The scanner-first Termly alternative

Termly grew up solving a US problem well: give a small business the documents and notices it needs to look compliant without spending thousands on lawyers. That heritage shows in the model. CCPA and most US state laws follow a notice-and-opt-out logic: tell people what you collect, give them a way to opt out of sale or sharing. The EU works the other way. ePrivacy Article 5(3) requires prior, opt-in consent before any non-essential cookie or tracker touches the user's device. Notice after the fact is not enough; the tracker must not fire until the user agrees.

That gap is not academic. On 1 September 2025 the CNIL fined Shein €150M and Google €325M on the same day, both for cookie failures rooted in consent that came too late or was not valid. A US-style generator can produce a beautiful cookie policy and a working banner, and you can still be non-compliant if scripts fire before the user clicks accept. The document describes the intended state; it does not prove the actual state.

CookieSentry exists to close that distance. It does not write a policy and assume the banner works. It measures what your live page actually does before consent, then generates documents that reflect the national rule that applies, so the paperwork and the behaviour line up.

Termly bundles three things: generated documents, a cookie scanner, and a banner. The scanner's job inside that bundle is to feed the banner, categorising cookies so the consent UI knows what to gate. That is useful, but it is the same vendor checking its own work, and it inventories cookies rather than proving the order of events. The compliance question an EU regulator asks is narrower and harder: at the moment a fresh visitor lands and does nothing, what already fired?

CookieSentry answers only that question, and answers it independently. It loads the URL with no consent given and captures every cookie and tracker that appears anyway, names the third party behind each one, and writes it into a report and a PDF. If your Termly banner is configured correctly, the report confirms it and you have evidence. If a tag manager or an embedded script is leaking before consent, the report catches it before a DPA does. Keeping the auditor separate from the banner vendor is the point.

Switching to CookieSentry does not mean ripping out your consent setup. CookieSentry has no banner to install and never will, so there is no consent script to swap. If you run Termly's banner, keep it; if you run your own, keep that. CookieSentry sits alongside as the layer that proves what fires before consent and generates and maintains your GDPR documents against the national overlays that apply to your EU traffic.

Where teams do consolidate is the audit half. If you adopted Termly partly for its cookie scanner and policy output, CookieSentry can take over that role with EU-specific depth: a real pre-consent test instead of an inventory, and documents tuned to section 25 TDDDG, Poland, Denmark, Sweden and pan-EU ePrivacy rather than a global template. Pricing is flat and predictable and does not scale by the number of subpages, so the cost of running the audit layer does not climb as your site grows.