Best privacy policy generators, and how to judge them
Most roundups rank these tools by price and feature count. Both go stale within a quarter. The criteria below are the ones that still matter a year after you choose, and they separate the options far more sharply than pricing does.
Facts checked August 21, 2026. Vendor pricing changes often, so verify before deciding. Sources: Termly pricing, iubenda pricing.
Who each option suits
- If you need cookie consent collection and logging, you need a compliance platform, and that requirement should decide it.
- If you sell to businesses, DPA coverage matters more than price, because procurement will ask for one.
- If you want documents that survive a lapsed subscription, prioritise exportable files over hosted policies.
Five criteria that still matter in a year
Ownership. When you finish, do you have a file, or an account? A downloadable document keeps working regardless of what happens to your subscription. A hosted policy served by script is a dependency, in exchange for automatic updates.
Metering. Does the price move with your traffic? Iubenda bands by pageviews — Essentials covers 25,000 a month, Advanced 50,000, Ultimate 150,000, with overage at €0.05 per 1,000. Termly charges by plan tier instead. One of those grows with you and one does not.
Scope. A privacy policy alone is rarely the whole requirement. Terms of Service, a Cookie Policy and, for B2B, a Data Processing Agreement usually come with it. Tools that generate only a privacy policy leave you assembling the rest elsewhere.
Accuracy controls. How much does the tool ask about what you actually do? A generator that asks four questions cannot produce a document that describes your product, and a policy that misdescribes you is a liability rather than protection.
Consent tooling. If you set non-essential cookies and have EU or UK visitors, you need consent before those scripts fire, plus a record of it. That is a different product category from document generation, and only the platforms address it.
What the free tiers actually give you
"Free" means several different things in this market, and the differences matter more than the word.
Termly’s free plan includes one basic legal policy and 10,000 monthly consent banner views, with HTML embeddable policies and quarterly cookie scans. One policy is a meaningful constraint if you also need terms and a cookie policy.
Iubenda offers a free tier described as the essentials, with paid plans carrying a 14-day risk-free period. The published pageview allowances attach to the paid bands.
A downloadable kit that is free is free in a third sense: no tier, no metering, no account, and nothing to lapse — but equally nothing that updates itself when the law changes.
Read "free" as a question rather than an answer: free for how many documents, up to what traffic, for how long, and what happens after.
The mistake that costs people the most
Choosing on monthly price when the real variable is scope.
A founder picks the cheapest generator, publishes a privacy policy, and considers the job done. Six months later a customer sends a security questionnaire asking for a signed DPA, and there is no DPA, because the tool never offered one. The deal stalls while they scramble.
The second version of the same mistake is discovering that the cheapest option meters by traffic, at the point where traffic is finally growing — exactly when a surprise bill is least welcome.
Decide what you need first: documents only, or documents plus consent management. Then compare within that category. Comparing a document generator against a consent platform on price is comparing two different products.
How to sanity-check any generated policy
Whatever tool you use, read the output against your real product before publishing. Specifically check that the legal entity name matches your registration, that every third-party service you actually run is disclosed, that any stated retention period is one you actually implement, and that contact addresses in the document are inboxes somebody monitors.
That last one catches more people than it should. A privacy policy naming privacy@yourcompany.com is only useful if that address exists and someone reads it, because it is where data subject requests will arrive.
A generated document is a draft until you have reconciled it against reality. The tool cannot do that step for you.