cside alternative: an honest comparison

Yes, if you want PCI DSS 6.4.3 and 11.6.1 coverage without a vendor's proxy in your checkout path, including inline scripts. cside is the better fit if you also want bot, fraud and AI-agent detection from one vendor, or if its larger free plan decides it.

Up to 500,000 payment-page views, yes: free for 2,000, then $99/month for 100,000, rising to $499 at 500,000. Above that it is custom. Ours is published at every volume: free for 1,000, the same steps up to $499 at 500,000, and $0.60 per 1,000 after that, so $799/month at 1,000,000.

Up to 500,000 payment-page views a month, Script Monitoring and cside cost the same at every step, from $99/month at 100,000, and cside's free plan is larger at 2,000 page views against our 1,000. Above 500,000, ours stays published at $0.60 per 1,000 page views, so 1,000,000 is $799 a month, while cside moves to custom pricing. On annual billing ours is 10 months for 12.

Not currently. cside's caveats page says it "currently does not monitor inline scripts" and recommends moving them to external files. 6.4.3 applies to every script that executes on the payment page, inline ones included. Script Monitoring monitors inline scripts as well as external files.

Yes, and for some combinations it is sensible, for example cside for bot and fraud signals and Script Monitoring for PCI evidence. Running two client-side tools on the same payment page adds weight, so decide which one is the system of record for your PCI evidence.

Yes, and it is worth asking every vendor in this category the same question. Our tag is integrity-checked on load: if what arrives in the browser is not the script we published, it does not run. A client-side monitor that an attacker can silently modify is worse than no monitor, because it keeps reporting all-clear while the page is compromised. Not every agent in this category does this, so put it to cside as well.

It should not, and it is the right thing to worry about. Installation is one first-party tag with no DNS or CDN change, and your site traffic is never routed through us. Our tag is served from Amazon CloudFront, which AWS says has 750+ points of presence in 100+ cities across 50+ countries, so it loads from close to every visitor. It loads asynchronously and is fail-open: if our service is unreachable, your page renders and your checkout completes. Most teams run monitor-only mode alongside their existing tool for a few weeks before switching the system of record.

Usually days rather than weeks. The tag goes in, you mark your payment pages with selector rules, and the inventory populates from live traffic immediately. The slower part is re-recording business justifications, and if you already wrote them for 6.4.3 they transfer directly.

It can, which is why it is worth asking about. cside's CSP documentation describes setups where "cside proxies your domain", with scripts served from csidetm.com, which your CSP has to allow. A proxy serving your payment-page scripts is in your checkout path, and its speed and availability become part of your checkout's. cside says its design fails open; ask how it handles a slow or partly degraded proxy as well as a full outage. Our tag is served from Amazon CloudFront, which AWS says has 750+ points of presence in 100+ cities across 50+ countries, so it loads from close to every visitor. It loads asynchronously and is fail-open: if our service is unreachable, your page renders and your checkout completes. Script Monitoring never proxies your scripts.