DPDP Comply vs CookieYes — Cookie Consent Is Not DPDP Compliance
CookieYes is one of the better-known consent tools in this space, and unlike most of its competitors it was built in India. If you are comparing it with DPDP Comply, the honest framing is not "Indian versus foreign" — it is scope.
CookieYes does cookie consent, and does it well. The DPDP Act asks for considerably more than cookie consent. This comparison is about which parts of the Act a banner reaches, and which parts it cannot.
Overview
CookieYes
CookieYes is a cookie consent management platform: a scanner that finds cookies and trackers on your site, a customisable banner, category-based consent, script blocking, and consent logging. It supports the major global frameworks and integrates with Google Consent Mode. For the specific job of "do not fire trackers before a visitor agrees", it is a mature product.
DPDP Comply
DPDP Comply is built around the obligations in India's DPDP Act 2023 rather than around the banner. Consent capture is one module. The others exist because the Act asks for them: rights request handling, a published grievance route, notice management, verifiable parental consent, and an audit trail you can hand to a regulator.
Where the two overlap
For cookie consent specifically, the feature lists converge. Both give you a scanner, a categorised banner, script blocking before consent, granular purposes, and Google Consent Mode v2 support. If your entire compliance question is "does my site drop analytics cookies before the visitor clicks accept", either tool answers it.
That overlap is real, and worth saying plainly rather than pretending otherwise.
Where a cookie tool stops
The DPDP Act's obligations are not primarily about cookies. The parts a consent banner does not reach:
Data principal rights (Sections 11 to 14). A person can ask what you hold about them (S.11), have it corrected or erased (S.12), raise a grievance (S.13), or nominate someone to act for them (S.14). That is an intake route, an identity check, a workflow, a record of what you did, and a way to prove it later. A cookie banner has no view of any of it.
A published grievance route (Section 13). You have to publish where people go when you have not dealt with them properly, and you have to actually answer. This is a page, an inbox, and an owner — not a banner setting.
Notice (Section 5). The notice that has to accompany consent is a document with specific contents, in a language the person can read. Our multilingual consent page covers what that means in practice for Indian sites serving more than one language.
Children's data (Section 9). Processing a child's data needs verifiable parental consent, and behavioural advertising to children is off the table. See verifiable parental consent under Section 9.
Breach notification (Section 8(6)). You must notify the Board and affected people. That needs an incident record, not a consent log.
Cross-border transfer (Section 16). The Act works on a negative-list basis — transfer is permitted except to countries the government restricts. Knowing where your processors sit is a data-mapping question. See cross-border transfer.
None of this is a criticism of CookieYes. It is a cookie consent tool and does not claim to be a rights management platform. The mistake is on the buyer's side — treating a banner as the whole of DPDP compliance because it is the most visible part.
The consent record itself
One difference that matters even inside the overlap: what a consent record has to prove.
Under the Act, consent must be free, specific, informed, unconditional and unambiguous, tied to a notice, and as easy to withdraw as it was to give. If a regulator asks about a specific person on a specific date, you need to show which notice version they saw, which purposes they agreed to, and what happened when they changed their mind.
DPDP Comply stores consent against the notice version in force at the time, with an append-only audit event for every change, and issues a verifiable receipt. Cookie consent logs are generally designed to answer "did they accept", which is a narrower question than "prove what they agreed to and to what".
The cost of compliance, not the cost of the tool
We have deliberately not put competitor pricing in this post — it changes, and a stale number is worse than none. The comparison worth making is total cost.
If a cookie tool covers consent and you then need rights request handling, grievance logging, notice versioning and breach records, you are buying or building three or four more things and reconciling them at audit time. Our pricing is public, including a free tier that covers the banner and basic rights handling, so you can work out the total yourself.
Who should choose what
Choose CookieYes if
- Cookie consent genuinely is your whole requirement
- Your main frameworks are GDPR and CCPA, with DPDP secondary
- You already have rights request handling elsewhere
- You want the narrowest, most focused tool for the banner alone
Choose DPDP Comply if
- You need the obligations around the banner as well as the banner
- Rights requests need to be received, tracked and evidenced
- You need a grievance route you can publish and defend
- You process children's data and need verifiable parental consent
- You want one audit trail rather than four systems to reconcile
The bottom line
CookieYes is good at what it does, and "Indian-built" is not the differentiator some comparisons pretend it is — they got there first on that. The difference is scope. If you are solving cookies, it solves cookies. If you are solving the DPDP Act, cookies are one of about seven things on the list.
The quickest way to find out where you actually stand is to look at your own site: our free readiness check loads it as a visitor from India and reports what it finds, including whether it can locate a rights route and a grievance contact. No signup, and it will tell you plainly when it could not check something rather than counting it against you.