Consent management platforms

A consent management platform handles the collection, storage, and enforcement of user consent on your website. Under GDPR, you need consent before setting non-essential cookies or running tracking scripts. The CMP presents a banner, records the user's choice, and blocks or allows scripts accordingly.

Getting this right matters for two reasons. First, regulators are actively enforcing cookie consent rules — the French CNIL, Irish DPC, and Italian Garante have all issued fines for non-compliant banners. Second, if you run Google Ads or GA4, Google now requires Consent Mode v2 to be implemented for EU traffic, which depends on your CMP passing consent signals correctly.

The guides below cover implementation details that vendor documentation often skips: how to test that scripts actually block before consent, how to handle Consent Mode v2 edge cases, and how to audit your cookie setup after deployment. The vendor profiles provide honest assessments of each platform's strengths and limitations based on our testing.