business – software info by fk

At a Glance

Spec	Value
Installs	800,000+
Rating	4.8★ (3,025 ratings)
Free tier	Banner Only (uncapped) or Connected Mode (1,000 visits/month, 7-day retention)
Starting price	$14.95/month (Professional, 1 domain)
Best for	Sites already using Google Consent Mode v2 or Meta/Microsoft ads

Short Verdict

Cookie Compliance splits into two genuinely different free options plus one paid tier, and that split is most of the story. “Banner Only” mode is free forever, needs no account, and just shows a customizable notice — no automatic script blocking, no consent logging. Switching on “Connected Mode” gets you the real compliance engine — automatic script blocking, Google and Facebook/Microsoft consent-mode signals, a consent audit trail — for free as well, but capped at 1,000 monthly visits and 7 days of consent history. Past that traffic level, or if you need unlimited history, more languages, or coverage across several domains, you’re into the Professional plan starting at $14.95/month. It’s the second-most-installed plugin in our roundup (800,000+ installs, 4.8 stars), and it leans harder into Google/Meta ad-consent signals than into generating legal documents for you — that’s the main trade-off against Complianz’s broader, less ad-tech-specific free tier.

What Cookie Compliance Is

Cookie Compliance for WordPress is built by Hu-manity.co and is still listed under its original WordPress.org slug, cookie-notice, even though the plugin itself was rebranded from “Cookie Notice” to “Cookie Compliance” — worth knowing so you don’t think you’ve landed on the wrong listing. As of this writing it has 800,000+ active installs and a 4.8-star rating across 3,025 reviews (2,851 of them five-star), running version 3.1.14. It requires WordPress 4.9.6 or higher and PHP 7.4 or higher, and the developer lists it as tested up to WordPress 7.0.7.

Unlike Complianz, which is built around a setup wizard that scans your site and auto-generates legal documents, Cookie Compliance is built around two operating modes. “Banner Only” runs entirely inside WordPress with no external account — you get a banner, and that’s it. “Connected Mode” links the plugin to Hu-manity.co’s own web dashboard and unlocks the actual consent-management functionality: script blocking, consent categories, analytics, and integration with ad platforms’ consent signals. The vendor’s own compliance claims cover GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive, PECR (UK), LGPD (Brazil), PIPEDA (Canada), CCPA/CPRA and other US state laws including the VCDPA and Colorado Privacy Act, across what it describes as 100+ jurisdictions.

What’s in the Free Version

This is the part worth reading carefully, because “free” means two different things here:

Banner Only (free, no account, no cap): a customizable consent banner, synced with your WordPress Privacy Policy page, WP Consent API integration (so other privacy-aware plugins can read the visitor’s choice), and WPML/Polylang compatibility for multilingual sites. It does not block scripts or store a consent record — it’s a notice, not a consent-management platform.
Basic (free, requires a Hu-manity.co account, “Connected Mode”): this is where script blocking and consent logging actually turn on. The published plan includes GDPR/CCPA/ePrivacy/PECR-oriented compliance messaging, a consent analytics dashboard, Google and Facebook consent-mode signals, geolocation-based banner logic, and one additional language beyond your site’s default — but it’s capped at 1,000 visits per month, keeps only 7 days of consent history, and gets “basic” (as opposed to priority) support.

In practice: if your site gets meaningful traffic, the free Connected tier’s 1,000-visit cap is the number that will push you toward a paid plan faster than any feature gate will — that’s a different free-tier constraint than Complianz, which caps nothing on its free plan but locks specific features (Consent Mode v2, IAB TCF) behind payment instead.

What’s Behind the Paywall

The Professional plan starts at $14.95/month for a single domain, billed monthly, with a 17% discount for annual billing (confirmed directly on cookie-compliance.co/pricing as of this writing — an earlier draft of this review carried a lower figure from a different source; the vendor’s own “Save 17%” label on the pricing page is the figure to trust). The pricing page also offers 5-, 10-, and 20-domain license bundles, but the per-domain price for those tiers isn’t published as a flat number on the site — it’s revealed by the domain-count selector at checkout, so if you’re licensing more than one site, get the actual figure there rather than assuming it scales linearly from the single-domain rate.

