The short version. iubenda from €4.99 covers policies and consent together and is the least fiddly. Termly has a real free tier and the cheapest paid plan at $10. CookieYes and Cookiebot both charge per domain and are the ones to compare if you run several sites. Complianz is a one-off annual fee if you are on WordPress. And read the section at the end about accessibility overlays before you buy one, because the FTC fined the biggest of them a million dollars.
Every price here came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 15 August 2026. Some are listed in euros because that is how the vendor lists them.
Responsible for a wider programme than a website? Our directory keeps shortlists for compliance leads, covering the parts nobody checks.
What we ranked on, for a company with nobody in the role
This list is for the person who ended up owning compliance because somebody had to. Usually a founder, an operations lead, or whoever built the website. The serious platforms in this space start in the thousands per month and are sold to people whose job title contains the word privacy, and that is not who is reading this.
So we weighted:
- Does it cover policies as well as the banner? A cookie banner on a site with a copied privacy policy has fixed the visible half.
- How does it price multiple sites? Per domain pricing decides everything once you run more than one.
- Is the free tier real? Several here have one that genuinely works for a small site.
- Does it claim more than it delivers? This category has a documented problem with that, covered at the end.
1. iubenda: the least fiddly all-rounder
Essentials €4.99/month billed yearly, or €5.99 monthly, which is $5.99 and $6.99. Advanced €19.99 yearly, or €21.99 monthly, which is $24.99 and $27.99. Ultimate €79.99 yearly, or €89.99 monthly, which is $99.99 and $119.99. Its separate accessibility line runs Lite at €6 and Standard at €50 yearly. Verified 15 August 2026.
iubenda ranks first because it treats the whole problem as one job. Privacy policy, cookie policy, terms, consent banner and consent records come from the same place, generated from what you actually tell it about your site rather than from a template you pick.
For most small companies the practical benefit is that the documents stay current. A policy written once in 2022 and never revisited is the most common compliance failure we see, and it is the kind that only becomes expensive when someone asks.
Essentials at under €5 a month is genuinely cheap for what it covers. Look carefully at what sits on Advanced before assuming the entry tier is enough, since the gap between €4.99 and €19.99 is where several things people assume are included actually live.
Who it is wrong for: companies who only need a consent banner and already have counsel-drafted policies. You are paying for the document generation you will not use.
2. Termly: the cheapest way to be properly covered
Free plan for 1 website. Starter $14/month, or $10 billed annually. Pro+ $20/month, or $15 annually. Agency is custom for 10 or more sites. Additional websites are paid add-ons on all paid plans. Verified 15 August 2026.
Termly does policies and consent like iubenda, at a slightly lower price and with a free tier that is not a trial. For a single site that is not doing anything unusual with data, the free plan plus an afternoon of honest answers gets you a long way past where most small businesses are.
At $10 a month on annual billing the Starter plan is the cheapest serious option here, and the paid tiers mainly buy you scanning frequency and the ability to remove branding.
The thing to check is the per-site add-on pricing. Termly is priced around one website, so if you run three the arithmetic stops looking as good and CookieYes or Cookiebot’s per-domain models are worth comparing.
Who it is wrong for: agencies and anyone with a portfolio of sites. The Agency plan exists but is quoted, and the add-on route gets expensive.
3. CookieYes: the most generous free tier, priced per domain
Free with 100 pages per scan and 5,000 monthly page views. Basic $10 per domain per month with 600 pages per scan and 100,000 page views. Pro $25 per domain with 4,000 pages and 300,000 views. Ultimate $55 per domain with 8,000 pages and unlimited views. Verified 15 August 2026.
CookieYes is consent specifically rather than the whole compliance picture, and it does that job cleanly at a price that makes sense for a small site. The free tier’s 5,000 monthly page views is enough for a lot of small business websites to never pay anything.
Per domain pricing is the thing to understand. At $10 a domain it is cheap for one site and it multiplies, so three sites is $30 rather than one bill. Whether that beats Termly’s add-on model depends on how many sites and how much traffic, and both are cheap enough that the difference is a rounding error below three sites.
Watch the page view limits rather than the page count, since that is the ceiling most sites reach first.
Who it is wrong for: companies that also need policies written. This is a banner and a consent log, not a compliance package.
4. Cookiebot: the incumbent, and it shows in the price
Free for 50 subpages on 1 domain. Premium Lite €7/month. Premium Small €15 per domain per month for 350 subpages. Premium Medium €30 per domain for 3,500 subpages. Premium Large €50 per domain for 7,000. Premium XLarge €90 per domain above that. Usercentrics Advanced, the tier above, is custom and priced on traffic. Verified 15 August 2026.
Cookiebot has been doing this longest, its scanner is the most thorough at finding the trackers you did not know were on the page, and it is the name most likely to satisfy a client or a partner who asks what you use.
It is also the most expensive here at any given size, and the free tier’s 50 subpages is tight enough that most real sites exceed it immediately. Premium Small at €15 a domain is the realistic entry point, which is 50% more than CookieYes for the same job.
