Opinion
Buying an anticheat in 2026? Read this first
99.9% detection, ‘the #1 anticheat’, leaked source code: the market is a minefield. Six questions to ask every vendor.
Search for ‘best FiveM anticheat’ and you’ll mostly land on comparisons written by… anticheat vendors. On its own site, every vendor ranks itself first. There’s no independent, public benchmark of detection rates. That makes choosing hard, but not impossible.
1. What’s claimed, and what can be shown?
‘99.9% detection’ and ‘15,000+ servers’ remain marketing claims until someone checks them. Ask for a trial and test with your own resources and your own players.
2. What does it really cost?
Prices range from free (FireAC) to around €50 a month. Lifetime licences sit roughly between €125 and €250. Do the maths over 12 to 24 months: a lifetime licence only pays off if the product keeps getting updates.
3. Has the source code ever leaked?
FiveGuard’s source code has reportedly leaked, and clones are circulating on GitHub. A leaked anticheat is a manual for cheat makers to build around. Ask the vendor how they responded.
4. How heavy is it?
Measure it yourself with resmon during peak hours. Figures like ‘under 0.5 ms’ come from the vendors themselves.
5. What happens with a false positive?
Evidence with every ban (a screenshot, runtime trace or replay) makes appeals fairer and saves your staff hours of arguing. Raven, Electron and WaveShield all lean heavily on this.
6. Does it work on GTAV Enhanced?
Anticheats that take screenshots through NUI are hit by a known issue on Enhanced. Ask for a concrete roadmap, not ‘soon’.
No silver bullet
An anticheat is one layer. You still need server-side validation (never trust the client), events that check who’s calling them, logging and alert staff. As one developer put it on the forum, the goal isn’t to chase every cheat individually, but prevention and behaviour analysis.
Ready to compare? See our rankings of eight anticheats.