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.
If you want to verify their claims yourself, please navigate to their product pages.
| Criteria | c/side | Akamai Page Integrity Manager | Why It Matters | What the Consequences Are |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Approaches used | Proxy | JS-Based Detection | ||
| 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 | Identifies attacks that change based on user, time, or location | Missed detection of targeted attacks | ||
| DOM-Level Threat Detection | Tracks changes to the DOM and observes how scripts behave during runtime | Unable to identify sophisticated DOM-based attacks | ||
| 100% Historical Tracking & Forensics | Needed for incident response, auditing, and compliance | Needed for incident response, auditing, and compliance | ||
| 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 | ||
| QSA validated PCI dash | The most reliable way to ensure a solution is PCI compliant is to conduct a thorough audit by an independent QSA | Without QSA validation, you rely entirely on marketing claims, which could result in failing an audit | ||
| SOC 2 Type II | Shows consistent operational security controls over time | Lacks verified security control validation, making it a risky vendor | ||
| PCI specific UI | An easy interface for quick script review and justification via one click or AI automation | Mundane tasks and manual research on what all the scripts do, which takes hours or days |
What is Akamai Page Integrity Manager?
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.
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 in order to be properly detected and blocked next time.
How cside goes further
cside primarily offers a hybrid proxy approach which sits in between the user session and the 3rd party service. It analyzes the served dependencies code in real-time before serving it to the user.
This allows us to not only spot advanced highly targeted attacks and alert on them, cside also makes it possible to block attacks before they touch the user's browser. It also checks the box for multiple compliance frameworks, including PCI DSS 4.0.1. We even provide deep forensics, including if an attacker bypasses our detections. Allowing you to more tightly scope the size of the incident us to make our detection capabilities better every day. No other vendor has this capability.
We believe this is the most secure way to monitor and protect your dependencies across your entire website. We've spent years in the client-side security space before we started cside, we've seen it all, this is the only way you can actually spot an attack.
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FAQ
Q: How does cside's hybrid proxy differ from Akamai's Page Integrity Manager?
A: The fundamental difference is where protection happens. Akamai injects JavaScript monitoring code into your pages and watches for suspicious behavior after scripts have already reached your users' browsers. cside's hybrid proxy intercepts and analyzes every script before it reaches the browser, blocking malicious content at the network level. This means we prevent attacks from happening, while Akamai detects them after they've already executed and potentially collected user data.
Q: Can attackers bypass cside's protection like they can with Akamai's browser-based monitoring?
A: No, because cside's core analysis happens on our proxy, completely invisible to attackers. 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. Since our proxy protection occurs server-side before content reaches the browser, attackers have no way to detect, study, or circumvent our security mechanisms.
Q: What forensic evidence does cside provide compared to Akamai's monitoring alerts?
A: 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.
Q: How do compliance and regulatory reporting compare between the two approaches?
A: cside provides superior compliance documentation because we maintain immutable records of every script version, complete with cryptographic hashes and archived code. This creates a comprehensive 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.
Q: Why is cside's prevention approach better than Akamai's detection approach?
A: Prevention stops attacks before any damage occurs, while detection only alerts you after malicious scripts have already executed in your users' browsers. With Akamai's approach, credit card numbers and personal data can be stolen in milliseconds before the monitoring system even detects the attack. cside's proxy ensures malicious scripts never get the chance to interact with user data because they're blocked before reaching the browser entirely.
Q: How do the performance impacts compare between cside and Akamai's approach?
A: Akamai injects monitoring JavaScript into every page, adding overhead to each page load and consuming browser resources to constantly monitor script behavior. cside's proxy approach often improves performance by caching scripts and blocking resource-heavy malicious scripts before they can execute.
Q: Which approach provides better protection against sophisticated, targeted attacks?
A: cside's AI-powered proxy 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 proxy catches these attacks through deep code analysis before they ever reach the browser.
Q: How does script analysis differ between cside and Akamai's systems?
A: 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 before they execute, using analysis rules and AI to examine the actual code structure, logic, and intent. This lets us identify malicious scripts even if they're designed to behave normally until specific conditions are met.
Q: What happens when each system detects a threat?
A: 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, we block it entirely before it reaches the browser, and if needed, we can serve the last known safe version using our hash-locking technology. This ensures your website continues functioning while staying completely protected.
Q: Which solution is harder for attackers to reverse engineer and bypass?
A: cside is virtually impossible to reverse engineer because attackers never see our analysis logic. It all happens on our proxy infrastructure. 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.