Comparison guides
Compare SaaS legal templates, privacy policy generators, and lawyer options
Practical buying guides for founders deciding between free templates, paid generators, compliance platforms, Simple Legal Pages, and hiring a lawyer.
Featured comparison
Termly vs Iubenda
Termly and Iubenda compared on pricing model, pageview metering, hosted versus downloadable policies, and what happens to your legal pages if you stop paying.
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Comparison guide
Privacy policy template vs hiring a lawyer
When a template privacy policy is genuinely enough for a SaaS product, when you need a lawyer instead, and the specific signals that should send you to one.
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Comparison guide
Best privacy policy generators, and how to judge them
How to evaluate privacy policy generators on the criteria that matter — ownership, metering, DPA coverage and accuracy — rather than on which one is cheapest this month.
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Comparison guide
Free vs paid privacy policy templates
Free privacy policy templates range from genuinely usable to actively risky. How to tell the difference, what paid actually buys, and when neither is the right answer.
Read comparisonHow to choose between templates, generators, platforms, and a lawyer
Most founders searching for a privacy policy are really asking a narrower question: what is the cheapest thing that will not embarrass me later? The honest answer depends on how much personal data you handle and how much money is at stake if you get it wrong. A pre-revenue side project and a Series A company with EU customers are not solving the same problem, even though they both need a document called a privacy policy.
The four routes below cover essentially every option on the market. They differ less in the words that end up in the document and more in what happens afterwards: who keeps it current, whether you can edit it, and whether you keep it if you stop paying.
| Option | Best for | What to watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Free template you copy and edit | Pre-launch side projects with no users and no payment processing yet. | Generic templates often name the wrong legal entity, omit a lawful basis for processing, and are never updated when regulations change. |
| Privacy policy generator | Products that need policies matching how they actually collect data, without paying for ongoing compliance tooling. | Output quality varies a lot. Some generators lock your finished document behind a subscription and stop serving it if you cancel. |
| Full compliance platform | Companies that also need a cookie consent banner, consent logs, and data subject request handling in one place. | You are buying a recurring subscription and hosted script. That is real value if you need consent management, and overkill if you only need documents. |
| Lawyer-drafted documents | Funded companies, regulated industries, unusual data flows, or anything where a mistake is expensive. | Cost and turnaround. A lawyer is the right answer when your situation is genuinely non-standard, not for a typical SaaS at launch. |
Three questions that settle it quickly
Do you have users in the EU or UK? If yes, GDPR applies no matter where your company is registered, and a single EU user is enough. That rules out the thinnest free templates, which usually say nothing about lawful basis, data subject rights, or international transfers.
Do you set non-essential cookies? Analytics and advertising scripts in the EU generally require consent before they load, which is a banner-and-consent-log problem, not a document problem. If that is your situation, a compliance platform earns its subscription. If you only run privacy-friendly or first-party analytics, you may not need one at all.
Do you process data on behalf of business customers? B2B buyers will ask for a Data Processing Agreement during procurement, and a privacy policy alone will not satisfy them. Make sure whichever route you pick actually produces a DPA, because several consumer-focused generators do not.
One thing worth checking first
Before you compare features or price, check whether you can export the finished document and keep it. Some hosted tools serve your policy from their own domain via a script, which means your legal pages disappear from your site if your subscription lapses. Documents you own outright, in an editable format, avoid that failure mode entirely — and they are still yours if you later switch to a lawyer.
These guides are general information for founders comparing options, not legal advice. For anything unusual about your data flows, industry, or jurisdiction, talk to a qualified attorney.