Cookiebot vs CookieYes
ConsentProof is a cookie consent checker that scans any website with a real browser and records which cookies and third-party trackers fire before the visitor consents.
Cookiebot
Cookiebot, owned by Usercentrics since 2021, is one of the most widely deployed consent management platforms in Europe: it shows the banner, scans for cookies and generates the cookie declaration.
It does the job we deliberately do not do: it serves a compliant consent banner, maintains a cookie declaration on your page, and integrates with most CMSs. If you need a banner, this is a legitimate choice and we do not offer an alternative to it.
Its scanner and declaration widget are genuinely convenient for a single site: one script, and the cookie table on your policy page keeps itself roughly current.
It is backed by a substantial company (Usercentrics, Munich, around 380 staff as of the 2026-09-06 review), which for some clients is itself the requirement.
The pricing model is the recurring complaint, not the product. Because tiers are counted by subpages and subdomains, a site that grows or a client with many subdomains changes price bracket without the agency doing anything. Named Trustpilot reviews from 2026 make the same point repeatedly, including one that reads 'Our website has around 2500 pages, but we get bumped to a 7000 page plan' (Eric Bekkers, 2026-08-26).
Its Trustpilot profile stood at 3.6 out of 5 from 334 reviews on 2026-09-06, with 46% of them one star — an unusually polarised distribution for a category leader, driven mostly by billing and renewal experiences rather than by the banner.
The scanner is attached to the subscription rather than to a monitoring workflow: reviewers report scans that appear not to re-run, with one writing that they were 'continued to overcharge us…without appearing to run a single fresh scan.'
Checked 2026-09-06: published tiers run from a free plan (1 domain, 50 subpages) through roughly €7, €15, €30, €50 and €90 per month, priced by number of subpages, with subdomains counted as separate domains. A widely reported August 2025 change doubled the base price and moved accounts with fewer than four domains onto a higher tier. Confirm current pricing on cookiebot.com before quoting it to a client.
CookieYes
CookieYes is a bootstrapped UK consent management platform, best known for a WordPress plugin with over a million active installs and a free tier that many small sites run on indefinitely.
Its reputation is good and earned: 4.8 out of 5 from 372 Trustpilot reviews and 4.8 from 3,229 WordPress.org ratings on 2026-09-06, with the plugin updated the same month.
The free tier is genuinely usable for a small site, which is why it is so widely installed, and setup on WordPress is about as easy as this category gets.
It is a small bootstrapped company shipping regularly, which in this category is not the norm.
The loudest one-star theme is the free tier tightening over time rather than the product being bad. A representative WordPress.org review reads 'They trapped us with a good free tier and now they are making it worse and worse every year', and another describes the banner being disabled once the pageview limit is hit.
Billing is by pageview, so a client's good month is your bill's bad month, and the free-tier scan allowance (about 5 scans a month, 100 pages each) is not a monitoring tool.
As with any vendor-run scanner, the scan is produced by the same company that sells the banner it is testing.
Checked 2026-09-06: a free plan plus tiers at roughly $10, $25 and $55 per month. The free plan is capped at about 5,000 monthly pageviews, 100 pages per scan and 5 scans a month, and CookieYes branding stays on the banner until the top tier. Overage on pageviews is charged separately. For an agency, ten client sites on the mid tier works out at roughly $250 a month.
Frequently asked
- What is the best Cookiebot alternative?
- It depends on what you are replacing. If you need a consent banner, the honest answer is another consent platform — we do not sell one. If what you actually need is independent proof that the banner blocks trackers, and alerts when that stops being true, that is what ConsentProof does alongside whatever banner you keep.
- Why did my Cookiebot price go up?
- Its plans are counted by subpages, with subdomains treated as separate domains, so a site that grows or gains a subdomain can change tier. A widely reported change in August 2025 also doubled the base price and moved small accounts up a tier. Check your current invoice against the published tiers rather than against memory.
- Can I use Cookiebot and ConsentProof together?
- Yes, and that is the intended combination. Cookiebot collects consent; ConsentProof tests, from a clean browser session, whether anything fired before that consent was given, and tells you when a new tracker appears.
- Is ConsentProof cheaper than Cookiebot?
- They are not substitutes, so a straight comparison is misleading. What is comparable is the billing shape: our monitoring is a flat price per site, while Cookiebot's tiers scale with subpages and subdomains.
- What is the best CookieYes alternative?
- If you need a consent banner, compare CookieYes with other consent platforms — we do not sell one, so we are not the answer to that question. If you need to verify that a banner blocks trackers before consent, and to be told when that changes, that is our half of the problem.
- What does the CookieYes free tier still cover?
- As of 2026-09-06 it covers a banner on one site up to roughly 5,000 monthly pageviews, with about 5 scans a month at 100 pages each and CookieYes branding on the banner. For a small brochure site that is often enough; for an agency it is not a monitoring plan.
Related
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