Akamai Page Integrity Manager vs cside

This article takes an honest look at the features of Akamai Page Integrity Manager. Since you're on the cside website, we acknowledge our bias. That said, we've built our case honestly and based our analysis on publicly available information, industry information, and our own or our customers' experiences.

Apr 28, 2024 • Updated Jul 19, 2026

Simon Wijckmans Founder & CEO

TL;DR: cside vs Akamai Page Integrity Manager

Page Integrity Manager applies behavioral monitoring to third-party scripts inside Akamai's CDN. Requires an Akamai CDN contract, no public pricing.
cside runs on any CDN, in 100% of real user sessions with no sampling, and produces QSA-grade evidence for PCI DSS 4.0.1 requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1. Every script is downloaded to cside's own infrastructure for server-side analysis, and the raw attack code is archived. Free tier available.
Already deep in Akamai and want the native add-on: Akamai. Want CDN-agnostic deployment, full session coverage, and QSA-grade payload evidence without the enterprise minimum: cside.

What is Akamai Page Integrity Manager?

Akamai Page Integrity Manager solely competes with cside's Client-side security solution and PCI Shield. Other services like VPN detection, AI agent detection and Privacy Watch are not in their scope.

Akamai Page Integrity Manager is a client-side security solution that monitors and analyzes JavaScript running in users' browsers to detect malicious activity, like digital skimming, formjacking, and Magecart-style attacks. It focuses on identifying suspicious behavior from third-party scripts and alerting when potentially harmful actions are found.

Is it a good idea to buy a client-side security solution from a firewall vendor?

Large security vendors sometimes have a stab at shipping a quick side product. They do this as they know that their buyers are bought into their platform. The easy choice is to simply buy their solution. However, many users notice quickly that these products did not get the attention they needed and often simply do not work or address the requirements. Browsers as an attack surface are totally different from looking at a network packet as firewall.

How Akamai Page Integrity Manager works

Akamai's Page Integrity Manager is mainly able to list, allow, and block scripts based on previous intel and known issues. They offer great visibility of the script sources, but no insight into the actual payload of a script. This means they can't block scripts in real-time, before needing confirmation after alerting you.

Akamai Page Integrity Manager injects a JavaScript file into the of a website, which runs in the user's browser during live sessions. The script monitors the execution of all other scripts on the page.

Users need to set up a policy management system that allows them to allowlist or block specific scripts or domains. This is combined with a threat feed to check which sources are deemed safe and malicious.

This is a reactive solution. Akamai Page Integrity Manager can not actively block malicious scripts before they execute. Blocking relies on predefined allow/block policies or manual response after detection, meaning new attacks need to be found, understood, and adjusted for so they can be properly detected and blocked next time.

How cside goes further

Akamai's Page Integrity Manager runs JavaScript agents inside the browser. Every attacker who visits your site can see that code, study it, and reverse-engineer the detection logic. cside runs a first-party script in the page too, like any product that observes the session, and ships anti-tamper protection to make those detections harder to manipulate. What an attacker cannot quietly rewrite is the evidence: every behavior cside records is keyed to a content hash of the script that ran, and cside holds its own server-side fetched copy of that script to diff against, so a payload that behaves differently when it is watched still leaves a hash and a version diff.

This isn't theoretical. Attackers routinely inspect in-browser monitoring code and design their payloads to avoid triggering alerts. A large part of cside's analysis does not run in the browser at all: our detection engine downloads each script server-side and analyzes the payload there, against the archived copy.

Akamai detects and alerts after a script has already been delivered. cside enforces blocks at runtime in the browser, alongside CSP, so a script or a specific capability you have not authorized is stopped in the session rather than only reported afterwards. Business plans also include script rollbacks.

Akamai also requires you to be an Akamai CDN customer. cside works with any infrastructure. Add one script, and you're protected. No CDN lock-in, no minimum contract. Pricing starts at $99/month with a 14-day free trial.

For compliance, cside archives each script payload it observes and keeps a per-script revision timeline, covering both PCI DSS 4.0.1 requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1. Retention is tiered by plan. Akamai's behavioral alerts don't produce the kind of evidence QSA auditors expect during assessments.

Try cside before you buy. cside has a free plan, so you can sign up, deploy, and explore the platform yourself, with no sales calls or procurement process. And our support team is one message away whenever you need a hand.

Akamai PIM alternatives: how cside compares

Akamai Page Integrity Manager (Akamai PIM) is a client-side security add-on that runs a JavaScript agent in the browser and requires an Akamai CDN contract. If you are looking for an Akamai PIM alternative, cside is CDN-agnostic: it works on any infrastructure, runs in 100% of real user sessions with no sampling, downloads every script to its own infrastructure for server-side analysis, and archives the raw payload as QSA-grade evidence for PCI DSS 4.0.1 requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1. Pricing starts at $99/month with a free tier, with no CDN lock-in or enterprise minimum. Choose Akamai PIM if you are already committed to Akamai's CDN and want the native add-on; choose cside for CDN-agnostic deployment, full session coverage, and payload-level evidence.

