CookieYes Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

CookieYes is a Google certified consent management platform that puts a compliant cookie banner on your site with one line of code. It is the cheapest credible option for a single site and the support is the best in its class. Best for: small businesses and WordPress site owners running one or two domains. Price: Free plan, then $10 to $55 per month per domain. Rating: 7.9/10

What is CookieYes?

CookieYes is a consent management platform, or CMP. It scans your website for cookies and trackers, categorises what it finds, shows visitors a consent banner, blocks non-essential scripts until they agree, and keeps a log of every consent so you can prove compliance if a regulator asks. You install it by pasting one script tag into your site or, on WordPress, by activating a plugin. Setup genuinely takes minutes rather than an afternoon.

It is run by CookieYes Limited, a UK registered company (company number 13074037), and it grew out of the WordPress ecosystem. That heritage still shows: the CookieYes plugin has over a million active installs on WordPress.org with a 4.8 star rating from thousands of reviews, and the company says more than 1.5 million businesses use the platform. It holds ISO 27001 certification, is a certified Google CMP partner for Consent Mode v2, and supports IAB TCF v2.3. We dug into it because most small sites overpay for compliance tooling they do not need, and CookieYes is the clearest counter-example.

What Are CookieYes’s Key Features?

Automated cookie scanning

CookieYes crawls your site and matches what it finds against a database of more than 100,000 known cookies, then sorts them into necessary, functional, analytics, performance and advertising buckets. Scans run monthly on a schedule so new trackers added by a marketing team do not sit uncategorised for a year. The page depth is the thing to watch, because it is what your plan actually buys: 100 pages per scan on Free, 600 on Basic, 4,000 on Pro and 8,000 on Ultimate. Reviewers do occasionally report the scanner missing a cookie, so a manual check after a big site change is worth the ten minutes. The scan output also drives the auto-blocking rules, which means a missed cookie is not just a cosmetic gap in your policy page. It is a script that fires before consent.

Script auto-blocking and consent logging

This is the feature that actually makes you compliant rather than just decorated. CookieYes blocks third party scripts from firing until the visitor consents, which is the part most cheap banner tools get wrong. It also records every consent event with a timestamp and exports the log to CSV, which is what you hand over during an audit. Both matter more than banner design, and both are handled without you writing any code.

Google Consent Mode v2 and IAB TCF v2.3

CookieYes is a certified Google CMP partner, and Consent Mode v2 support is available on every tier including the free plan. That is significant if you run Google Ads or Analytics in the EU, because without it your conversion data degrades badly. IAB TCF v2.3, which matters if you sell programmatic advertising, sits on Pro and above. CookieYes was among the first CMPs certified for TCF v2.2 back in 2023, so it has a track record of keeping up with framework changes rather than lagging a release behind.

Policy generators and multi-regulation coverage

The platform ships privacy policy and cookie policy generators, plus banner templates for GDPR style opt-in and CCPA style opt-out. It covers GDPR for the EU and UK, CCPA and CPRA in California, VCDPA, PIPEDA in Canada, LGPD in Brazil and several others, with geo-targeting so European visitors see an opt-in banner and American visitors see the notice-and-opt-out version. One gap worth knowing: there is no terms and conditions generator, so you still need that from somewhere else.

How Much Does CookieYes Cost?

CookieYes starts free and tops out at $55 per month. The Free plan gives you 5,000 pageviews a month, 100 pages per scan and five scans per month on one domain. Basic is $10 per month for 100,000 pageviews and 600 pages per scan. Pro is $25 per month for 300,000 pageviews and 4,000 pages per scan, and adds IAB TCF v2.3 and geo-targeting. Ultimate is $55 per month for unlimited pageviews and 8,000 pages per scan. Annual billing gives you two months free. Overages on the mid tiers are billed at $0.30 per 1,000 extra pageviews.

Against the competition that is aggressive. Cookiebot’s free tier caps at 50 subpages on one domain and its paid plans run from around 7 euros for a 50 subpage site up to 90 euros a month for large sites, with automatic tier upgrades that can surprise you on the invoice. Termly sits near $10 a month. Osano’s self serve small team plan is $199 a month for up to three domains, which is an entirely different budget conversation. For a single small business site, CookieYes is close to the price floor for a tool that is actually Google certified.

