Roblox Player:IsFriendsWith() Explained — Limits, Bugs, and Alternatives

What the function does (and the signature)

From the official Roblox documentation:

Player:IsFriendsWith(userId: number): boolean

The method is called on a Player instance representing someone currently in the server, and it takes the numeric user ID of another Roblox account. It returns true if the two are Roblox friends, false if not. Example use:

local Players = game:GetService("Players")

Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(player)
    local ownerId = 156  -- Builderman, for example
    if player:IsFriendsWith(ownerId) then
        print(player.Name .. " is friends with the place owner")
    end
end)

The biggest catch: it needs a Player instance

The method is defined on Player, which means you must have an instance of a player currently in your server. You can't call IsFriendsWith() for two arbitrary user IDs where neither is in the game. As one developer put it on the DevForum thread "Checking if two players are friends without a Player instance", this is a hard limitation of the API.

This rules out a whole class of use cases:

• Building a leaderboard that ranks players by their friend connections to a celebrity, without each player being currently in your server
• Pre-computing friend relationships offline for analytics
• Finding degrees of separation between any two arbitrary users

Known bug history

The function has had several reliability issues over the years that are still discussed on the DevForum:

• "IsFriendsWith() not working under no circumstances" — thread reporting the method silently returning false even for confirmed friends
• "Inconsistent Player:IsFriendsWith() return" — reports that the same call returns different values in different sessions
• "IsFriendsWith() may be critically failing" — a thread arguing that bugs in this function have economic consequences in games that use it for friend-gated rewards

None of these are formally deprecated — Roblox still ships the function — but the reliability is genuinely uneven, and many developers have moved to other approaches.

What you can use instead

1. Player:GetFriendsOnlineAsync()

For the "who's online and a friend" use case, GetFriendsOnlineAsync returns a list of currently-online friends. More reliable than IsFriendsWith for online-friend lookups. Important caveat: Roblox announced in early 2025 that the IsOnline property is being deprecated as part of broader Friends API restructuring.

2. Players:GetFriendsAsync(userId)

Returns a paginated list of all a user's friends, not just online ones. Works regardless of whether the player is in your server. This is the closest in-Lua equivalent to what you can do via the Roblox friends HTTP API.

3. HttpService:RequestAsync() against the FriendPath Scan API

For anything more complex than "is X friends with Y" — like "are these two arbitrary users connected within 3 hops" or "how many degrees of separation between them" — you almost certainly want to hit the FriendPath Scan API. It requires an API key (issued to arbastro Suite subscribers) but exposes the full bidirectional-BFS lookup as a single HTTP call:

local HttpService = game:GetService("HttpService")
local response = HttpService:RequestAsync({
    Url = "https://arbastro.com/api/v1/friendpath/path?from=Builderman&to=david.baszucki",
    Method = "GET",
    Headers = {
        ["Authorization"] = "Bearer ak_live_YOUR_KEY",
    },
})
local data = HttpService:JSONDecode(response.Body)
print(string.format("%d degrees of separation", data.result.degrees))

This handles bidirectional BFS, proxy rotation, UK-account detection, and rate-limit handling on the server side. Get an API key from your arbastro account API keys page (requires Suite; 50 free Scan calls/day + $0.005/call beyond). Full reference at friendpath.arbastro.com/docs.

When IsFriendsWith is still fine

For a simple "is this player who just joined my server a friend of the owner" check, IsFriendsWith() still works and is dead-simple. It's only when you start trying to extend it beyond its single-server-online-players design that you run into walls. Use it for what it's good at, and use the FriendPath API or GetFriendsAsync for everything else.

Note on the 2024-2025 Friend API changes

Roblox made significant changes to the Friends API in late 2024 and 2025, including raising the friend limit from 200 to 1,000 and renaming "friends" to "connections" in the UI. If you're maintaining old code, make sure your test cases cover the higher friend counts — some game implementations assumed the 200 cap and have edge-case bugs at 250+.