Best FiveM anticheat in 2026: an honest comparison

Why should you trust this FiveM anticheat comparison?

Every anticheat vendor publishes its own best FiveM anticheat page, and every one of those pages concludes that the best option happens to be the product it sells. This comparison is different for one simple reason: FiveMonitor does not sell an anticheat, has no affiliate deals with any of the products below, and earns nothing regardless of which one you choose. We build a monitoring panel that works alongside all of them, so our only interest is that you pick the anticheat that genuinely fits your server. Every price in this guide was checked on the vendor's own website in July 2026, every capability is attributed to the vendor that claims it, and where a number is a marketing claim rather than a verifiable fact, we say so explicitly. That is the whole method: facts, dates, sources, and no horse in the race.

What can a FiveM anticheat actually do (and not do)?

A FiveM anticheat is a server resource, often with a client component, that watches for behaviour a legitimate player should not produce: blacklisted events and triggers, suspicious entity spawns, forbidden explosions or injected menus. When it matches something on its lists, it can kick, ban or flag the player automatically. What it cannot do is see everything. Cheats run on the player's machine, outside the server's authority, and cheat developers update their tools as fast as anticheat developers update their detections; it is a permanent arms race, not a solved problem. That is why no anticheat on this list, free or paid, stops everything, and why detection-rate figures are marketing claims you cannot independently verify. The realistic outcome of a good anticheat is fewer and less disruptive incidents, not zero incidents.

• What they do well: block blacklisted triggers and events server-side, automate bans for obvious cases, and add screenshot-based checks. FiveGuard and Pegasus both advertise AI menu detection based on screenshots, according to their sites.
• What they document per ban: Raven AC states that every ban ships with a screenshot and a runtime trace attached, as listed in July 2026.
• What they cannot guarantee: detection of private or paid cheats, or the accuracy of their own marketing. WaveShield's "99.9% detection" and "15,000+ servers", and Electron's "#1 FiveM Anticheat", are their claims as listed in July 2026, not audited figures.
• What none of them replace: human judgement on player reports, evidence review and ban appeals.

How do you choose the best FiveM anticheat for your server?

The best FiveM anticheat for a 300-player city and the best one for a 20-player community project are rarely the same product, which is why searching for the best FiveM anticheat 2026 without context leads mostly to vendor pages. Start from three variables: budget, server size and how your staff actually work. Budget decides whether 45 to 60 EUR per month is trivial or painful, and whether a lifetime licence pays for itself. Server size decides how much automated filtering you need before humans get involved: with 200 concurrent players you cannot manually review everything, while with 30 you probably can. Staff workflow decides which panel features matter, because some teams live in a web dashboard while others handle everything in-game. Match those variables against the products below and the shortlist usually collapses to two or three candidates you can trial before committing.

• Small community (under ~50 players): a free stack, or a budget subscription such as Pegasus AC (around 16 EUR/month) or Raven AC ($17.99/month), prices as of July 2026.
• Growing server: mid-range subscriptions with a proper web panel, such as Reaper AC ($25/month) or FiniAC (from 34.99 EUR/month), as of July 2026.
• Established city: the premium tier of FiveGuard, WaveShield or Electron, where a lifetime licence can beat a year of subscription payments.
• Review-heavy staff teams: prioritise multi-screen tooling, such as FiniAC's 16-screen MultiStream, Electron's multi-screen watching with session replay, or WaveShield's DVR recording, each per its vendor's site.

Is there a good free FiveM anticheat?

Yes. FireAC is the reference free FiveM anticheat in 2026: open source, published on GitHub as AmirrezaJaberi/FIREAC, and free to run on any server. Its limits are structural rather than hidden. It is configured and managed through an in-game menu, there is no web panel, and there is no vendor support team behind it; updates and help come from the community, at the community's pace. That makes it a genuinely good starting point for a new server with no budget, and a poor fit for a large city that needs dashboards, staff roles and someone answering tickets. If you go free, combine it with tools you already have: txAdmin ships free with FXServer and covers bans, restarts and player management, and free scripts can cover evidence gathering while your budget is zero.

• FireAC: free, open source, in-game menu, no web panel.
• txAdmin: free with FXServer; player management, per-player playtime in its Players list, bans and restarts, but no screen viewing.
• fl_spectate and RAGE_SpectateMenu: free GitHub scripts for an admin-only in-game spectate camera; no web access and no video recording.
• screenshot-basic: free; sends still screenshots to a Discord webhook.
• WX txAdmin Logs and jhag01/txAdminLogs: free webhook scripts that push txAdmin actions to Discord.

How much does a FiveM anticheat cost in 2026?

