Complianz Review: Features, Pricing, and Whether the Free Version Is Enough for Your WordPress Site

At a Glance

Spec	Value
Installs	1M+
Rating	4.7★ (1,659 ratings)
Free tier	No page-view or session cap; auto cookie scan, script blocking, policy generation
Starting price	$59/year (Personal, 1 site)
Best for	Broadest free legal coverage without ad-tech extras

Short Verdict

Complianz is the most fully-featured free cookie consent plugin for WordPress, and that’s not really in dispute — no page-view cap, no session limit, and a free tier that covers more privacy frameworks out of the box than most competitors offer even on paid plans. Where it gets more complicated is everything past the free tier: Google Consent Mode v2, IAB TCF support, and consent records are all gated behind a paid license, and some site owners report banner reliability issues and conflicts with caching plugins. If you want broad legal coverage for free and don’t need ad-tech-specific integrations, it’s a strong default choice. If Google Consent Mode v2 or IAB TCF certification is a hard requirement for your ad stack, budget for the Personal plan before you commit.

What Complianz Is

Complianz GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent Banner is a Google-certified Consent Management Platform (CMP) built specifically for WordPress (a separate Shopify app also exists, but that’s outside the scope of this review). It’s the most-installed cookie consent plugin on WordPress.org, with 1+ million active installs and a 4.7-star rating across 1,659 reviews as of this writing, running on version 7.5.5. It requires WordPress 5.9+ and PHP 7.4+, and the developer lists it as tested up through WordPress 7.1.2.

The pitch is coverage breadth: instead of building a banner and leaving the legal research to you, Complianz runs a setup wizard that scans your site, asks a series of configuration questions about what you use it for (blog, WooCommerce store, membership site, etc.), and then generates region-specific banners and policy documents covering GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive, UK-GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, LGPD (Brazil), POPIA (South Africa), PIPEDA (Canada), and others, in 15+ languages.

What’s in the Free Version

This is where Complianz stands out from most of the field: the free tier isn’t a stripped-down trial, and it isn’t capped by traffic. It includes:

The full guided setup wizard, no coding required
Automatic cookie scanning (covers up to 50 posts/pages per scan)
Script and iframe blocking with placeholders for common third-party embeds — Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, AdSense, HubSpot, reCAPTCHA, X/Twitter, and ActiveCampaign are explicitly supported out of the box
Region-specific banners for the EU, UK, US, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, and Canada
Auto-generated cookie policy and privacy policy documents from the scan results
250+ pre-built plugin and service integrations
Native Gutenberg blocks
Basic WooCommerce compatibility (see below)
WCAG 2.1 AA and ADA-oriented accessibility features on the banner itself

For a genuinely free tool, that’s a lot of legal surface area covered — this is the main reason it topped the “best for deep legal coverage without a subscription” slot in our plugin roundup.

What’s Behind the Paywall

Complianz sells three annual license tiers, all billed per year with a 30-day money-back guarantee:

Personal — $59/year, covers 1 website
Professional — $179/year, covers 5 websites (roughly $3/site/month)
Agency — $399/year, covers 25 websites and bundles a separate multisite plugin (roughly $1.35/site/month)

Across all three paid tiers, you get: Google Consent Mode v2 integration (Complianz received Google’s official certification for this in July 2024), IAB Europe TCF support with a registered CMP ID (332) — vendor and third-party sources describe this as TCF v2.0 and up, so if a specific TCF version is a hard requirement for your ad partners, confirm current version support directly with Complianz before buying — plus Geo-IP-based banner targeting, Records of Consent (a stored, exportable log of who consented to what and when), A/B testing for banner copy and design, advanced/hybrid site scanning, data-subject-request handling tools, and priority support.

In plain terms: the free version handles the “show a compliant banner and generate the right legal documents” job well. The paid version is really aimed at sites running serious ad tech (Google Consent Mode v2 specifically matters if you’re running Google Ads or GA4 with ad personalization) or sites that need a defensible, exportable consent audit trail — which matters more once your site’s size or ad spend puts it on a regulator’s radar, per the enforcement examples we cover in “Do You Need a Cookie Policy on Your WordPress Site?”

