Compare
Compare Client-Side Security for PCI Compliance
When comparing security solutions, look past promises and assess how their capabilities handle modern client-side attacks and fit real business operations. See our comprehensive solutions.
When comparing security solutions, look past promises and assess how their capabilities handle modern client-side attacks and fit real business operations. See our comprehensive solutions.
Ask how it handles attacks as they really happen. Can it spot new threats the moment they land, understand the payload of the script, and follow its behavior as it changes with the user or the time of day?
Can they show exactly what each third-party script collects and still detect a malicious payload that fires for only 1 in 1,000 visitors, or just 5% of users after 5 p.m.?
Does it remember every action for forensics later, guard live sessions where customers type passwords and card numbers?
Will it catch sneaky DOM tricks, watch exactly the code your visitors run, and use AI to deobfuscate code in real time or will they just use threat feeds where malicious JavaScript can stay undetected for months and years?
If the answer to any of these is no, your security team will be left guessing, let alone prevent a client-side attack from happening. Looking at each of these capabilities up front is the quickest way to know whether a product will protect your customers and your bottom line. Explore our e-commerce and payments industry solutions.
We know that there is a lot of marketing content out there, but the proof is in the pudding. You should always write a malicious script yourself to see whether the solution catches it. Learn about common attack types like Magecart attacks and data leaks. If you need us to, we can share one with you too. We'd like for you to use a solution that actually works.
In the scope of PCI, some solutions may have some of the required data scattered around their dashboard. To prevent you from having to keep track of script justifications in a spreadsheet you may want to consider the UI in relation to the PCI requirements.
| Criteria | Why it Matters | What the Consequences Are | CSP | Crawler | JS-Based | Hybrid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time Protection | Attacks can occur between scans or in the excluded data when sampled | Delayed detection = active data breaches | | | | |
| Full Payload Analysis | Ensures deep visibility into malicious behaviors within script code itself | Threats go unnoticed unless the source is known on a threat feed | | | | |
| Dynamic Threat Detection | Needed for incident response, auditing, and compliance | Avoids trade-offs between performance and security | | | | |
| 100% Historical Tracking & Forensics | Needed for incident response, auditing, and compliance | Avoids trade-offs between performance and security | | | | |
| No Performance Impact | Avoids trade-offs between performance and security | Higher page load times can reduce conversions and hurt UX | | | | |
| Bypass Protection | Stops attackers from circumventing controls via DOM obfuscation or evasion | Stealthy threats continue undetected | | | | |
| Certainty the Script Seen by User is Monitored | Aligns analysis with what actually executes in the browser | Gaps between what's reviewed and what's actually executed | | | | |
| AI-driven Script Analysis | Detects novel or evolving threats through behavior modeling | Reliance on manual updates, threat feeds or rules = slow and error-prone detection | | | | |
| Implementation Complexity & Timeline | Impacts time-to-value and internal resource costs | Long deployment timelines reduce agility | high | medium | medium | low |
| Can meet 11.6.1 requirement | 11.6.1 relates to monitoring changes in the security headers as well as the script contents themself | Not monitoring security headers violates 11.6.1—missing or altered headers signal potential attacks | | | | |
| |  cside |  Cloudflare Page Shield |  Report URI |  Akamai Page Integrity Manager |  Imperva Client-Side Protection |  Jscrambler |  Feroot |  Human Security |  Source Defense |  Reflectiz |  DataDome |  DomDog |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Criteria | ||||||||||||
| Approaches used | Proxy & Agent Detection + Crawler + Free CSP Endpoint | CSP + fetching script after | CSP + a script to check security headers | JS-Based Detection | CSP | JS-Based Detection | JS-Based Detection | JS-Based Detection | Crawler + JS Based Detection | Crawler | CSP | JS-Based Detection |
| Real-time Protection | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Full Payload Analysis | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Dynamic Threat Detection | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| DOM-Level Threat Detection | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| 100% Historical Tracking & Forensics | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Bypass Protection | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Certainty the Script Seen by User is Monitored | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| AI-driven Script Analysis | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| QSA validated PCI dash | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| SOC 2 Type II | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| PCI specific UI | | | | | | | | | | | | |
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
No, cside is a hybrid proxy.
