TL;DR: For most WordPress sites, Complianz is the pick: it’s WordPress-native, its free tier is genuinely usable, and Premium is $59 a year for one site, which undercuts everything hosted. CookieYes is the best hosted option with a WordPress integration, free to 5,000 pageviews then $10/$25/$55 per domain, but geo-targeting starts at $25. Cookiebot has the strongest scanner and suits large or long-neglected sites, priced by subpage count. Termly is worth it if you want legal documents and consent from one vendor at $15 per site monthly. The free-only route works for simple single-region sites and stops working the moment you need geo-targeting or consent records. And the honest fifth option is not installing another plugin at all.
WordPress makes this both easier and worse. Easier because there’s a plugin for it. Worse because there’s a plugin for everything, and the consent one has to correctly suppress scripts injected by your theme, your page builder, your analytics plugin, your ad plugin, and whatever embeds sit inside your posts. That’s a lot of surface area for something that fails silently.
Here’s how the real options compare.
Quick comparison
| Plugin | Free tier | Paid entry | Geo-targeting | Consent records | Hosted or local |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Complianz | Banner, scanning, policy generator | $59/yr, one site | Premium | Premium | Local |
| CookieYes | 5,000 pageviews/mo | $10/domain/mo | $25 tier and up | Yes | Hosted |
| Cookiebot | Up to 50 subpages | ~€7/domain/mo | Yes | Yes | Hosted |
| Termly | Limited | $15/site/mo annual | Yes | Yes | Hosted |
Complianz: the default recommendation
Complianz has more than a million active installations, and it’s the one we’d point most WordPress owners at first.
The free version is unusually complete: a single-site banner, cookie scanning, and a policy generator. Most free tiers in this category are a banner and nothing else, so this is a real starting point rather than a demo.
Premium is $59 a year for one site, $179 for five, $399 for twenty-five, and adds the things that separate a notice from a working consent layer: geo-detection with region-specific banners, consent records, Google Consent Mode v2, IAB TCF, A/B testing, and fuller legal documents.
The reason it leads: at $59 a year you’re paying less annually than one month of some hosted competitors, everything lives in your own install with no external service in the page load, and the WordPress integration is native rather than adapted.
The tradeoff is ownership. Complianz’s own documentation is clear that the administrator stays responsible for configuring it correctly. It gives you the controls; it doesn’t guarantee you set them right. That’s true of every self-hosted option, and it’s the actual cost of the cheap price.
Best for: most WordPress sites, especially if you’d rather pay yearly.
CookieYes: best hosted option
CookieYes is hosted, with a clean WordPress plugin. Free to 5,000 pageviews a month, then Basic at $10 per domain, Pro at $25, Ultimate at $55 unlimited. Annual saves about 16.67%.
Scanning, automatic script blocking, consent logging, and policy generators all included. If you’d rather someone else run the consent infrastructure and just have the plugin talk to it, this is the pick.
The tier trap, again: geo-targeting starts at $25, not $10. If you need EU visitors and US visitors to see different things, the $10 plan does not do that, and your honest comparison is $25 a month against Complianz’s $59 a year. That’s roughly a 5x difference over a year for a feature Complianz includes in Premium.
Best for: WordPress owners who want hosted infrastructure and don’t need geo, or who do need it and prefer hosted enough to pay for it.
Cookiebot: best scanner
Cookiebot, now part of Usercentrics, prices by subpage count per domain rather than traffic. Free up to 50 subpages, then $8 a month for Premium Lite (to 50 subpages), $16 Small (to 350), $34 Medium (to 3,500), $56 Large (to 7,000), and $96 XLarge above that, per domain. Euro pricing runs roughly €7/€15/€30/€50/€90. Over 100,000 active WordPress installations.
Its scanner is the best here, which matters for the WordPress site that’s been running since 2015 and has collected embeds, widgets, and tracking scripts from four different marketing efforts. If you don’t know what’s on your site, this finds out.
Two cautions. Every domain is a separate subscription with no volume discount. And in August 2025 Cookiebot moved accounts holding one to three Premium Small domains up to Premium Medium; accounts with four or more kept Small, and Lite was untouched. It was a targeted repricing rather than a across-the-board increase, but if you run a single small site it hit you.
