If you have a website, there are several legal notifications that you need to put on it. These include a cookie consent form and also a Privacy Policy page. Strictly speaking, you only need to state your website’s privacy policy if the site collects data from visitors. Keep in mind that just collecting email addresses from visitors to put into your contact management system for an email campaign makes you eligible for a Privacy Policy page requirement.
If your site is just a blog and doesn’t collect any information from visitors then legally, you don’t need a Privacy Policy page. However, the legal landscape for the World Wide Web is changing all of the time and you can be sure that legislation is not going to loosen. So, it is a good idea to put a Privacy Policy statement on your site while you are developing it to make sure you are covered in case the law suddenly changes.
Here is our list of the seven best privacy policy generators:
- CookieYes Free Privacy Policy Generator EDITOR’S CHOICE An excellent no-pressure free generator for GDPR-compliant privacy policy statements. This online service is produced by a well-regarded cookie consent manager provider.
- TermsFeed An easy-to-use questionnaire-led privacy policy generator that produces tailored statements for GDPR and CCPA compliance. Some options are free.
- Get Terms A privacy policy creator that is available in free and paid versions and is provided online.
- Termly Free Privacy Policy Generator A privacy policy creation system that is intended for small sites with a low visitor count. There is a paid version for larger sites.
- PrivacyPolicies A privacy policy generator that is offered in free and paid versions. Includes notifications for trackers and ads.
- Shopify Free Privacy Policy Generator A free service offered by an eCommerce hosting service.
- Free Privacy Policy A system that offers free and paid privacy policy statements that are hosted by the service and you can also choose to download them and insert them on your sites.
You can read more about each of these options in the following sections.
The Privacy Policy page tells visitors what your company will do with the information they give you. The policy should state the following:
- The creation date of the current version of the privacy policy
- What information the site collects about visitors
- How that information is collected
- The reason for requiring personal information
- How collected personal information is stored and protected
- What your company will do with the collected information
- How visitors will be informed when the privacy policy changes
- Who has access to collected information
The legal requirement for the format of the text in the Privacy Policy page varies from country to country, with the major laws surrounding this requirement being laid down in the EU, in California, and Brazil. Fortunately, the data privacy protection laws in these states are all very similar, so there are services available that can generate Privacy Policy statements to please all requirements.
Rather than studying all of the current laws surrounding this requirement, it is just a lot easier to get the Privacy Policy from someone else. A very simple solution to this task is to just look at a website that is very similar to yours, copy their text, edit it to insert information about your business and website where necessary.
Privacy policy and cookie policy
The Privacy Policy statement on your site is going to be pretty standard. Most of the text is the same for all websites so there isn’t much complexity to getting the right format. As explained above, you could just copy the text from another website. For this reason, you shouldn’t have to pay much for the services of a privacy policy generator – they aren’t very complicated. Cookie policies are a different matter.
A very large proportion of the websites in the world have been generated. If your site is based on WordPress or you created it with Joomla, Drupal, Wix, or any other website generator, your site is going to use cookies. Just because you don’t remember ever being asked about inserting cookie functionality in your site doesn’t mean that the site generator didn’t put them in.
The presence of cookies in your site’s operating processes is a big problem. Because of them, even if your site doesn’t collect any information from users, you will need to get consent for the cookies.
Cookie consent isn’t just a matter of telling people about the cookies your site uses. First of all, you need to find out what cookies are used on your site. The next problem is that visitors have the right to reject some or all of the cookies that your site wants to download onto their computers. This requires an extra cookie blocking mechanism to be built into the code of your site.
Fortunately, many companies offer cookie consent management services. These scan your site for cookies, generate a consent banner, and then optionally block cookies from downloading depending on the response of the site visitor. Cookie consent management is not as straightforward as privacy policy generation and so cookie consent managers are paid products. You can read more about Cookie Consent Tools here at Comparitech.
Privacy Policy statements and cookie consent management are closely linked and so companies that offer cookie consent managers will also provide a Privacy Policy statement. Many cookie consent management providers offer privacy policy generation to non-members for free. This is usually a loss leader and you will soon find that the initial free Privacy Policy isn’t quite good enough and will need extra information added that is only available to paid subscribers. Usually, a subscription upgrade on the Privacy Policy generator will also get you the cookie consent management service, so it is worth paying for.
The best privacy policy generators
The best bet for a good legally tight privacy policy generator is going to come from a cookie consent management provider, either bundled in with the cookie consent manager plan or as a free service provided to attract customers for the paid tool.
What should you look for in a privacy policy generator?
We reviewed the market for privacy policy generators and analyzed the options based on the following criteria:
- A service that can generate statements that cover the requirements of GDPR and CCPA
- The option to get the privacy policy statement in many different languages
- A choice of whether to get the code or have the privacy policy hosted
- Integration with a cookie consent management service
- A notification if laws change and the privacy policy needs to be updated
- A free tool or a service that has a free trial for evaluation
- A good price that offers the privacy policy in with another service, such as a cookie consent manager
Taking these criteria into account we identified some solid options for you to consider.
1. CookieYes Free Privacy Policy Generator
CookieYes is a cookie consent management service that we recommend highly. The company also offers a free privacy policy generator on its website.
This service is suitable for websites that seek data from visitors anywhere in the world except for in California, South Africa, or Brazil because it takes care of the legal requirements of GDPR. Other places in the world don’t have a Privacy Policy statement requirement, except for those locations just listed here.
The good thing about the CookieYes Free Privacy Policy Generator is that it doesn’t exert too much pressure on you to upgrade and pay. This is a contrast to some of the other free services that won’t leave you alone until you go for the paid service.