We proxy 3rd party scripts except some (Stripe, Paypal, Intercom, Google Pay) and give you the ability to adjust our solution to not proxy specific trusted scripts. This allows you to have new or lesser trusted scripts be proxied, we still analyse them the same we do for first party scripts, but cside is not in the middle.
By design the cside edge has a 99,99% uptime SLA and if there is a failure, we fail open allowing scripts to be fetched directly from the 3rd party. Therefore there should be no impact to your uptime ever.
First party scripts are uploaded to us for analysis, allowing full visibility. The cside product is highly customizable and based on the customers needs we adjust our solution to match.
CSP products let you list "good" domains and tell the browser to block everything else. That stops obvious out-of-scope hosts and ticks PCI 6.4.3, but it never looks at the JavaScript itself.
If an attacker slips bad code onto an approved CDN CSP would not catch it. cside works the other way around: every third-party script is fetched (but this can be customized) through our edge, hashed, scanned, and either served clean or blocked before the browser sees it. Because we keep the full payload and header record, we also cover PCI 11.6.1 without any manual lists to maintain.
Agent-based 'Trap' systems inject decoy objects or DOM hooks into the page and hope malicious code will interact with them; if the trap fires, the tool sends an alert from the browser. Attackers can simply ignore or delete those decoys, or block the callback endpoint, so sophisticated skimmers slip through. Detection also happens after the script has already reached the client, leaving no immutable copy for forensics if the beacon never fires.
In contrast, cside's proxy prevents the bad payload from reaching the browser in the first place: every script is fetched, hashed, scanned by static rules and an on-prem LLM, and either served clean or blocked. Because we capture and archive the exact bytes that were attempted, auditors and incident-response teams get a complete, replay-ready record far more useful than a "trap triggered" log entry. Because traps are so easy to bypass, we saw them miss more than 300 000 compromised sites in Q1 2025 alone, one of the findings that pushed us to build cside in the first place. Cside, on top of the async detections in our proxy service also does client-side detections in the browser as part of its agent; however, this is just one layer in the system.
Note: If you can't proxy a particular script or page, cside can fall back to a non-proxy (or hybrid-proxy) mode, or if you prefer specific scripts not to be proxied you can also define them as unproxied. In that setting we let the browser fetch the script, then immediately upload the full payload to the platform for analysis and long-term storage. You still gain far more visibility than a trap-based agent because we capture and archive the actual code, not just a beacon that may or may not fire while keeping the option to switch any script back to true inline blocking whenever you're ready.
External crawlers visit your site from a data-centre IP once in a while and record what they see. They're fine for a basic inventory but blind to anything time-gated, geo-targeted, or shown to just a slice of users. Attackers can even detect the crawler and serve it a clean version. Because cside's proxy handles every real visitor request, those edge-case payloads show up the moment they're delivered, and we can block them instantly. A scheduled crawler still runs in the background to pick up dormant scripts, but real-time defence happens inline. Learn more about script injection protection.
Note: We offer a crawler-based service for teams with limited engineering resources and, unlike other crawlers, it re-uses live attack intel from our proxy fleet rather than third-party threat feeds like VirusTotal or RiskIQ. Customers can upload LocalStorage, SessionStorage and cookies so we can reach the payment page.
cside sits in the path of every third-party request, fetches the actual JavaScript, and inspects it in real time. So malicious code is blocked before the browser can execute a single line. Because we keep the full payload, not just a hash or domain name, you get a byte-perfect copy of what each user was served: rock-solid evidence for audits and a "replay" record for forensics.
Static scripts are cached at our edge and usually load faster than origin; dynamic calls add only 8-20 ms—well under a human blink. This design lets you shut down threats instantly, maintain complete visibility into what visitors really see, and watch every change over time to spot patterns or emerging risks. And because the platform is truly hybrid, you decide on a script-by-script basis which calls run through the proxy and which do not; any script you leave un-proxied is still captured and uploaded right after it's served, and analysed and logged for the same forensic trail.