As of July 2026, FiveM anticheat pricing runs from completely free to roughly 60 dollars per month, with lifetime licences between about 100 and 250 EUR. All figures below come from each vendor's own website, checked in July 2026, and can change without notice, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a promise. Two patterns are worth noting before the list. First, monthly pricing splits into a budget band of roughly 16 to 25 EUR or USD and a premium band of roughly 35 to 60, and the premium band is where multi-screen panels, replay and DVR features concentrate. Second, lifetime licences typically cost the equivalent of three to six months of the same product's subscription, so they pay off quickly for servers that plan to stay, but they are worth nothing if the vendor disappears, a risk you should price in.

• FireAC: free and open source.
• Pegasus AC: around 16 EUR/month; AI screen detection via screenshots and a large config file, per pegasusac.net.
• Raven AC: $17.99/month or $149.99 lifetime, per ravenac.net.
• Reaper AC: $25/month; its site advertises monitoring unlimited players simultaneously.
• FiniAC: 34.99 to 49.99 EUR/month, subscription only, per fini.ac.
• FiveGuard: around 45 EUR/month or 100 to 125 EUR lifetime, per fiveguard.net.
• WaveShield: 49.99 EUR/month or 250 EUR lifetime, per waveshield.xyz.
• Electron AC: around $59.99/month, $149/year or $199 to $229 lifetime, per electron-services.com.

FiveGuard vs Electron: which one fits your server?

FiveGuard vs Electron is the most common head-to-head in this space, and the honest answer is that they compete on different strengths. FiveGuard, as listed on fiveguard.net in July 2026, costs around 45 EUR per month or 100 to 125 EUR lifetime, and pairs its web panel with a live "Watch Screen Of Players" feature and AI screenshot-based menu detection. Electron, per electron-services.com in the same month, costs around $59.99 per month, $149 per year or $199 to $229 lifetime, and adds a live map, analytics, multi-screen watching and session replay to its panel; it also markets itself as the "#1 FiveM Anticheat", which is a slogan rather than a measurable fact. If the decision is purely price, FiveGuard's lifetime licence costs roughly half of Electron's. If your staff rely on reviewing incidents after the fact, Electron's session replay is the differentiator.

Which FiveM anticheat fits your profile?

There is no single winner, but there is usually a best fit per profile, and matching profile to product is more honest than crowning a champion. The mapping below follows only from documented prices and features on each vendor's site as of July 2026, not from detection claims nobody outside the vendor can test. Read it as a starting shortlist: pick the one or two products whose trade-offs match your situation, run them on a real server with real players for a few weeks, and judge them on the incidents your staff actually deal with. An anticheat that looks worse on paper but fits your team's workflow will serve you better than a longer feature list your moderators never open. With that caveat, here is where each product objectively stands out.

• Tightest budget with a web panel: Pegasus AC at around 16 EUR/month or Raven AC at $17.99/month, as of July 2026.
• Lifetime licence preference: FiveGuard has the cheapest lifetime at 100 to 125 EUR, followed by Raven at $149.99, Electron at $199 to $229 and WaveShield at 250 EUR.
• Replay and recordings: Electron with session replay, or WaveShield with DVR recording, per their sites.
• RP situation review: FiniAC, whose Apollo dashboard and MultiStream show 16 simultaneous player screens with voice audio, per fini.ac.
• Watching many players at once on a budget: Reaper AC advertises unlimited simultaneous player monitoring for $25/month.
• Evidence attached to every ban: Raven AC, which also claims under 0.5 ms overhead at 200+ players; that figure is theirs.
• No budget at all: FireAC, free and open source.

Why is detection alone not enough?

Because every ban that matters ends with a human decision. An anticheat can flag, kick and auto-ban the obvious cases, but the reports that consume your staff's time still need someone to look at what the player is actually doing before acting. That review layer is where FiveMonitor lives, and it is not an anticheat: it detects nothing and bans nobody. It is a web panel that shows you live video of any player's screen; capture runs on the player's client and streams to the panel, with 0% impact on server FPS and zero load on the server itself. Your staff can verify a report with their own eyes, watch several suspects at once in the multi-player monitor, and gather evidence before deciding. Detection plus human review beats detection alone, whichever anticheat from this list you end up running.

FiveMonitor works alongside every product above, or on a server with no anticheat at all. You can watch players live, track playtime from txAdmin, and give staff their own Discord logins as sub-users. See everything it does on the features page; plans start at 9.99 EUR/month on pricing, with Pro at 15.99 EUR/month for unlimited players.

Pick your anticheat, then add the eyes

Whichever anticheat you choose from this comparison, someone on your team still has to review reports and evidence, and that is the layer FiveMonitor covers. Create your account and start the 7-day free trial, no card required, and watch your first player's screen live within minutes.