Skip to content

Cookie Consent Tools · Editorial review

CookieConsent review: a free banner, bring your own backend

cookieconsent.orestbida.com

CookieConsent is a free, MIT-licensed JavaScript consent banner by independent developer Orest Bida, published on npm as vanilla-cookieconsent. Its 10 KB gzipped script holds back tagged scripts until the visitor agrees and supports opt-in and opt-out modes. Translations, consent records and country detection are left to you.

JavaScript libraryPrior script blockingGoogle Consent ModeOpen-source licenceNo external account

Our verdict on CookieConsent

CookieConsent is a good fit for a developer-run adult site that knows every tag it loads and wants a light banner with no account or fee. It is a poor fit for anyone who expects the tool to find trackers, keep proof of consent or switch between US and EU rules on its own.

Adult ad networks do not rely on IAB TCF, so its absence matters less for a tube paid by ExoClick or TrafficStars than for a site running Google ad products.

CookieConsent v3 documentation home page on a dark background, with a Get Started button and four boxes: Lightweight, Versatile, Accessible, GDPR and CCPA Compliant
CookieConsent

Is CookieConsent enough for GDPR and CCPA?

It covers the banner and prior blocking, and nothing around them. Orest Bida lists the gaps himself: CookieConsent needs basic JavaScript, ships no default categories or translations, is not a CMP, stores no consent records and does not implement IAB TCF. Google AdSense, Ad Manager and AdMob stopped working with it in January 2024.

Proof of consent is your job. The library keeps the choice in a browser cookie with a consent ID, valid 182 days by default. To log it, you post that ID and the accepted categories to an endpoint you build and store yourself. Accept and Reject buttons carry equal weight by default.

Opt-out for US visitors needs your own country check

CookieConsent runs in opt-in mode by default and can switch to opt-out, where enabled categories run until the visitor objects, as CCPA-style rules allow. It does not detect the visitor’s country. The documentation’s example passes a country code that your server or CDN must supply, then picks the mode. A site behind Cloudflare can read the country header and feed it in.

Holding back ExoClick or TrafficStars tags

A script is blocked when its tag is set to type="text/plain" with a data-category attribute, then runs once that category is accepted. Adult network tags go under marketing by hand, and an untagged script runs as usual. Iframes need the author’s separate iframemanager library, and Google Consent Mode v2 is wired through a gtag example in the docs.

Which CookieConsent is this?

This review covers Orest Bida’s library: npm package vanilla-cookieconsent, 5,600+ GitHub stars and more than 530,000 npm downloads in the last week of September 2026. Version 3.1.0 is from February 2025, with fixes merged in May 2026 but not released. Osano’s older cookieconsent has not shipped a release since 3.1.1 in 2019. Two products share the name and appear in search results for it: cookieconsent.com, a free banner generator from TermsFeed, and CookieConsent by AWORK One, a paid consent platform listed on Software Advice. Neither is related to this library.

CookieConsent strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • 10 KB gzipped, no dependency.
  • Opt-in and opt-out modes.
  • Free under MIT, no account.

Limitations

  • No consent records or country detection.
  • No translations or default categories.
  • No scanner and no IAB TCF.
  • No release since February 2025.

CookieConsent or c15t

c15t brings what CookieConsent leaves out: a consent backend, region rules and network request blocking, but its ready banner needs React or Next.js. CookieConsent drops into any site with a script tag. A PHP tube stays with CookieConsent, and a Next.js site that needs consent records moves to c15t.

Klaro!

Klaro! is a consent manager from KIProtect GmbH in Berlin whose banner is open source under the BSD 3-Clause license.

Read the review Klaro! →tarteaucitron.js

tarteaucitron.js is an open-source consent manager under the MIT license, built in France by Amauri Champeaux since 2014.

Read the review tarteaucitron.js →Silktide Consent Manager

Silktide Consent Manager is a free, MIT-licensed cookie banner from Silktide, the web governance company with offices in Austin and Birmingham.

Read the review Silktide Consent Manager →Complianz

Complianz is a WordPress cookie consent plugin with more than a million active installs, published by Complianz B.V. in the Netherlands, part of the iubenda group.

Read the review Complianz →
Sources