Best alternatives to CookieYes

Most people leave CookieYes for one of two reasons: they've outgrown the free plan's 5,000 pageview and 100-page-scan ceiling, or they've realized their compliance problem is bigger than cookies. CookieYes is genuinely good at what it was built for — serving a consent banner, scanning for cookies, and keeping a blog or content site tidy under GDPR. If that's your whole problem, it's a reasonable tool at a reasonable price.

But if you're running a SaaS that uses Firebase, PostHog, Stripe, or any number of SDKs that collect data outside the browser cookie layer, CookieYes won't surface those. You'll have a cookie banner and a privacy policy that's technically missing half your stack. That gap tends to become visible at the worst possible moment: a lawyer review, an App Store submission, or a GDPR inquiry.

The alternatives landscape breaks into a few distinct camps. There are full consent management platforms (Cookiebot, OneTrust) that go deeper on consent orchestration but come with enterprise pricing. There are policy generators (Termly, iubenda) that lean on questionnaires rather than live scans. And there are scan-first tools like Pageguard that start with what your site actually does, then generate documents from that. The right direction depends on whether your primary gap is consent management, policy documentation, or both.

Scanning approach: cookie-focused vs. full-stack

CookieYes scans for cookies. That covers a real and important category, but it leaves out SDKs, analytics libraries loaded via JavaScript, server-side tracking integrations, and third-party services that don't set a cookie at all. A SaaS using PostHog for analytics, Stripe for payments, and Firebase for auth has meaningful data collection happening at every layer. CookieYes will catch the cookie-level signals; it won't catch the SDK-level ones. Pageguard runs against 437+ technology signatures across the full stack and flags what it finds, including things you may have forgotten you integrated six sprints ago.

Pricing model: subscription with pageview caps vs. pay-per-document

CookieYes charges monthly and limits the free plan to 5,000 pageviews and 100 pages per scan. Once you exceed that, you're looking at $10/mo for Basic or $25/mo for Pro to unlock geo-targeting. The subscription model makes sense if you need a consent banner running continuously, because that is an ongoing service. It makes less sense if what you primarily need is accurate compliance documentation. Pageguard charges per document generated with no pageview cap and no subscription. For a founder who needs a privacy policy and a terms of service once, paying per document is cheaper than committing to $10 to $25 a month indefinitely.

Feature scope: web cookies vs. mobile and beyond

CookieYes is a web tool. It has no path to generating an Apple App Store privacy nutrition label or a Google Play Data Safety form. For a team shipping both a web app and a mobile app, that means managing two separate compliance workflows. Pageguard covers both surfaces from the same scan.

Gap reporting: cookie-level vs. severity-rated

CookieYes surfaces cookie-level compliance information. Pageguard produces a GDPR gap report with severity ratings across critical, high, medium, and low categories, telling you not just what's present but what's missing and how much it matters. That distinction matters when you're trying to triage a compliance backlog rather than just check a box.

Switching away from CookieYes involves two distinct pieces: the consent banner and the policy documents. They're worth separating.

If you've been using CookieYes primarily for the consent banner, you'll need a replacement CMP before you remove it. Pageguard does not provide a consent banner, so if banner management is part of your requirement, plan for that gap explicitly. Options include Cookiebot, Osano, or continuing with CookieYes for the banner while using a different tool for documentation.

For the policy documents themselves, the practical steps are straightforward. If you're moving to Pageguard: run the free scan (no account needed), review the gap report, then generate the documents that reflect what the scan actually found. You'll end up with a privacy policy, cookie policy, and terms of service grounded in your real stack rather than your answers to a questionnaire.

The friction point most people don't anticipate is that a live-scan-generated policy will sometimes surface integrations they'd forgotten about, which means the new document may be more detailed than the old one. That's not a problem; it's the point. Plan to review the output before publishing rather than treating it as a drop-in replacement.

Existing CookieYes subscribers on annual plans should check their billing cycle before switching to avoid paying for overlap.

A solo founder running a SaaS with PostHog, Stripe, and Firebase who just got flagged during an App Store review.

CookieYes will give this person a cookie banner and a partial privacy policy, but it won't detect the SDK-level data collection from PostHog or Firebase, and it has no path to generating an App Store privacy nutrition label. Pageguard is the direct fit here: full-stack scan, privacy nutrition label generation, pay-per-document with no monthly commitment.

A content blogger with 8,000 monthly pageviews who wants a basic cookie banner and a GDPR-compliant cookie policy.

This is exactly the use case CookieYes was built for, and the $10/mo Basic plan is a reasonable price for it. The free plan's 5,000 pageview cap means they'd need to pay, but the scope of the problem doesn't require a scanner that detects 437 technology signatures. CookieYes is the right call; looking for alternatives here is probably unnecessary.

A 5-person SaaS team preparing for a Series A due diligence process who needs complete, accurate compliance documentation across web and mobile.

The team needs privacy policy, terms of service, cookie policy, App Store privacy nutrition label, and a gap report they can hand to a lawyer. CookieYes doesn't cover the mobile surfaces and doesn't produce a severity-rated gap report. Pageguard covers the documentation layer. For ongoing consent management, they'd likely want to run a dedicated CMP alongside it.

A freelance developer managing compliance for three client sites who is paying $25/mo for CookieYes Pro mainly for geo-targeting.

If geo-targeted consent management is the core need, CookieYes Pro is hard to replace cheaply. If the $25/mo is mostly going toward policy documents that don't reflect the clients' actual tech stacks, Pageguard's per-document model would cost less across three sites and produce more accurate output.