Switch from Akamai. Name Your Price.
Get real browser-side protection, faster PCI DSS 4.0.1 evidence, and lower total cost with Source Defense.
Akamai treats eSkimming and client-side security as a minor add-on. Source Defense is purpose-built to protect your site from JavaScript-based attacks that happen inside the browser, where customers enter data.
For over a decade, we’ve focused exclusively on eSkimming and client-side protection and continuously track emerging threats. We’re the number one name in eSkimming security trusted by the card associations, merchant acquirers, QSAs, and the world’s leading brands.
Proof points
- Proven coverage for PCI 6.4.3 and 11.6.1
- Proactive protection against eSkimming and data leakage from day 1
- Near-zero maintenance via automatic policies powered by over a decade of real-world threat intelligence
- Deploys in minutes through your tag manager
- Validated by CoalFire, VikingCloud, and Verizon
Used by leading global merchants and validated by top PCI assessors.
What Akamai Misses
- Reactive protection after an issue is found
- Manual policy assignment and script-by-script testing
- Potential gaps in PCI DSS 6.4.3 and 11.6.1 coverage
- High overhead due to messy, unstructured data
Protect what Akamai cannot
See browser side risks in real time and give your team the evidence auditors expect.
| Source Defense Advantage | What Akamai Misses |
|---|---|
| Easy-to-use PCI dashboard and ability to view all data and views relevant for payment pages only | Provides site-wide views, making it especially difficult to manage and generate evidence for payment-page-specific information |
| Automatically enforced policies continuously, informed by over a decade of eSkimming and client-side focus and ongoing threat research | Protection is reactive, not proactive; typically requiring manual policy selection, application, and validation to address newly observed issues. |
| Auto-grouping of script files as services for easy management and identification of new behavior, ensuring integrity per service | Each script file is managed individually, making it difficult to manage and differentiate between behaviors of different services from the same vendor |
| Script isolation is supported, providing a higher layer of protection without entirely blocking scripts | Script isolation (sandboxing) is not supported |
| Simple deployment, not dependent on other client-side solutions in place | Dependent on other Akamai products for straightforward deployment, which can make implementation difficult if not bought as a bundle |
“Deployment used a single tag in our tag manager. Development time was half a day and tuning took one day.”
About Source Defense
As a PCI Participating Organization and the pioneer in eSkimming security, Source Defense played a role in the development of new requirements for web security found in PCI DSS 4.0.
We’ve helped thousands of the world’s leading brands address these issues. We’ve also been educating merchants, QSAs, PSPs, eCommerce Platform providers and virtually every stakeholder in PCI compliance on the vulnerabilities in modern website design that make eSkimming attacks possible. We’ve made it our misison to provide guidance around ambiguity in the standard; advise on the pros and cons of approaches provided by the council and we recently launched a free assessment, monitoring and management solution for both merchants and their QSAs.
