TL;DR: These two products share a plan name and almost nothing else. Termly Pro+ is $15 per website per month billed annually ($20 monthly) and is a dedicated privacy compliance platform: cookie scanning, script blocking, consent records, a preference center, generated legal policies, DSAR forms, and Google Consent Mode v2. Surmado Pro+ is $199 a month billed annually ($250 monthly) and is a managed website that happens to include ad and visitor tracking with a location-aware consent banner. Comparing them on price is meaningless because they’re not the same purchase. Choose Termly when you like your current website and need a compliance layer for it. Choose Surmado when the cookie banner is one of several website problems you no longer want to own.
These two get compared because a search result put them next to each other, and because both companies happen to sell a plan called Pro+. One costs $15 a month and one costs $199, which makes the comparison look absurd until you notice they aren’t selling the same thing. The useful thing we can do here is explain what each one actually replaces.
What each one actually is
Termly Pro+ is a compliance product. You keep your website exactly as it is, wherever it’s hosted, and Termly adds a privacy layer on top. It scans your site weekly to discover what’s loading, categorizes those trackers, blocks the non-essential ones until a visitor agrees, records what each visitor chose, and generates the privacy policy, cookie policy, terms, and disclaimers that need to match. It handles DSAR requests and supports Google Consent Mode v2. Unlimited banner views on Pro+.
Surmado Pro+ is a website. We migrate your existing site onto a faster, more search-and-AI-readable foundation, host it, maintain it, and keep it current. It includes a custom chatbot trained on your content, up to five additional languages, weekly blog posts, ad and visitor tracking, ten research Jobs a month, and a cookie consent banner that adjusts to where each visitor is. Scout, our AI agent, makes edits whenever you ask, in plain English, with a human check before anything goes live.
One is a feature you add to a website. The other is the website.
The comparison table nobody else will publish honestly
| Termly Pro+ | Surmado Pro+ | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $15/site/mo annual, $20 monthly | $199/mo annual, $250 monthly |
| What it is | Compliance platform | Managed website |
| Automated cookie discovery | Yes, weekly scans | No |
| Tracker categorization | Yes | No |
| Prior-consent script blocking | Yes | For its own tracking, server-side |
| Granular preference center | Yes | No, accept or decline |
| Stored consent records | Yes | No |
| Generated privacy and cookie policies | Yes | No |
| DSAR handling | Yes | No |
| Google Consent Mode v2 | Yes | No |
| IAB TCF certification | Yes | No |
| Location-aware consent | Yes | Yes |
| Honors Global Privacy Control | Yes | Yes |
| Website hosting | No | Yes |
| Site migration and rebuild | No | Yes |
| Ongoing site maintenance | No | Yes |
| Content published for you | No | Weekly |
| Custom chatbot | No | Yes |
| Additional languages | No | Up to five |
Termly wins the consent column decisively. It should. It’s a consent product and we’re not.
Why we’re not going to claim parity
It would be easy to write this post so Surmado wins. Pick the criteria carefully, emphasize what we do, wave at the rest. Plenty of comparison posts work exactly that way, usually the ones published by whichever vendor comes out on top.
Here’s the straight version. If you need automated cookie discovery, tracker categorization, a granular preference center, stored consent records, generated legal policies, DSAR workflows, Consent Mode v2, or IAB certification, Termly does those things and we don’t. Not “we do them differently.” We don’t offer them. At $15 a month it’s a good deal for what it is, and if that list describes your requirements, buy Termly and stop reading.
Claiming otherwise would be the kind of thing you’d find out was false about a week after signing up, which is a bad way to start.
So what is the $199 actually buying
Not a better cookie banner. A different scope of work.
With Termly, you still own the website. You own the hosting, the updates, the speed, the content, the fact that the site hasn’t been touched since 2023, and the job of noticing when the consent script stops working after a platform change. Termly handles the privacy layer well and leaves the rest with you, which is fine when the rest is fine.
With Surmado, the consent banner is a line item inside a service where somebody else owns the site. There’s no plugin to select, no dashboard to configure, no second subscription, no renewal date, and no integration between two vendors that can drift out of sync. The tracking and the consent gating were built together by the same people who run the site.
There’s a technical consequence worth naming. Surmado’s consent decision happens on the server, before the page is delivered to the browser. In opt-in regions, a tracker that hasn’t been consented to isn’t blocked by client-side JavaScript, it simply isn’t in the page. Client-side blocking is how most CMPs work and it’s mostly fine, but it’s also a race between the blocker and the tracker, and races occasionally get lost.
That’s a narrower promise than Termly makes. For a business whose actual tracking stack is Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta, and maybe a session recorder, it’s also most of what the CMP was going to be doing.
Most of Termly’s feature list isn’t aimed at you
Worth saying, because the table above makes Surmado look thin.
If you run a plumbing company, a restaurant, a dental practice, or a small consultancy selling to US customers, a real portion of that feature list is built for companies you’re not. IAB TCF certification exists for programmatic ad auctions. DSAR automation matters when you get enough data-subject requests that handling them by hand stops scaling. Per-vendor toggles across forty trackers matter when you have forty trackers.
The things a typical local business genuinely needs are narrower: don’t fire non-essential trackers on people who haven’t agreed where agreement is required, make declining as easy as accepting, allow a change of mind, treat visitors differently by region because the rules genuinely differ, and have a cookie policy that matches reality.
Both products do the first four. Termly also does the fifth, and a lot more besides. Whether the “more” is worth managing a second vendor for is the actual decision.
Where this flips: if you sell into the EU or UK at volume, or you’re in a regulated field handling sensitive data, the enterprise-shaped features stop being theater and start being the reason you’d get through an audit. Then Termly, or Complianz Premium, is the correct answer and $199 for a managed website is solving a different problem you may or may not also have.
Choosing
Choose Termly Pro+ if:
- Your website is fine and you like it.
- You need consent records, generated policies, DSAR handling, or Consent Mode v2.
- You want one vendor for both the banner and the legal documents.
- $15 a month against $199 a month is the comparison that matters, because a website isn’t what you’re shopping for.
Choose Surmado Pro+ if:
- The cookie banner is the fourth thing wrong with your website this quarter.
- You don’t want to select, install, configure, and maintain another tool.
- You want the hosting, the updates, the content, and the tracking handled by one vendor.
- Your consent needs are “do it correctly by region,” not “produce an audit trail.”
Choose both if: you want Surmado to run the website and Termly to run compliance. These aren’t mutually exclusive, and for a business with real EU exposure that’s a reasonable stack.
The bottom line
Termly manages privacy compliance. Surmado manages the website, including the consent experience its own tracking needs.
The shared plan name is a coincidence, and the price gap isn’t the story. A $15 compliance tool and a $199 managed website aren’t competing for the same budget line, they’re answering different questions. The only real mistake is buying the $199 product because you wanted a better banner, or buying the $15 one and expecting the rest of your website to improve.
If the website is the problem, Surmado Sites rebuilds your existing site and sends a preview before you pay anything. Current numbers are on the pricing page. If you’re still weighing the category, the full comparison covers Termly, CookieYes, Complianz, Cookiebot, and iubenda, and Termly alternatives goes deeper on the switch specifically. Not sure you need a banner at all? Start here.
General product information, not legal advice. Feature comparisons reflect each product’s publicly documented capabilities as of August 2026 and change without notice; check both vendors’ current pages before deciding.