WooCommerce and E-Commerce

Complianz’s own marketing confirms WooCommerce compatibility, specifically around tracking pixels, payment gateway scripts, and marketing scripts commonly used in WooCommerce stores — the plugin can categorize and block these the same way it handles other third-party scripts. It doesn’t interfere with WooCommerce’s own cart/session cookies, which are functionally necessary for checkout and are exempt from consent requirements. If you’re running a store, it’s worth testing the integration against your specific checkout and payment gateway setup rather than assuming full coverage out of the box, since payment providers change their own tracking scripts periodically.

Setup and Day-to-Day Use

The setup wizard is the plugin’s strongest usability feature: it walks through cookie scanning, a short questionnaire about what the site does, banner template selection, Geo-IP activation, legal document generation, and script categorization, and independent reviewers consistently describe it as completable in a single sitting without needing to touch code. Where the friction shows up is afterward — troubleshooting a false-positive script block, resolving a conflict with a caching or page-optimization plugin, or fine-tuning an edge case the wizard didn’t anticipate all require more manual digging than the initial setup suggests. Some site owners report banner display or reliability issues, particularly on sites running aggressive caching setups; if your site uses a caching plugin, test the banner on a fresh, logged-out, cache-cleared page load before you trust the default configuration.

Pros

Free tier with no page-view or session cap, unusual in a market where most competitors gate volume behind a subscription. Broad regulatory coverage (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, LGPD, POPIA, PIPEDA, and more) generated automatically rather than left to you to research. Consent data and legal documents are hosted on your own server rather than routed through a third-party service. A large, well-reviewed install base (1M+, 4.7★) means most edge cases have already been hit and documented by someone else. 250+ pre-built integrations cut down on manual script categorization.

Cons

Google Consent Mode v2, IAB TCF, Geo-IP targeting, and Records of Consent are all locked to paid tiers — if any of those is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, the “free plugin” framing doesn’t really apply to your use case. Some users report banner reliability problems and conflicts with caching/optimization plugins that require manual troubleshooting. Support quality on paid tiers is reported as inconsistent by some reviewers, with response-time targets (24 hours weekdays, 48 hours weekends) not always met. It’s WordPress- and Shopify-only, so it’s not a fit if you manage properties on other platforms and want one consent tool across all of them.

Who It’s a Good Fit For

Site owners who want strong, automatically-generated multi-jurisdiction legal coverage without paying anything, and who are comfortable spending 20-30 minutes in a setup wizard rather than dragging a banner into place with a page builder. It’s also a reasonable default for WooCommerce stores that aren’t yet running heavy ad-tech stacks requiring Google Consent Mode v2 or IAB TCF specifically.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

If Google Consent Mode v2 or IAB TCF is a hard requirement for your ad or ad-tech setup right now, you’re effectively evaluating the $59/year Personal plan, not the free plugin — at that point it’s worth comparing against Cookie Compliance (which builds its paid tier specifically around Consent Mode v2 and Meta/Microsoft consent signals) before deciding, which we cover in our next deep-dive review. Sites already fighting caching-plugin conflicts with other tools may also want to budget extra testing time before assuming Complianz will resolve cleanly on the first try.

Bottom Line

For the price of $0, Complianz gives you more genuine legal coverage than most paid competitors offer — that’s the headline, and it’s earned. The catch is that the features ad-driven sites tend to care about most (Consent Mode v2, IAB TCF, consent records) all sit behind a subscription, so “free” and “fully covers my ad stack” aren’t the same claim. As with any consent tool, this isn’t a substitute for legal advice about what your specific site is required to do — treat it as a strong starting point for the mechanics, not a compliance guarantee.

Not sure if your site even needs one of these yet? Run through our consent-management checklist first.