Your business grows. OneTrust’s bill grows with it.
OneTrust
volume-meteredPriced on your audience size Cost is metered on Average Daily Unique Visitors (ADUV) across all your channels and properties. As your traffic grows — or as you consolidate domains after an acquisition — your pricing tier can step up. Overage mechanics documented in their contracts.
Ethyca
flat-rate alwaysPriced on your integration footprint A flat annual fee based on the websites, apps, and backend systems you connect. Traffic spikes, product launches, seasonal surges — none of it changes what you pay. Your cost is tied to scope, not audience.
Significantly lower total cost of ownership Enterprises that have moved from OneTrust to Ethyca report materially lower 3-year costs — with full pricing predictability throughout.
Companies building trust into data with Ethyca
What OneTrust customers say when they're not being asked by OneTrust.
OneTrust holds a 1.7 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot. These are real, unsolicited reviews from their customers. The pattern is consistent: once the contract is signed, the support disappears.
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"The team was very proactive when it came to contract renewal. But once the contract is signed and paid for, you're left alone — even if you can't access the service at all. I've been trying to regain access to my account for over 45 days after a simple domain change. The only consistent response has been redirection, but no actual resolution." ”— OneTrust customer · Capterra verified review · 2024
Ethyca — what support looks like
Direct access to privacy implementation experts
You speak to people who have implemented consent programs in production environments — not a ticket queue or a rotating cast of new contacts.
Decisive answers, fast
Privacy questions are technical. Our team can translate between regulatory requirements and engineering reality — because that's the core of what Ethyca does.
Partner model, not ticket model
Ethyca is built as a technical partner to engineering and legal teams, not a SaaS vendor whose value ends at the contract signature.
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"With Ethyca, 5 minutes chatting with Jason is the equivalent of working with OneTrust for months."”— Data Leader, Major US Publication
OneTrust charges for your audience. Ethyca charges for your footprint.
These aren't just different numbers — they're different philosophies. One ties your compliance costs to the success of your business. The other doesn't.
OneTrust
How it works: Average Daily Unique Visitors, aggregated across all properties
OneTrust CMP is metered on Average Daily Unique Visitors (ADUV) — counted across all your channels (web, mobile, CTV) and all your properties (domains, apps, devices), averaged over up to 365 days. Exceed a usage tier, and you have up to three calendar months to reduce usage or step up to a higher band — or OneTrust may invoice the step-up cost, pro-rated from the start of the grace period. Renewal uplifts of 50%+ have been documented for flat-scope contracts.
→ Traffic growth = cost growth
Ethyca
How it works: A flat license based on the websites and systems you integrate
Ethyca charges a flat annual fee based on the number of websites, apps, and backend systems you connect. There are no visitor counts, no traffic tiers, no overage mechanics. A seasonal spike, a product launch, a press cycle, a post-acquisition domain consolidation — none of it affects what you pay. Pricing stays aligned to your implementation scope, not your audience. M&A activity doesn't create compliance cost surprises.
→ Traffic growth = zero additional cost
Ethyca vs. OneTrust — side by side
A direct comparison across the dimensions that matter most to enterprise privacy and engineering teams.
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The organizations that chose infrastructure over dashboards.
From global media to fintech to e-commerce — enterprises that need privacy to actually work inside their systems, not just reported above them.
Ready when you are.
Built-in OneTrust migration tooling means your users never re-consent, your historical work isn't wasted, and your team doesn't start from zero. Enterprises regularly go live faster than their original OneTrust deployment took to scope.
↳ Step 1 — Map your full digital footprint
Helios automatically discovers and classifies personal data across cloud environments, third-party vendors, and internal systems — no manual inventory spreadsheets, no starting blind.
↳ Step 2 — Migrate consent preferences — zero re-consent
Built-in OneTrust consent migration maps existing categories to Fides privacy notices. User consent preferences travel with them. No new dialogs, no user experience disruption, no lost consent records.
↳ Step 3 — Configure site × region × experience
Consent configuration is organized as a clear grid — each site, each region, each required experience. Legal and engineering teams can both read it, test it, and update it without reverse-engineering a complex tree.
↳ Step 4 — Turn obligations into enforced infrastructure
Fides translates regulatory requirements into machine-readable rules — enforced across your stack automatically. Legal gets verifiable proof. Engineering gets CI/CD-native tools that fit how they already build.
↳ Step 5 — Cancel OneTrust with confidence
With real-time inventory, automated DSR, enforceable consent across your full property footprint, and AI governance running — the dashboard becomes redundant. The infrastructure you actually need is already in place.
Typical enterprise deployment. Large publishers live on 100+ sites in 3 weeks.
Re-consents required from users. OneTrust preferences migrate automatically.
Pricing that doesn't punish you for growing your audience. Ever.
The renewal uplift you avoid negotiating against. Documented in OneTrust contracts.
Common questions
The questions that come up most often when teams are evaluating whether to move.
Now. The evaluation, scoping, and migration timeline for most enterprises runs 4–12 weeks. Starting that process 6 months before your renewal gives you the leverage to walk away — or negotiate from strength. Teams that wait until 30 days out rarely get the outcome they want from either vendor.
OneTrust provides workflows, dashboards, and reports that help you manage and demonstrate compliance. That's genuinely useful. But it sits on top of your systems, not inside them. Ethyca's Fides taxonomy makes legal obligations machine-readable and enforces them automatically, across every system, without manual review. The difference becomes concrete when a regulator asks "can you prove this rule was applied?" — with a dashboard, you show a screenshot; with infrastructure, you show a log.
No — and this is a misconception we actively address. Ethyca is built for the privacy leader who understands that the problem they're solving is inherently technical, and wants to equip their engineers with the right tools. The Fides taxonomy is readable by both sides: legal teams define obligations in plain terms, engineering teams implement them as code. The goal is to eliminate the translation failure between the two teams — not to favor one over the other.
Ethyca has a built-in OneTrust consent migration pathway. Your existing user preferences are mapped from OneTrust categories to Fides privacy notices automatically. Existing users do not see a new consent dialog — their preferences travel with them. This is a genuine technical migration, not a "start fresh and re-collect" approach.
Yes. Ethyca serves The New York Times (10M+ subscribers across 200 countries), WeTransfer (80M+ monthly users), American City Business Journals (40+ semi-autonomous editorial properties), and Vercel (infrastructure for millions of developers and Fortune 100 clients). Complex multi-property, multi-region environments are exactly what the platform is designed for — and a complex footprint doesn't increase your cost, because Ethyca prices on properties integrated, not visitors counted.
Because legal obligations are represented in the Fides taxonomy as machine-readable rules, new regulations are additive updates — not new modules to license. Enterprises using Ethyca maintain a regulatory readiness view that tells them exactly what's live, what falls back, and what needs to change when a new state law passes — without re-learning the deployment or negotiating a new commercial scope.