Usercentrics

Usercentrics is a consent management platform (CMP) from Munich that collects, stores and signals cookie consent for websites and apps. In 2021 Usercentrics acquired Cybot, the Danish company behind Cookiebot, so both products now have the same owner.

Both brands are still on sale. Cookiebot's pricing page sells Premium plans by subpage count and lists Usercentrics Advanced, a session-priced plan sold through sales, as the step above them. For an SMB operator, the practical question is which product matches your traffic, your number of domains and how much configuration you want to own.

The ePrivacy rules require consent before non-essential cookies are set, and GDPR Article 7 requires that you can demonstrate that consent. A CMP covers both by blocking tags until the visitor chooses and by keeping a record of each choice.

Usercentrics supports Google Consent Mode v2 on every plan, including the ad_user_data and ad_personalization signals Google requires for EEA advertising traffic. Its pricing page lists IAB Europe's Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) from the Pro tier upwards, which matters if you sell programmatic ad inventory.

Usercentrics' documentation describes a DPS Scanner that watches which third-party services load during real visits and flags any that are missing from your CMP configuration. The pricing page lists automated scans on every plan: once at setup on Free, monthly on paid tiers and weekly on Corporate.

Usercentrics sells monthly subscriptions and has a free plan for a single low-traffic domain. Paid tiers are priced by monthly sessions and number of domains, so traffic drives the cost more than site size. Higher tiers add domains and IAB TCF. White-label is an add-on or part of the custom-priced Corporate plan, which also carries the data export API.

Entry paid tiers sit in the same low range as Cookiebot's Premium Lite, so price rarely decides between them at small scale. The real cost question for a growing site is where your session count lands. Tier names and limits change often, so confirm current details on the Usercentrics pricing page before comparing quotes.

A Usercentrics audit usually means one of two things: checking that your implementation works, or producing evidence for a data protection review.

For the first, load the site in a clean browser profile, reject all, and confirm in developer tools that no analytics or advertising cookies are set and no marketing tags fire. Then accept all and check that Consent Mode v2 signals change from denied to granted. Privacy Bench's cookie audit checklist and Consent Mode v2 checker cover both steps.

For the second, export the consent records Usercentrics stores and keep your service list, banner text and configuration history alongside them.

The two alternatives most relevant to SMBs are Cookiebot, from the same owner, and iubenda. Cookiebot prices by subpage count instead of sessions and builds a cookie declaration from its scans, which can work out cheaper for a small site with a lot of traffic.

iubenda is a different kind of product: a legal suite that bundles privacy and cookie policy generators and a terms generator with its cookie banner. Both support IAB TCF, iubenda on all paid plans and Usercentrics from Pro, so the iubenda vs Usercentrics decision turns on other things. A small business that mainly needs policies plus a compliant banner gets more from iubenda. Usercentrics fits better when you manage several domains centrally, need white-label banners or want consent data exported by API.

Our take: Usercentrics is a strong fit when consent is a cross-team concern, such as several domains, programmatic advertising, white-label banners or an API that feeds consent into other systems.

For a single-site SMB running Google Analytics and Google Ads, the free or entry tiers cover the core job, but most of what sets Usercentrics apart sits in higher tiers. Cookiebot, under the same ownership, covers the same core job with subpage-based pricing. Whichever you choose, test the reject path again every time a new script is added, and keep a dated note of each test with your consent records.