BannerBye

Compare / Consent-O-Matic

BannerBye vs
Consent-O-Matic

One clicks reject after the banner flashes on screen. The other stops it from appearing.

Consent-O-Matic comes out of Aarhus University, built by researchers including Midas Nouwens as part of academic work on consent-management platforms (CMPs). It's fully open source, has around 115,000 users and a 4.3 rating on the Chrome Web Store, and updates its rules through a static JSON list rather than any hidden logic.

It works by recognising the CMP behind a banner and clicking "reject" for you — a real improvement over clicking through banners yourself. But it acts after the banner has already rendered, which is a structurally different moment than where BannerBye operates.

Side by side

BannerBye Consent-O-Matic
How it works Sends a reject signal before the banner renders Detects the CMP and clicks reject after the banner has rendered
Visible flicker None on supported sites Banner briefly appears before being dismissed
Sends GPC signal — not by default
Open source ✓ MIT ✓ fully open
Zero telemetry
Maker Kreatrix B.V., independent product company Aarhus University research team
Platforms Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari (iOS, iPadOS, macOS) Chrome, Firefox, Safari desktop — no mobile version
Rule updates Self-healing — reported sites fixed automatically, usually within hours Static JSON rule list, updated on the maintainers' schedule
Price Free (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) · one-time €1.99 on Safari Free

Based on publicly available extension documentation, source code and Chrome Web Store listings, September 2026.

The honest take

Consent-O-Matic is a genuinely well-built academic tool, and its CMP-recognition logic is the same general idea behind BannerBye's own CMP-specific handlers (both projects independently recognise providers like OneTrust and Didomi and answer their API directly). Where the two diverge is the moment of action: Consent-O-Matic still lets the banner render before it clicks reject, so you see a brief flash — a small thing, but not nothing across dozens of banners a day.

The bigger practical gap is coverage: no GPC signal, no mobile version, and updates that depend on volunteer researcher time rather than a maintained release cycle. That's a reasonable trade-off for an academic project not built to be a consumer product. BannerBye is built specifically to be maintained daily, across every browser people actually use, including the ones Consent-O-Matic doesn't reach.

Questions about this comparison

Does Consent-O-Matic prevent cookie banners from appearing? +

No. It waits for the banner to render, recognises the consent-management platform behind it, and clicks reject on your behalf. The banner is visible for a moment before it disappears.

BannerBye sends a reject signal before the page renders, so on sites where that signal is honoured, the banner never appears at all.

Why doesn't Consent-O-Matic send a GPC signal? +

It's a deliberate choice by the Aarhus University research team, reflecting their focus on consent-management-platform interaction rather than the separate GPC standard.

BannerBye sends both: the GPC header on every request, and an IAB TCF v2.2 reject string for sites using that framework.

Is Consent-O-Matic still maintained? +

It's an open-source academic project, not a commercial product, so updates follow the researchers' availability rather than a fixed release cadence.

BannerBye runs a self-healing pipeline: a broken site gets reported, Anthropic's Claude reviews the proposed fix, and an approved rule ships to every user automatically — typically within hours.