The CookieYes system generates the text for a Privacy Policy page, it doesn’t create or host that page. This is an advantage because it enables you to walk away with just what you need. If you run your website with a content management system, such as WordPress or Joomla, it is a fairly easy task to create a new page and copy in the text that CookieYes created for you.
As they are nice folks that don’t pressure you into paying, you will probably be willing to also consider their cookie consent management service.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
CookieYes Free Privacy Policy Generator is our top pick for a privacy policy generator because it doesn’t hold on to the page and expect you to link to it from your site. This tool just generates the text of your privacy policy and you can then copy it and paste it into a new page that you generate for your site. This gives you more control over the Privacy Policy page and you can’t be held to ransom by being forced to buy extra services.
Operating system: Cloud-based
2. TermsFeed
TermsFeed is a potentially free privacy policy generator. The system leads the user through a questionnaire about the site and its operations and many of the options that you might select related to paid services.
There is a charge for the privacy policy if you collect social media data, if you use Google Analytics, if you operate an email marketing system, if your site shows ads, if you use targeted marketing, or reCAPTCHA. So, it is possible to get a Privacy Policy generated for free. However, the circumstances in which that could happen would be for a site that doesn’t need a Privacy Policy page.
You can select to integrate wording that is compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and/or CalOPPA. However, all of those options incur a charge. Although you will end up having to pay quite a lot for your final Privacy Policy statement, you could navigate the questionnaire to generate a free version just to get a look at the finished format and see whether you like it. After that, you can decide whether you want to go for the paid version.
3. GetTerms
GetTerms doesn’t lead you down the path of thinking you’re getting a free privacy Policy statement and then hit you with charges right at the end of the process. The company is upfront about charges by presenting you with three options – one is free and the other two are charged for.
The free service is called Basic Policy. This is only suitable for personal websites, which, in truth, probably don’t need a Privacy Policy page for legal purposes. The Standard Pack gives you a customized Privacy Policy page. You also get a Terms of Use page and a Cookie Policy statement. The top plan is the Comprehensive Pack. This declares its compliance with GDPR and CCPA, which implies that standard Pack’s privacy policy isn’t compliant.
So, if you have a commercial website that needs to collect data from visitors, you should go for the Comprehensive Pack and get yourself a cookie policy declaration as well.
4. Termly Free Privacy Policy Generator
Termly offers a privacy policy generator and it also has a free version. As you would expect, the paid version is better than the free version. However, unlike many of the free systems on this list, the Termly service creates a Privacy Policy text that is compliant with both GDPR and CCPA.
The Termly-generated Privacy Policy page is hosted on the Termly server and will be integrated into your site at the time it loads in a browser, so visitors aren’t sent off to another site to read the statement. The free version has the Termly logo on it. Paying customers can copy the page over to their sites. However, the benefit of keeping it hosted by Termly is that the company updates all of its hosted pages whenever legal requirements change.
Both the free and paid versions of Termly are very good and the low price of the paid edition, called Pro+ is very reasonable and well worth the price if you have a commercial website.
5. PrivacyPolicies
The PrivacyPolicies system charges a one-time fee for its paid plan, which is called the Premium plan. This is a good deal because many rival-paid privacy policy generators charge on a subscription. The Privacy Policy system is almost identical to that of TermsFeed – the questionnaire for both is identical.
The free version isn’t written to data protection standards. You have to upgrade to the Premium plan to get GDPR, CCPA, or CalOPPA compliance. Apart from that shortfall, the free version does have many useful attributes. It includes clauses for analytical tools and advertisement notifications. However, the Premium plans cover more tools in each of those categories.
Both the Free and Premium plans provide hosted Privacy Policy pages. Those who pay for the Premium service also get the right to download the test to integrate into their sites. The advantage of leaving the page hosted lies in the automatic updates that PrivacyPolicies applies to those pages when the law changes.
6. Shopify Free Privacy Policy Generator
Shopify is an eCommerce platform that hosts sales websites. The company also offers a free privacy policy generator. This is a teaser offer to get customers for the eCommerce hosting service. However, this is a generous way to go about tempting new customers and it includes the option for a 14-day free trial of the full Shopify service.
This service creates a GDPR-compliant Privacy Policy text. The generator doesn’t operate live on the site. You just give your site’s name plus your name and email address and then Shopify emails you a template. This service doesn’t include a site scanner, so you will have to find some other tool to search through for trackers and ad widgets to declare in your Privacy Policy.
The template will have your site’s name inserted into it but no other specific clauses. Instead, the template includes standard GDPR-compliant text with guidance on how to fill in parts of the template to complete your Privacy Policy statement. This can then be inserted into a new page on your site.
7. Free Privacy Policy
Free Privacy Policy offers free and paid privacy policy statements that are hosted. It is also possible to download a copy of the HTML for the page and insert this into your website. This service is remarkably similar to TermsFeed and PrivacyPolicies.
The privacy policy generator is a questionnaire that leads you through a series of questions to get a free privacy policy and then hits you with a notification that you need to upgrade to the Premium version to get a text that complies with GDPR, CCPA, and/or CalOPPA. The system will also cover notifications about Google Analytics trackers, Mailchimp inserts, and Google Ads widgets in the paid version.
It is a little sneaky of this service to end up only offering a commercially useable privacy policy statement to those who pay, given that it is called “Free Privacy Policy.” However, the system only charges a one-time fee, so you aren’t on the hook for repeat fees. Despite the one-off payment, the service will host your Privacy Policy page and update it whenever law changes occur.
Each service that your website includes, such as GoogleAds tracking, adds a charge to the bill for your privacy policy. The prices are the same as those charged by TermsFeed and PrivacyPolicies.
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