The catch is per-domain pricing. Every domain needs its own subscription, and only one free plan is allowed per account. Run five client sites and Basic quietly becomes $50 a month rather than $10. Agencies should look at the CookieYes partner programme, which discounts multi-site accounts, but the base model punishes portfolios. The other catch is gating: the free plan is real, but banner customisation, geo-targeting and TCF all sit behind paid tiers, and CookieYes has trimmed free tier customisation in the past to users’ annoyance.

Who is CookieYes Best For?

Use CookieYes if you run one website, are not a developer, and want compliance handled in an afternoon for the price of a couple of coffees. WordPress owners get the smoothest ride of anyone, since the plugin is mature and heavily used. It is also a sensible pick for small ecommerce stores and marketing sites that run Google Ads, because certified Consent Mode v2 on the free tier protects your conversion tracking without an upgrade. Support is consistently the most praised part of the product, which counts for a lot when you are a non-technical owner staring at a compliance requirement.

The partner programme is worth a look if you build sites for clients. It discounts multi-site accounts by up to half, which softens the per-domain problem without eliminating it, and it gives you one place to manage consent across a client roster. Just go in knowing what you are getting: CookieYes is a consent tool, not a privacy programme. It will not handle data subject requests, vendor risk or a records of processing register, so treat it as the banner layer rather than the whole compliance answer.

Skip CookieYes if:

• You manage many domains. Per-domain billing compounds fast, and the partner discount only softens it.
• You need an API. CookieYes does not offer one, so programmatic provisioning across sites is not on the table.
• You need data subject access request automation. That is out of scope here and you will need a broader privacy platform.
• Your site is very large and content heavy. The 8,000 page scan ceiling on Ultimate is generous but not unlimited, and deep scanning is where Cookiebot pulls ahead.
• You need white labelling for client deliverables.

Best CookieYes Alternatives

Cookiebot

Cookiebot is the closest direct competitor and the stronger tool on scanning depth. Owned by Usercentrics, it prices per domain by subpage count, from a free 50 subpage tier through roughly 7 to 90 euros a month, and it supports 47 or more languages against CookieYes’s 40 or so. Pick Cookiebot if your site is large, content heavy and you have someone technical to configure it. Pick CookieYes if you want a simpler dashboard, better support and predictable billing, because Cookiebot’s automatic tier upgrades have generated real complaints about surprise invoices.

Termly

Termly sits around $10 a month and bundles more than a cookie banner. Its pitch is the full legal document set, with privacy policy, terms and conditions, disclaimer and refund policy generators alongside consent management. If you are launching a site from scratch and need every legal page at once, Termly saves you assembling that from two tools, since CookieYes has no terms and conditions generator. On pure consent management, cookie database depth and scanning, CookieYes is the more focused product.

Complianz

Complianz is the WordPress-native option and the cheapest of the three. It runs on a flat annual licence for a single site, around $59 a year, with a free version on WordPress.org. Everything lives inside your WordPress admin rather than a separate SaaS dashboard, which some owners strongly prefer and which avoids per-domain SaaS billing entirely. The trade-offs are real though: it is WordPress only, the setup wizard is longer, and you do not get the hosted scanning infrastructure or the certified partner status that CookieYes brings.

Final Verdict: Is CookieYes Worth It?

CookieYes earns a 7.9 because it does the boring, necessary job properly at a price a small business can actually justify. The free plan is genuinely usable rather than a trap, Consent Mode v2 is certified on every tier, auto-blocking works, and the consent log gives you the paperwork a regulator wants. Support is the single most praised thing about it across user reviews, and for non-technical owners that is worth more than any feature list. A 4.8 rating on G2 across nearly 300 reviews is not an accident, and the WordPress plugin sitting above a million active installs means bugs get found and fixed quickly.

The limits are structural rather than sloppy. Per-domain pricing makes it a poor fit for agencies and portfolio owners, there is no API, and the deepest scanning belongs to Cookiebot. If you run one site or two and want compliance solved cheaply and quickly, buy CookieYes and stop researching. If you manage a dozen client domains or a site with tens of thousands of pages, price out Cookiebot or a WordPress-native licence like Complianz before you commit.