You are paying for scan depth and for the name. Both are legitimate reasons, and neither is worth much to a five-page site.
Who it is wrong for: small single sites, where CookieYes does the same work for less. It earns its price on complex sites with a lot of third-party scripts.
5. Complianz: a flat annual fee, if you are on WordPress
Personal $59 a year for 1 site. Professional $179 a year for 5 sites. Agency $399 a year for 25 sites. Verified 15 August 2026.
Everything above is a subscription that scales with traffic or domains. Complianz is a WordPress plugin with a flat annual licence, and for the right buyer that changes the arithmetic completely.
Look at the Agency tier. Twenty-five sites for $399 a year is about $1.33 per site per month. The same portfolio on CookieYes Basic is $250 a month. If you are a WordPress agency maintaining client sites, that is not a close comparison.
The trade is that it is WordPress only, it lives in the site rather than in a hosted dashboard, and the consent records sit with the site rather than centrally. For a small business or an agency working in one platform, none of that is a problem.
Who it is wrong for: anyone not on WordPress, and anyone who needs consent records held centrally across a mixed estate.
Before you buy an accessibility overlay, read this
Accessibility is the compliance topic small companies most often try to solve with a widget, and it is the one place in this article where we are going to be blunt.
In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission announced that accessiBe, the largest vendor of accessibility overlays, would pay $1 million to settle allegations of deceptive marketing. The order was approved as final in April 2025. The company had advertised that its widget would automatically bring a site into conformance with WCAG 2.1 at AA level, describing it as compliant with 30% of requirements immediately and the remaining 70% within 48 hours. The FTC’s complaint alleged the plug-in failed to make basic components accessible, including navigation menus, form fields and image descriptions, and that the claims were not supported by competent and reliable evidence.
Separately, reporting on litigation in this area found that hundreds of businesses using overlays were sued anyway, and courts have not treated installing one as evidence of compliance.
None of that means accessibility does not matter. It means a widget is not a remediation, and buying one does not transfer the obligation to the vendor. If accessibility is a real requirement for you, the work is in the markup, and the honest options are an audit and a remediation plan rather than a script tag.
Teams this list will not suit
Companies with a privacy function. You are shopping in a different category with data mapping, DSAR workflow and vendor management, and the tools here will look like toys.
Anyone processing sensitive data at scale. Health, biometric and children’s data change the obligations enough that generated policies are not sufficient.
US-only businesses with no EU traffic. Your obligations are different and state-specific. Check what actually applies to you before buying a GDPR-shaped product.
Anyone hoping a banner is the whole job. Consent is what people see. What matters is whether your site honours the choice, and none of these tools verifies that.
Considered, and left off
Osano, Usercentrics and OneTrust. All serious, all sold by demo or quoted on traffic. We could not read pricing at source on 15 August 2026 and do not rank what we cannot verify.
accessiBe and the overlay category. Covered above, and left off deliberately rather than for lack of a price.
Free policy generators. Fine for a first draft and dangerous as a finished document, because they describe a generic company rather than yours. The paid tools here are cheap enough that this is a false economy.
Consent enforcement testing. A genuinely different job, which is checking whether tags fire despite a refusal. Nothing in this list does it, and it is where the enforcement action is. It is on our directory list for compliance leads.
Questions people ask us
What is the cheapest setup that is actually compliant?
Termly’s free tier for a single small site, or iubenda Essentials at under €5 a month if you want policies that stay current. Both are cheap enough that the real cost is the hour you spend answering questions about what your site does honestly.
I run several websites. What changes?
Pricing model becomes the whole decision. Termly prices around one site with add-ons, CookieYes and Cookiebot charge per domain, and Complianz sells 25 WordPress sites for $399 a year. For an agency the last of those is not close.
Does a cookie banner make me compliant?
No, and this is the most common misunderstanding in the category. The banner records a choice. Whether your site actually honours that choice is a separate question that none of these tools answers, and it is what regulators have been citing.
Are accessibility overlays worth buying?
The FTC fined accessiBe $1 million in a settlement announced in January 2025 over claims that its overlay automatically delivered WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, and finalised the order that April. Courts have not accepted overlay installation as evidence of compliance. Treat a widget as a cosmetic layer, not a remediation.
Do I need this if I am a small business with no EU customers?
You probably still need a privacy policy, and several US states now have their own requirements. What you likely do not need is a full GDPR consent setup. Work out which laws actually apply before buying a product built for a different one.
Can AI write my privacy policy?
It can write something that reads like one, which is exactly the problem. A privacy policy is a description of what your business actually does with data, and a model that has never seen your systems is guessing. The tools here ask you the questions instead, which is the useful part.
See our maintained directory shortlists for compliance leads, including tools that check whether your site honours the consent it recorded.
Last reviewed: 15 August 2026. Every price was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on that date. The FTC action against accessiBe is a matter of public record from January and April 2025. Nothing here is legal advice, and which laws apply to you depends on where you and your customers are. We review this page quarterly.
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