Alternative to Borlabs Cookie for WordPress websites

Real Cookie Banner as alternative to Borlabs Cookie

Real Cookie Banner tries to solve many weaknesses of Borlabs Cookie better. There is a free version of Real Cookie Banner with which you can try out before buying the PRO version, whether you like the cookie banner plugin. Real Cookie Banner does not leave you alone during the setup. In the dashboard you will find a list of all the important steps you should go through, whereas in Borlabs Cookie you have to explore these steps yourself or browse their knowledge base. When it comes to setup, you have more than 150 service templates and 120 content blocker templates at your disposal. With these, you can use a variety of WordPress plugins, embedded content, and external services with a consent without having to do a lot of research. Borlabs Cookie offers around a quarter of the templates, which is why more research work in privacy policies etc. is waiting for you as a website owner.

Did you actually know that according to the ECJ ruling C-673/17 (“Planet49”) you should list all technical cookies with expiration date etc. that a service sets? In Borlabs Cookie there is only one field per service (called “Cookie” there) for this information. In Real Cookie Banner you can enter the technical data in a clearly arranged table. In addition, we have thought ahead for you, and automatically display a notice to presume compliance with Article 8 of the GDPR (consent of children and adolescents), so that this age group does not illegally agree to cookies, etc., to which they cannot agree. If you use services from the USA such as Google Analytics, you should also ensure explicit consent for this after the end of the Privacy Shield by the ECJ. You can activate texts for this in Real Cookie Banner. In Borlabs Cookie you have to do it yourself for both topics (and dig through the laws) because it comes without such texts.

If you want to display your cookie banner on a multilingual website only in countries where you have to obtain consent, you are out of luck with Borlabs Cookie. There is no such feature. Real Cookie Banner, on the other hand, comes with a privacy-friendly locally stored IP-to-country database, which allows you to do exactly that.

You also need an alternative to Borlabs Cookie if you use page builders like Thrive Architect. For example, this page builder includes fonts as inline CSS in the same style block as the subpage’s custom CSS. If you need to block the loading of fonts before a consent, you usually use Borlabs Cookie to block away all other styles in the style block as well. Real Cookie Banner, on the other hand, can block each selector in a CSS block individually and thus avoid too many blocked styles. In addition, the Borlabs Cookie alternative offers you the programmatic blocking of user-defined HTML elements. And when you finally are allowed to play a video after the consent, the user does not have to click on consent and then on play, but the video plays automatically after the consent.

Borlabs Cookie can be fine-granularly customized to your website’s design with 85+ settings. That’s great, but since there’s no live preview of the changes, you’ll have to reload your site and thus the cookie banner after each change to see it in action. Also, there is only one default design and that’s it. So, you have to play designer yourself! Real Cookie Banner as an alternative, on the other hand, not only offers more options, which are displayed in a live preview immediately after customization, but also brings 20+ design presets. There should be the right design approach for every taste without complex configuration!

Professional website operators require consents according to the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF). This standardized form of consent is required by more and more marketers like Google Adsense. If you don’t use TCF, your ad revenue can suffer greatly. Borlabs Cookie does not support this in version 2.2. With Real Cookie Banner, on the other hand, you can optionally make your cookie banner TCF compatible with a variety of features.

Once the cookie banner is set up, half the work is done. Now it’s the website visitor’s turn, and he has to consent on your website. But what if he doubts that he has consented correctly? According to Art. 82 GDPR, there is a burden of proof for the website operator. This practically means that you, as the website operator, must “prove” in case of doubt that your website visitor has consented. Borlabs Cookie stores for this purpose in which services and cookies were consented to, but not which services were available for selection, texts in the cookie banner, its design, etc. Here is a lot of scope that an opposing lawyer can successfully attack you. Real Cookie Banner wanted to create an alternative to this, in our opinion, incomplete documentation. That’s why our solution stores everything – services, texts, design, consent site, etc. – to be able to look back later on what exactly the cookie banner looked like and, in some cases, where consent was clicked. If that doesn’t convince a judge in the case – if you have set everything up correctly – then we don’t know what else to do.

Both Borlabs Cookie and Real Cookie Banner are installed natively in WordPress as a plugin. So, they don’t load a script “from the cloud” to display the cookie banner, but everything is played out directly from your webspace. However, visitors can thereby block Borlabs Cookie quite easily with an adblocker or cookie notice blocker. Real Cookie Banner, on the other hand, has several anti-adblocker mechanisms built in to make it as difficult as possible for such systems to block the cookie banner. After all, we want you to get to your consents!

In case you run a website in multiple languages you can use WPML, Polylang, TranslatePress or Weglot with Real Cookie Banner. For these plugins we offer in-depth integration, so you can manage your services, content blockers and texts as easily as possible. Borlabs Cookie, on the other hand, has explicit support for WPML and Polylang only. And if you use it, not only do you have to re-integrate all services/cookies in each language, but even the design settings with more than 85 options have to be done again for each language, which can take a lot of time.