GDPR cookie consent banner • Top 3 compliance solutions

 

By Konbi, August 13th, 2018

The General Data Protection Regulation law (GDPR), passed by the European Union in 2016 and now in force since 25 May 2018, is changing the way companies must present personal data to their website visitors and in particular their policy regarding cookies.

For the Internet user, it is question to have an increased visibility of the way his personal data are used, but also to have the opportunity to ask the visited website to modify or delete his stored personal information.

What's the use of cookies?

Cookies, stored in the web browser of the user, have many uses. If cookies can be used to follow the path of a user to offer targeted advertising corresponding to the visits he makes to different websites (eg Google Adsense, the first ad network on the Internet), they are also essential the collection of information related to the traffic of a website (eg Google Analytics) but also when the website visited has features requiring identification of the user (train or plane ticket booking, e-commerce purchase etc ...).

What does a company need to do to comply with the GDPR law?

For a European company* that wants to comply with the GDPR law, several actions should be considered in order to comply with the European Data Protection Act:

  • The creation of a EU banner cookie, which must now allow an effective blocking of the cookies used by the website visited, if the user expresses the wish via a dedicated cookie consent banner,

  • Updating the Terms of Use of the company's website in order to complete it with a cookie policy that exhaustively lists the cookies used, the way cookies are used and solutions for the user allowing him to easily control his personal information (modification, deletion),

  • The implementation of a methodology and the creation of a platform dedicated to the centralization of the personal data of visitors / consumers of the company's websites.

* The GDPR law actually concerns any company or organization whose visitors on the web are European citizens, that is to say the vast majority of companies in the world today

What are the best cookie banner solutions in 2018 and 2019?

Konbi manages many websites for its clients, in addition to its own websites. So for several months we have been looking for what could be the simplest and the best solutions to implement, for a type of service that if it brings a welcome transparency to the user is first seen as a constraint by many companies.

Several factors must be taken into account before setting up the most appropriate cookie banner for your activity:

  • The price

  • The simplicity of implementation

  • The aesthetic and non-invasive dimension for your website

  • An open source or proprietary solution

  • The quality of customer service

  • Localization (support for multiple languages)

Top 3 GDPR cookie banner solutions

If there are currently a number of solutions offering a cookie banner generator, in our opinion, here are the 3 best cookie consent banner services currently available on the market:

CookieSecure has recently arrived (summer 2018) in the service market offering GDPR solutions and cookie consent banners. CookieSecure offers a complete and flexible service for a very reasonable price range. From our experience, CookieSecure is the professional in the field of data protection in accordance with the GDPR law that best meets the needs of VSEs and SMEs who wish to comply with the law GDPR or adopt a more flexible and effective solution than that they currently use.

Here are the reasons why we now offer our customers** to integrate the CookieSecure solution:

  • Price: with an entry-level service (Starter plan) at 9 € per month for a domain, CookieSecure is very attractive, especially since the offer includes free installation for customers who wish. The CookieSecure Partner plan offers support for 8 different domains, making it an attractive offering for companies managing a fleet of multiple websites or for webmasters who manage multiple sites for their customers,

  • Implementation: The CookieSecure administration interface is very easy to use, and it includes extremely useful tools, such as the creation of a Terms of Use according to the specificities of the company's activity, generated from a simple questionnaire,

  • Design: CookieSecure offers a default cookie banner with a streamlined design, ideally positioned (at the bottom of the screen) and whose features incorporate the GDPR compliance requirements. The customer also has the opportunity to customize the design of the EU cookies banner in the colors of his blog or company, through the CookieSecure administration tool, which is done in a simple and direct way, with a preview available at all times,

  • Is it open source? CookieSecure is not an open-source service, which for this type of tool seems rather a guarantee in terms of security,

  • Customer service: CookieSecure's customer service is very fast (less than 24 hours) and efficient,

  • Multilingual: CookieSecure allows you to customize the text of your cookie banner to take into account the 24 official languages f the European Union. You also have the option of not displaying a cookie banner for those of your users who are outside the EU.

