---
title: Overview
description: Welcome to Duckity's documentation site!
icon: Fish
---

Welcome to Duckity's documentation site. Here you'll find everything you need to know about Duckity,
plus some extras to help you use Duckity more efficiently and effectively.

## What Duckity Is

Duckity simplifies your API's protection, makes it predictable, and increases the cost an attacker
has to pay to abuse your application.

<Cards>
    <Card title="Impose a Cost on Abuse" icon={<LiHandCoins />}>
        Duckity adds an invisible-to-the-user non-parallelizable CPU cost on every protected request
        that increases the cost of abuse.
    </Card>
    <Card title="Keep Control" icon={<LiFerrisWheel />}>
        Keep full control over your protection's behavior by tuning parameters from the dashboard.
        Nothing is implicit.
    </Card>
    <Card title="Know What Goes On" icon={<LiSearchCheck />}>
        Monitor the system's state at any time. Access patterns are logged for as long as you
        configure them to audit behavior in real time.
    </Card>
    <Card title="Set Up Once, Use Everywhere" icon={<LiMonitorSmartphone />}>
        Duckity provides cross-platform SDKs for you to use the same protection system everywhere.
        Get started in less than 5 minutes.
    </Card>
</Cards>

By layering dynamic CPU cost on top of configurable access rules and real-time adaptive costs, users
stop being annoyed by intrusive CAPTCHA puzzles while abusers get an increasing cost.

Optimized for scale and heavy concurrent access, Duckity automatically scales with your application
without hassle.

## Benefits Over CAPTCHAs and Alternatives

Duckity provides several improvements over standard CAPTCHAs and CAPTCHA alternatives:

<Accordions>
    <Accordion title="Predictable, Invisible Behavior">
        By relying on modern verifiable delay functions, Duckity is able to provide hands-off
        security to your application and customers without sacrificing on user experience. Abuse
        cost scales dynamically while your users get a predictable application experience, unlike
        alternatives where delays vary substantially depending on randomness.
    </Accordion>
    <Accordion title="Set Up Once, Use Everywhere">
        Duckity provides multiple easy-to-use cross-platform SDKs for you to use a single
        configuration across all your clients. From web to native desktop and mobile applications,
        CLI applications, M2M connections, videogames, IoT, and more.
    </Accordion>
    <Accordion title="Made to Suit your Application">
        Configure Duckity's behavior to suit your application's precise needs. Multiple features can
        get individual configurations to beter suit each of their access patterns and requirements.
    </Accordion>
    <Accordion title="Simple to Integrate">
        Most SDKs require no more than 4 lines of code to integrate with your application. Duckity
        provides detailed documentation for every feature to help you make the most out of it.
    </Accordion>
</Accordions>

Duckity does not try to tell humans and bots apart. Instead, it enforces a background computational
cost that humans do not notice.

|                             | Duckity | CAPTCHAs |
| --------------------------- | ------- | -------- |
| Simple                      | ✅      | ✅       |
| Transparent                 | ✅      | ❌       |
| Predictable behavior        | ✅      | ❌       |
| Customizable behavior       | ✅      | ❌       |
| Frictionless                | ✅      | ❌       |
| Cross-platform              | ✅      | ❌       |
| Accessible                  | ✅      | ❌       |
| Tells humans and bots apart | ❌      | ❓       |
| Cost-effective              | ✅      | ❓       |
| AI-resistant                | ✅      | ❓       |

## Get Started

You can make a free account by heading over to the [Duckity Dashboard](//app.duckity.com/hello). To
learn how to integrate with your stack in some minutes, head over to the Quick Start page.

<Card href="/quick-start" title="Quick Start" icon={<LiPencil />}>
    Integrate Duckity in less than 5 minutes.
</Card>