Best alternatives to OneTrust

People leave OneTrust for one of two reasons: either they were never the right fit to begin with, or their organization outgrew the complexity of managing it. The more common story, especially among readers landing on this page, is the first one. A founder or small engineering team got advised to "use OneTrust" because it's the brand name everyone knows, hit the sales process wall, and realized they're being quoted enterprise software pricing for what they actually need: a privacy policy, a cookie policy, and maybe terms of service.

The alternatives landscape breaks roughly into three tiers. There are lightweight, template-based generators that get you documents fast but have no idea what's actually running on your site. There are mid-market consent management platforms that handle cookie banners well but don't generate the full document stack. And there are scan-first tools, including Pageguard, that start by reading your live site and build documents from what they find rather than what you remember to tell them.

None of these are OneTrust. OneTrust is genuinely excellent at what it does for the organizations it's built for. The question is whether that organization is yours. If you don't have a dedicated privacy ops function and a procurement team, it probably isn't.

Pricing model: sales process vs. self-serve

OneTrust does not publish pricing. You enter a sales funnel, get a custom quote, and negotiate a contract. For a Fortune 500 legal team, that's normal procurement. For a solo founder or a five-person SaaS, it's a weeks-long detour before you even know if you can afford it. Most alternatives in this space are either subscription-based with published tiers, or pay-per-document with no recurring commitment. Pageguard charges per document generated with no subscription and no pageview caps. You scan for free, no account required, and only pay when you generate a document.

How they understand your site: questionnaire vs. live scan

Many alternatives, especially template generators, work from a questionnaire. You answer questions about what data you collect, and they produce a document based on your answers. The problem is that founders routinely undercount what's running on their sites. That PostHog snippet your developer added last sprint, the Stripe.js loading on every page, the Meta Pixel your marketing contractor installed six months ago: those all have privacy implications, and a questionnaire won't catch what you forgot to mention.

OneTrust and Pageguard both scan live sites. OneTrust draws on a database of 45 million-plus cookie signatures. Pageguard detects 437-plus technology signatures covering cookies, SDKs, and third-party scripts, and generates a gap report with severity ratings across critical, high, medium, and low categories so you know exactly what's missing and why, not just that something is.

Feature scope: consent management vs. document generation

OneTrust is a full privacy governance platform: data mapping, vendor risk assessment, DSAR workflows, multi-team audit trails, consent banners, and more. Most small teams will use perhaps 10 percent of that surface area. Alternatives that focus on consent banners, like Cookiebot or Usercentrics, are narrower but still subscription-based and don't generate your privacy policy or terms of service.

Pageguard focuses on the document stack: privacy policy, cookie policy, terms of service, and notably, Apple App Store privacy nutrition labels and Google Play Data Safety forms, which OneTrust does not cover. There is no consent banner in Pageguard. If you need a CMP on top of your documents, you will need a separate tool for that.

Switching away from OneTrust depends heavily on which parts of it you were actually using.

If your team was using OneTrust primarily for its consent management platform and cookie banner, you will need a replacement CMP. Cookiebot, Usercentrics, and Axeptio all offer self-serve consent management with published pricing. Pageguard does not include a consent banner, so this is a genuine gap to plan around.

If you were using OneTrust for DSAR workflow management or data mapping, those are harder to replace with a single lightweight tool. You may need purpose-built DSAR software or to handle those workflows manually if your request volume is low.

If the primary output you were getting from OneTrust was a privacy policy and cookie policy, the migration is straightforward. Scan your site with Pageguard, review the gap report, generate the documents. The scan is free and takes a few minutes. You pay only when you generate a document.

The practical friction points are contractual: if you are mid-contract with OneTrust, review your exit terms. Beyond that, the main thing you lose in moving to a lighter-weight stack is the consolidated audit trail and the enterprise-grade multi-team workflows. For a small team, those are not losses worth staying for.

A solo founder shipping a B2B SaaS with Stripe, Intercom, and PostHog running on their site.

This founder was told to "get compliant" before launching, contacted OneTrust, and is now staring at a sales intake form. What they actually need is a privacy policy that reflects what PostHog and Intercom are doing on their site, a cookie policy, and terms of service. Pageguard scans the live site, finds all three tools plus whatever else is running, generates the gap report, and produces the documents. No sales call, no subscription.

A five-person SaaS team shipping an iOS and Android app alongside their web product.

They need App Store privacy nutrition labels and a Google Play Data Safety form in addition to standard web policies. OneTrust does not cover this. Template generators will not know what SDKs are in the app. Pageguard covers the App Store and Google Play forms as part of its document generation. This is the scenario where the tool differentiation is sharpest.

A 50-person company with a dedicated legal ops hire evaluating whether to stay on OneTrust.

If this team is actively using data mapping, DSAR workflows, and multi-jurisdiction consent management, they should stay on OneTrust or evaluate comparable enterprise platforms like TrustArc. Pageguard is not the right tool for this complexity level, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.

A Shopify merchant who installed a dozen third-party apps over two years and has no idea what data they are collecting.

This person needs a scan more than anything else. Running Pageguard's free scan against their storefront will surface what is actually running. The gap report with severity ratings tells them what to fix first. They likely need a privacy policy and cookie policy at minimum, and neither requires a subscription to generate.