What Professional actually removes or adds versus Basic: unlimited monthly visits, lifetime consent-record storage (versus 7 days), unlimited additional languages (versus one), and premium support. The core compliance mechanics — script blocking, Google/Facebook consent-mode signals, geolocation — are the same feature set as the free Basic tier; you’re paying to remove caps, not to unlock functionality that free accounts don’t have at all. One notable gap either way: we found no mention of IAB Europe TCF support anywhere on Hu-manity.co’s site or in its Google Consent Mode documentation, on either tier. If IAB TCF certification is a requirement for your ad exchange relationships, Cookie Compliance doesn’t appear to offer it — Complianz does, on its paid tiers.

WooCommerce and E-Commerce

Cookie Compliance doesn’t market a specific WooCommerce integration the way Complianz does. That doesn’t necessarily mean it fails on a WooCommerce store — the script-blocking mechanism in Connected Mode works on any script tag it can detect and categorize, cart/session cookies would still be treated as strictly necessary the same as with any consent tool — but there’s no vendor documentation walking through WooCommerce-specific scripts, tracking pixels, or payment-gateway scripts the way Complianz’s marketing does. If you’re running a store and want that mapped out for you rather than configured by hand, that’s a point in Complianz’s favor.

Setup and Day-to-Day Use

Reviewers on WordPress.org consistently describe the plugin as working “out of the box” with minimal configuration for the basic banner case, which tracks with it being one of the higher-rated tools in this category. The friction shows up around the free/paid boundary rather than around setup difficulty: one recurring complaint in user reviews is that Google Consent Mode v2’s more specific parameters felt gated behind a paid plan even though the vendor’s current pricing page lists “Google & Facebook consent modes” under the free Basic tier too — this is worth testing directly against your own ad setup before assuming full v2 parameter support (ad_storage, analytics_storage, ad_user_data, and ad_personalization) is available for free, since the vendor’s documentation and some user reports don’t fully agree on where that line sits. A smaller, more cosmetic complaint that shows up in reviews is that plugin notifications can clutter the WordPress dashboard.

Pros

A real free tier that includes actual script blocking and consent logging, not just a banner — Basic Connected Mode isn’t a stripped-down trial. Banner Only mode is a genuinely no-strings option if you don’t want to connect to an external account at all. Strong install base and rating (800,000+, 4.8★) means most common issues are well documented. Built-in Google, Facebook, and Microsoft consent-mode signal support without needing a separate integration plugin. WPML and Polylang compatibility out of the box for multilingual sites.

Cons

The free Connected tier’s 1,000-visit-per-month cap is a hard ceiling that most active blogs or stores will hit, at which point you’re evaluating the $14.95/month-and-up Professional plan, not the free plugin. No IAB TCF support that we could find, on any tier — a gap if your ad partners require CMP certification. No published WooCommerce-specific integration documentation. Multi-domain pricing beyond the single-domain monthly rate isn’t published as flat numbers, so budgeting for more than one site takes an extra step at checkout. At least some user reviews report confusion about exactly which Google Consent Mode v2 capabilities are free versus paid.

Who It’s a Good Fit For

Sites already running Google Ads, GA4, or Meta ads that want consent-mode signals handled natively, without paying anything, as long as monthly traffic stays under 1,000 visits or you’re fine paying once it doesn’t. It’s also a reasonable pick if you want the option to start with a zero-commitment, no-account banner (Banner Only) and upgrade to real consent management later without switching plugins.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

If your site already gets more than roughly 1,000 visits a month and you want real script blocking and consent records without paying, Complianz’s uncapped free tier is the better starting point — you’d trade Cookie Compliance’s native ad-platform consent signals for Complianz’s broader auto-generated legal documents and WooCommerce-specific coverage. If IAB TCF certification is a hard requirement, neither tier of Cookie Compliance covers it, so it’s worth checking Complianz’s paid tiers or a TCF-focused tool instead. And if you’re running a store and want a plugin that documents WooCommerce script handling explicitly, Complianz has the more detailed vendor documentation for that use case.

Bottom Line

Cookie Compliance’s real strength is that its free tier isn’t a watered-down demo — Connected Mode gives you actual script blocking, consent logging, and native ad-platform consent signals at no cost, which is more than a lot of “free” tools in this space offer. The catch is a hard 1,000-visit monthly ceiling that will push any moderately active site toward the $14.95/month Professional plan faster than a feature gate would, plus a documentation gap around exactly which Consent Mode v2 features are actually free. 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 mechanism for enforcing whatever your compliance requirements turn out to be, not a compliance guarantee in itself.

Still deciding if you even need one of these? Run through our consent-management checklist, or read our Termly review for the third option in this series.