Privacy Bench
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Consent management platforms

Guides, tools, and vendor assessments to help you choose and implement a GDPR-compliant consent management platform.

A consent management platform handles the collection, storage, and enforcement of user consent on your website. Under GDPR, you need consent before setting non-essential cookies or running tracking scripts. The CMP presents a banner, records the user's choice, and blocks or allows scripts accordingly.

Getting this right matters for two reasons. First, regulators enforce cookie consent rules: France's CNIL, for example, has fined Google and Facebook over banners that made refusing cookies harder than accepting them. Second, if you use Google Ads measurement or personalisation on EEA traffic, Google requires Consent Mode v2 signals, which depend on your CMP passing the visitor's choice correctly.

The guides below cover implementation details that vendor documentation often skips: how to test that scripts actually block before consent, how to handle Consent Mode v2 edge cases, and how to audit your cookie setup after deployment. The vendor profiles set out each platform's strengths and limitations, drawn from vendor documentation and our review of each product.

Guides & tools

Google Consent Mode v2

How Consent Mode v2 works, when you need it, and how to verify your implementation is passing signals correctly.

IAB TCF 2.2 and 2.3

Overview of the Transparency and Consent Framework — what it means for publishers and which CMPs support it.

How to choose

Start from what runs on your site, not from feature lists. All three consent tools we cover are recorded with Google Consent Mode v2 support, so the deciding factors are ad inventory, cookie inventory and how much legal paperwork you want bundled.

  • You sell ad space or run programmatic ads: pick a CMP listed on IAB Europe's CMP list and, for Google ad products, Google's certified CMP list. Check each vendor's status on both before you commit.
  • You add tools often and nobody maintains a cookie list: Cookiebot's automated scanning saves the most effort.
  • You need white-label banners or run many brands: Usercentrics is built for that.
  • You are a small business that also needs a privacy policy and terms: iubenda bundles both with its consent banner.

Consent Mode v2 matters when you use Google Ads or link GA4 to it: it tells Google tags what the visitor chose. See the Consent Mode v2 guide. TCF matters only when third-party ad vendors need the consent signal, typically publishers using AdSense, Ad Manager or header bidding. See the IAB TCF guide. Many advertisers need the first and not the second.

CMP vendors

Cookiebot

Market-leading consent management platform with automated cookie scanning and Google Consent Mode v2 support.

iubenda

All-in-one privacy and legal compliance solution with policy generators and cookie consent management.

Usercentrics

Enterprise-grade consent management platform with advanced features for complex compliance requirements.

Related Resources

Tool

CMP Selector Tool

Answer a few questions and get a personalised CMP recommendation.

 Playbook

Consent Mode v2 Setup in GTM

Step-by-step Google Tag Manager guide to implementing Consent Mode v2.

 Playbook

Cookie Consent Banner Setup

Practical guide to setting up a compliant cookie consent banner.

 Tool

Cookie Audit Checklist

Identify every cookie and tracker on your site.