This article takes an honest look at the features of Report DataDome.
Since you’re on the c/side 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.
What is DataDome?
​DataDome is a cybersecurity company specialized in real-time detection and mitigation of online fraud and bot-driven threats. They analyze each incoming request to differentiate between legitimate users and malicious bots, effectively preventing activities such as data scraping, account takeovers, payment fraud, and denial-of-service attacks.
DataDome offers all kinds of different tools: Bot Protect blocks malicious bots in real time, Account Protect stops fraud like account takeovers, DDoS Protect mitigates Layer 7 attacks, Ad Protect prevents ad fraud and analytics skew, and Page Protect monitors client-side scripts for PCI compliance..
How DataDome works
Let's dive into each of DataDome's products and quickly explain how they work.
Bot Protect
Bot Protect is implemented at the server or edge level. You plug it into your CDN, reverse proxy, load balancer, or application layer. That could be something like NGINX, Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, or Fastly. Once integrated, every incoming request is passed through DataDome’s detection engine in real time. It analyzes things like headers, IP, device fingerprints, and behavioral signals.
Based on that, it either lets the request through, challenges it (e.g. CAPTCHA), or blocks it outright. You don't need to change your app logic—just drop it into your traffic path, and it starts working immediately.
Account Protect
Account Protect builds on the same infrastructure as Bot Protect, but focuses specifically on login and signup flows. You’ll configure DataDome to watch key authentication endpoints. It monitors for signs of abuse like credential stuffing, brute-force attempts, or bot-created accounts based. on velocity, intent, and known attack patterns.
You can set up rules or use automatic responses to challenge or block traffic trying to game your auth system. Since it’s using the same traffic layer as Bot Protect, it’s a seamless add-on.
DDos Protect
DDoS Protect runs through the same inline setup as Bot Protect. The difference is in how it detects and responds to Layer 7 DDoS patterns. Sudden spikes, repeated page hits, or deliberately slow attacks meant to exhaust resources.
Because the logic is already deployed at the edge, DDoS Protect can start mitigation instantly. Either rate-limiting, blocking, or redirecting malicious sessions without impacting your origin server.
Ad Protect
Ad Protect uses the same foundational bot detection layer but is geared toward marketing and advertising endpoints. Landing pages, analytics, and conversion funnels. You integrate it like Bot Protect, but then track how traffic interacts with paid campaigns. It filters out fake traffic, click farms, and bots that inflate impressions or conversions.
his ensures cleaner analytics and protects ad budgets from being wasted on invalid traffic. Marketers get better reporting, and the security team can trace back fraudulent traffic sources.
Page Protect
Page Protect is where the client-side comes in. You install a JavaScript tag on your web pages. This script monitors third-party scripts running in your users’ browsers. It tracks what scripts are loaded, what they access (e.g., form fields, cookies), and if they’re behaving suspiciously (e.g., skimming credit card info). DataDome analyzes it for threats. You can review activity and configure alerts or enforcement actions in the dashboard.
This approach is known as a Honeypot trap. These traps are less effective because attackers can load the scripts, figure out the traps, and bypass them relatively easily.
Various articles online, even on white-hat sites, explain how to circumvent Page Protect and other DataDome products.
Since c/side also focusses on client-side security, it's relevant to explain how we work. c/side uses a proxy approach which sits in between every actual user session. It checks the actual payload of every page view, and analyzes the served dependencies code in real-time before serving it to the user.
This allows us to not only spot 0-day attacks and alert, c/side 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 requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1.
We believe this is the most secure way to monitor and protect your dependencies across your entire website.
Sign up or book a demo to get started.