Related resources

Founder & CEO Simon Wijckmans

Founder and CEO of cside. Previously a product manager on Cloudflare Page Shield (now Cloudflare Client-Side Security). Co-chair of the W3C Anti-Fraud Community Group and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. Building accessible security against client-side attacks, web security is not an enterprise-only problem.

Don't just take our word for it, ask AI

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Akamai Page Integrity Manager is a client-side security solution that injects a JavaScript agent into your web pages to monitor third-party scripts in the user's browser and alert on digital skimming, formjacking, and Magecart-style attacks. It is a detection-and-alert tool, it flags malicious behavior after scripts execute, and requires you to be an Akamai CDN customer.

The difference is what each product sees and what it can do about it. Akamai injects JavaScript monitoring into your pages and watches for suspicious behavior. cside runs one first-party script tag that records what each third-party script does in the real session, and separately fetches the same script server-side to hash, archive, deobfuscate and analyze the payload. Blocks are then enforced at runtime in the browser, alongside CSP.

Partly. cside runs a first-party script in the page, so like any client-side product it is visible to a determined attacker. Akamai's JavaScript monitoring code runs in the user's browser where sophisticated attackers can see it, analyze it, and potentially disable or bypass it. The difference is the cross-check: cside also fetches each third-party script server-side to hash and archive it, so a script that behaves one way when observed and another way for a real shopper still produces a content hash and a version diff you can point at.

Akamai provides behavioral alerts and monitoring data when suspicious activity is detected, but cside captures and archives the exact malicious code bytes that were attempted to load. This gives you complete, replay-ready forensic evidence showing precisely what the attack looked like, how it worked, and what data it was trying to steal. Auditors and incident response teams get immutable proof of the attack rather than just behavioral observations.

cside provides superior compliance documentation because we archive each script version we observe, complete with cryptographic hashes and the archived code, with retention tiered by plan. This creates a complete audit trail showing exactly what was blocked and when. Akamai's monitoring approach provides behavioral logs and alerts, but lacks the detailed forensic evidence that regulators and auditors increasingly require for thorough incident documentation and compliance reporting.

Detection alone only alerts you after malicious code has already run in a user's browser, and with Akamai's approach card numbers and personal data can be read in milliseconds before the monitoring system flags the attack. cside enforces blocks at runtime in the browser, alongside CSP, so a script or a specific capability you have not authorized is stopped in the session rather than only reported afterwards.

Akamai injects monitoring JavaScript into every page, adding overhead to each page load and consuming browser resources to constantly monitor script behavior. cside adds a single first-party script tag and does not sit in front of your traffic, so your third-party scripts keep loading directly from their own origins. cside has not published a browser overhead benchmark for its own script.

cside's AI-powered analysis is far superior for sophisticated attacks. Our self-hosted LLM can analyze obfuscated code and conditional logic that bypass simple behavioral monitoring. Akamai's browser-based detection relies on recognizing suspicious behaviors, but advanced attackers design their code to appear normal while operating maliciously. Our platform catches these attacks through deep code analysis of the payload we fetch server-side, which is not logic an attacker can read from the page.

Akamai monitors what scripts do after they're already running in the browser, looking for suspicious behaviors like unauthorized data collection or DOM manipulation. cside analyzes what scripts are, not only what they do, using analysis rules and AI to examine the actual code structure, logic, and intent of the payload we fetch server-side. This lets us identify malicious scripts even if they're designed to behave normally until specific conditions are met.

When Akamai detects suspicious behavior, it sends alerts and may block certain actions, but the malicious script has already been delivered to the user's browser. When cside detects a malicious script, the block is enforced at runtime in the browser, alongside CSP, so the script or the specific capability it abuses is stopped in the session. Business plans also include script rollbacks to an earlier known-good version.

Not in the same way. cside runs a first-party script in the page, so like any client-side product a determined attacker can find it, and cside ships anti-tamper protection that makes those detections materially harder to manipulate than a plain in-browser agent. A large part of cside's analysis is not in the page at all: it runs server-side against the copy of the script cside fetched and hashed, so a payload that behaves differently when it is watched still leaves a content hash and a version diff. Akamai's JavaScript monitoring code is delivered to every browser where attackers can study it, understand how it works, and craft attacks specifically designed to avoid triggering alerts. This is why sophisticated attackers have learned to bypass browser-based monitoring systems.

cside is a CDN-agnostic alternative to Akamai Page Integrity Manager (Akamai PIM). It works on any infrastructure with no Akamai CDN contract, monitors 100% of real user sessions with no sampling, and produces QSA-grade payload evidence for PCI DSS 4.0.1 requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1, starting at $99/month with a free tier.

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