Main asset: Complete, simple, aesthetic and free installation support if desired. CookieSecure is also the only player on the market to offer a complete and advanced service, well beyond a simple html / javascript cookie banner, including a global GDPR support. One of the features we prefer: you answer a questionnaire about your website and the use that you make (or not) of the personal data of your visitors, then Cookie Secure automatically generates examples of a complete and personalized text for your General Terms and Conditions: Terms of Use, Cookie Policy and Terms of Sale.
Main weakness: Newcomer on the market (July - August 2018)
Rating: 9/10

Cookiebot is one of the first to have positioned itself in the GDPR solutions market. Konbi has been using it since June 2017 for one of its websites whose very important traffic requires special support.

  • Price: in addition to an offer at 9 € per month per domain, adapted to websites with little traffic and few pages, you should know that Cookiebot takes into account the amount of bandwidth consumed in the calculation of the amount of your monthly subscription, which does not allow to anticipate the cost of the service, which is variable depending on your traffic. You choose an offer by domain, there is currently no shared offer for several domains, which would be very useful.

  • Implementation: The administration interface of Cookiebot has for the moment less evolved than the public version of their website, which gained clarity. Cookiebot still has some progress to make to simplify and make more comprehensible their administration tool, whose available features are still limited and have not changed for more than a year since we started using their service,

  • Design: Cookiebot has the merit of proposing many customizable cookie banner templates. However, most of them take up too much space on the screen and especially include an aesthetic but counterproductive animatics, which consume resources for the browser at the expense of the display of your content,

  • Is it open source? Cookiebot is not an open-source service,

  • Customer service: Cookiebot customer service is fast (24 to 48 hours) and seems efficient from the experience we’ve had so far,

  • Multilingual: Cookiebot allows you to take into account the 24 official languages f the European Union provided that you do not modify their default GDPR sample text. You also have the option of not displaying a cookie banner for those of your users who are outside the EU.

Main asset: One of the first GDPR services available
Main weakness: Few enhancements or new features so far, poor user experience concerning their customer’s managing tool. Finally, you need minimum webmastering knowledge to be able to activate your own cookie banner, knowing that no installation support is currently available.
Rating: 7/10

Cookie Consent is a free, open source solution, which potentially involves planning development costs for the company that wants to implement it.

  • Price: Free,

  • Implementation: Cookie Consent requires technical knowledge in Javascript and CSS or to use a developer with the skills to use the tool (see their documentation here: https://cookieconsent.insites.com/documentation/about-cookie-consent/),

  • Design: Cookie Consent is very aesthetic and has many templates. However, given the constraints of the GDPR law, the solutions currently proposed seem a little weak,

  • Open source solution or not? Cookie Consent is an open-source service,

  • Customer service: N.A.

  • Multilingual: For this essential part of a complete GDPR solution, Cookie Consent requires technical knowledge that will incur development costs for the company that chooses their solution.

Main asset: Free, great design and open source
Main weakness: Complex and potentially costly to implement. The website is currently only accessible in English
Rating: 5/10

GDPR cookie consent banners - They can still do better:

  • SquareSpace: Since 2013, Konbi has been using SquareSpace's CMS for its customers and its own websites on a regular basis. However, despite the many strengths of SquareSpace in terms of design, it is clear that in 2018 they are still not up to par on their GDPR cookie banner service. Their offer is minimal, their design does not exist, the position of the banner when it is activated is placed automatically at the top of the screen, which blocks the logo and / or the navigation, they offer a basic text without any associated functionality which would allow their clients to be a minimum in accordance with the GDPR law,

  • WordPress: the most used CMS in the world, several plugins of Wordpress cookies banners exist, most created before the implementation of the law of May 25, 2018. Obviously, they can not answer to all the prerogatives of the European Data Protection Act (GDPR). As often with WordPress, one must consider juggling with the code of one's website to meet all the constraints of the GDPR law, which requires technical skills prerequisites.

It should be remembered that the 3 previously described solutions, CookieSecure, CookieBot and Cookie Consent by Insites can be perfectly implemented on a website hosted on platforms like SquareSpace and WordPress, which avoids having to depend on their integrated solutions, largely insufficient.

** Konbi is a CookieSecure certified partner and also uses CookieBot for it website KarmaWeather.com. However, we has no interest, benefit, nor have we perceived any compensation for their presence in this article.

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