Cookiebot

Cookiebot is a consent management platform built by Cybot in Denmark and owned by Usercentrics since 2021. It scans your website to find cookies and trackers, shows a consent banner that blocks non-essential cookies until the visitor chooses, and stores each consent so you can demonstrate it later. Scanning, blocking and consent logging together cover what ePrivacy consent rules and GDPR Article 7 expect from a cookie banner setup.

Cookiebot is sold as a self-serve product, which makes it one of the easier CMPs for an SMB to install without a developer. Its pricing page lists Usercentrics Advanced, a session-priced plan sold through sales, as the step beyond the largest Premium tier.

The Cookiebot scanner crawls the pages of your domain, detects cookies and tracking scripts, and sorts them into categories such as necessary, preferences, statistics and marketing. The result feeds both the banner and a cookie declaration you can embed in your cookie policy. Cookiebot's pricing page lists an initial scan on the free plan and monthly automatic scans on Premium plans, with daily scans as a paid add-on.

The scanner is not infallible. Cookies set only after login, inside checkout flows or by scripts that load late can be missed, which is why our dataset lists edge-case misses as a con. Spot-check those paths manually after major releases.

Cookiebot supports Google Consent Mode v2 on every plan, including the free one. It passes consent states to Google tags, including the ad_user_data and ad_personalization signals Google requires for EEA advertising traffic. Google's documentation describes two implementations: in the advanced one, tags still send cookieless pings after a decline, which Google uses for conversion modelling. In the basic one, Google tags do not load until consent.

Cookiebot also supports IAB Europe's Transparency and Consent Framework, listed on Premium plans only, which matters for publishers selling programmatic ads. If you only run GA4 and Google Ads, you need Consent Mode but not TCF. Enabling TCF on a site that does not need it adds a long vendor list to the banner for no benefit.

Cookiebot prices by the size of your domain, measured in subpages, rather than by traffic. The free plan covers one domain of up to 50 subpages with an initial scan, which makes it useful for testing and very small sites.

Premium Lite, the entry paid plan, keeps the same 50-subpage cap on a single domain but adds monthly scans. Premium Small and higher tiers raise the per-domain subpage limit, and each additional domain is billed separately. Large content sites move up the tiers quickly because every crawlable page counts, not only the ones with visitors. Check your subpage count against the current tiers on Cookiebot's pricing page before you commit.

Our take: Cookiebot is the default we would suggest to an SMB that runs Google Analytics and Google Ads, has no developer on hand and wants the cookie inventory maintained automatically. The scanner and the cookie declaration it generates address a common failure: a banner that no longer matches the tags on the site.

Look elsewhere if you need heavy banner customisation on a small budget, if your site has a very large page count or many domains, since each domain is billed separately, or if you need enterprise features such as white-labelling, where Usercentrics is the natural step up. For generated privacy policies and terms, pair Cookiebot with a policy tool or consider iubenda.