Termly

What it is

Termly produces the legal pages a website is expected to have and the banner that manages cookie consent. You answer questions about what your site does and it generates a privacy policy, cookie policy and related notices, embeddable as HTML so they update rather than sitting as a stale copy-paste.

The consent side is the more technical half: a banner, a preference centre, and a script auto blocker that stops tracking scripts from firing before someone agrees. It scans your site for cookies on a schedule, quarterly on the free plan and weekly on Pro+.

Who it's for (and who it isn't)

It fits small businesses with a website that collects anything: analytics, a contact form, a newsletter signup. In the EU that already brings obligations, and the common state of affairs, a banner that does nothing and a policy copied from another site, is worse than useless because it looks deliberate.

It is a weaker fit for companies with genuinely complex data processing: multiple products, international transfers, sensitive categories. A generator produces a document from your answers, and complexity is exactly where the answers stop fitting the questions. That is when a lawyer is the correct purchase.

Pricing

Termly is freemium. The free plan includes 1 basic legal policy, 10,000 banner views per month, quarterly cookie scans, the cookie policy and banner, the script auto blocker and HTML embeddable policies. Starter is $10 per month billed annually, or $14 monthly, with 2 policies. Pro+ is $15 per month billed annually, or $20 monthly, with unlimited policies and unlimited banner views, weekly automated scans, custom banner styling, multi-language support, IAB TCF 2.3 compliance and regional consent rules. Agency pricing covers multiple websites and resellers.

Banner views, not policies, is what pushes a growing site to upgrade: 10,000 views a month is a modest amount of traffic.

Set it up

Official guide: How to install your consent banner

1. Create a Termly account on the Free plan. It includes quarterly cookie scans (a check of your website for cookies, the small files a site saves in a visitor's browser), a cookie policy and banner, and the script auto blocker. Have your website address ready. Your Termly dashboard is now open.
2. In your dashboard, click the "Consent Management" dropdown, then "Scan Report", then "Scan Now". Termly checks your website for cookies. You now see a table of the cookies it found, sorted into categories.
3. Open the "Unclassified" tab, which lists cookies Termly could not sort, and edit the description of each one. If the tab is empty, go straight to the next step. Every cookie on your list now has a category.
4. Click "Generate Cookie Policy" to review your cookie policy, a page that tells visitors which cookies your site uses. Click "Add To Website" and choose how you want to publish it. You now see the ways Termly offers to put the policy on your site.
5. Style your cookie banner (the box that asks visitors to accept or decline cookies) under "Banner Settings". Then click "Install" and choose the "Auto Blocker" option. It stops third-party tracking scripts (code from other companies, such as analytics) from running until the visitor agrees. You now see your code snippet, the short piece of code that makes the banner appear.
6. Paste the snippet into the head section of your site's code, the hidden top part of every page. It must be the first script there. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and Kajabi each have their own Termly install article, so use it if you build your site on one of them. Your site now loads the banner on every page.
7. Open your website in a private browsing window and do not click the banner. You now see the banner. Then right-click the page, choose "View Page Source" and find a third-party script. If blocking works, it shows type="text/plain" until the visitor agrees.

When this works, your website shows a cookie banner on the first visit, third-party tracking scripts wait until the visitor agrees, and you have a cookie policy to publish. The Free plan also includes 1 basic legal policy.

On Starter ($10/mo billed annually ($14 monthly)): 2 policies. On Pro+ ($15/mo billed annually ($20 monthly)): unlimited policies and banner views, weekly scans, custom banner styling, multi-language and regional consent rules.

Strengths and limitations

The strength is coverage of an unglamorous obligation at a price a small business will actually pay. The script blocker matters more than the documents, because consent that does not gate anything is the most common compliance failure on small sites.

The limitations are the ceiling and the nature of generated documents. A generated policy describes what you told it, so a wrong answer produces a confidently wrong document, and it is not legal advice. Free is capped at 1 policy and 10,000 banner views, and the compliance features that European sites most often need, regional consent rules and multi-language, sit on Pro+.