Best for: large, old, or messy WordPress installs where discovery is the hard part.
Termly: best if you also need the legal documents
Termly is $15 per website per month billed annually, $20 monthly, and includes weekly cookie scans, script auto-blocking, a preference center, consent records, Google Consent Mode v2, DSAR forms, and generated privacy policies, cookie policies, and terms.
On price alone it loses to Complianz for WordPress. It wins when you want one vendor accountable for both the banner and the documents, which is a legitimate preference, especially if your current privacy policy is a template you found in 2019.
Best for: WordPress owners who need documents and consent handled together.
The free-only route
You can run a free consent plugin and be fine, under specific conditions: a single region, a small tracker list you actually know, no consent-record requirement, and someone willing to verify it still works after updates.
Where free stops working is predictable. You need geo-targeting. You need to prove what someone consented to and when. Your tracker list grew past what you’re tracking mentally. Or the plugin stopped blocking something after a WordPress update and nobody noticed for months.
That last one is the real risk with free tiers, and it’s not really about the software. It’s that nobody owns checking.
What actually breaks
Regardless of which you pick, the same failures recur on WordPress:
The plugin blocks your own analytics after consent is granted. Usually a script-handle mismatch, where the consent plugin doesn’t recognize the analytics tag after a plugin update renamed it. Symptom: your traffic numbers collapse and you assume traffic collapsed.
Page builders inject scripts the consent layer doesn’t see. Elementor, Divi, and WPBakery can output tracking in ways a scanner classifies differently than expected.
Caching serves the wrong banner state. A page cache can serve a cached “already consented” page to a new visitor, or cache a geo-specific banner and serve it to the wrong region. Geo-targeting plus aggressive full-page caching is a genuinely tricky combination.
A theme update resets your configuration. Rare, but it happens, and there’s no alert when it does.
None of these are exotic. They’re the normal cost of assembling a consent layer out of parts on a platform where everything can inject scripts.
The option that isn’t a plugin
Every recommendation above assumes you keep running WordPress and add one more thing to it. That’s the right assumption for plenty of businesses.
It isn’t the right assumption if the plugin count is itself the problem. If your site is running twenty-something plugins, three of which are half-broken, and adding a consent layer means auditing how it interacts with all of them, the marginal plugin isn’t the fix.
Surmado Sites is the other direction: we migrate your existing site off WordPress onto a faster foundation, host it, maintain it, wire up your analytics and ad tracking, and include a location-aware consent banner as part of the service. Visitors in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, and Canada see the banner before anything fires. Visitors in California, Colorado, Connecticut, and Oregon get a working opt-out, and a Global Privacy Control signal from the browser is treated as a decline. Because the consent decision happens on the server before the page is sent, there’s no client-side script-blocking to get out of sync with a page builder, and no caching interaction to debug.
Pro+ is $199 a month billed annually, or $250 month to month. To be clear about the trade: it is not a consent management platform. No automated cookie discovery, no granular preference center, no stored consent records, no generated policies, no DSAR handling, no Consent Mode v2, no IAB certification. Complianz Premium does more on that axis for $59 a year. What you’re buying is that nobody has to maintain it, and that it’s one vendor rather than two.
Best for: owners whose real complaint is the number of moving parts, not the banner.
The bottom line
For most WordPress sites: Complianz Premium at $59 a year. It’s native, it’s cheap, its free tier lets you try before paying, and it covers geo-targeting and consent records, which is where free options stop.
Go CookieYes if you specifically want hosted. Go Cookiebot if discovery is the hard part. Go Termly if you need the legal documents in the same place. Go free if your situation is genuinely simple and someone will check it periodically.
And if you’re reading a plugin comparison mostly because you’re tired of plugin comparisons, that’s worth noticing. The full category breakdown is in best cookie consent tools for small businesses, the Termly-specific view is in Termly alternatives, and if you’re not sure you need a banner at all, start here. Current Surmado pricing is on the pricing page.
General information about software, not legal advice.