The scanner-first iubenda alternative

iubenda's core promise is documents plus a banner: lawyer-crafted privacy and cookie policies, a Google-certified CMP, and a scanner that auto-suggests the services to declare. That covers the part of compliance that is about telling users what you do and collecting their choice. What it does not, by design, produce is independent evidence of what your site actually does in the moment before a visitor clicks anything.

This gap matters because enforcement is about behaviour, not documentation. The Italian Garante's updated cookie guidelines, published in June 2021 and enforced from January 2022, restate the ePrivacy Art. 5(3) rule that non-essential cookies may only be set after informed consent. A perfectly drafted iubenda policy and a correctly installed banner can still sit on top of a page that drops analytics or marketing cookies before consent, because of a hardcoded tag, a plugin, or a third party the scanner did not perfectly match.

CookieSentry exists to close exactly that gap. It does not rewrite your policy or replace your banner; it tests the live page and tells you, by name, what fired before consent. Keep iubenda for the documents and the consent UI, and use CookieSentry to confirm the two are actually consistent with each other.

iubenda does include a capable site scanner and prior-blocking, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise. The distinction is purpose and independence. iubenda's scanner is an input to iubenda's own configuration: it identifies services so the cookie policy and the auto-blocking list can be built. The output is a better-configured iubenda banner, which is exactly what it should be.

CookieSentry's scan has a different job. It is an outside check whose output is evidence about your site, decoupled from any banner you happen to run. That separation is the point: when you need to demonstrate compliance to a regulator, an acquirer's due-diligence team, or an agency client, a report from the vendor that configured the banner is weaker than an independent audit that simply observed the page. Running CookieSentry alongside iubenda gives you both the configured banner and the third-party proof that it holds.

The migration story here is not a swap. If iubenda's banner and TCF support are working for you, keep them; CookieSentry has no banner to put in their place and does not implement TCF. What you add is the audit-and-evidence layer plus national-overlay GDPR documents. Start with the free public scan, which needs no signup, to see what fires before consent on your most important pages.

If your team was leaning on iubenda mainly for its cookie scanning and audit reporting, that is the half CookieSentry can take over, with named pre-consent results, an exportable PDF, monitoring on paid tiers, and a public badge or landing page. iubenda continues to do what it does best, the consent UI and the document subscription, while CookieSentry provides the proof and the localized paperwork. Pricing is flat and predictable and does not climb with your page-view count, which is a different model from iubenda's per-site, per-page-view structure.