Code protection makes your own JavaScript hard to read, tamper with or lift. Client-side security governs what third-party code is allowed to do on your pages, and records what it did. These solve genuinely different problems, and plenty of organisations want both.
Hardens the JavaScript you wrote, with monitoring layered alongside it.
Governs what every script on the page may do, and records what it did — most of which you did not write.
Code protection operates at build time on the JavaScript you control, which is exactly the code you already have the most visibility into. The scripts that cause client-side incidents are usually the ones you did not write and cannot rebuild — a tag manager's payload, a vendor's widget, a dependency of a dependency.
Applies to code you own and can rebuild. Third-party scripts arrive on the page by another route entirely.
Governs and records whatever executed, regardless of who wrote it or how it got there, including scripts loaded by other scripts.
These are complementary more often than they are alternatives. The comparison is about which problem you are solving today.
| Consideration | Code protection | Report URI |
|---|---|---|
| Primary subject | The JavaScript you wrote | Every script that executes, most of which you did not write |
| Where it acts | Build pipeline, before deployment | After the fact, on what the browser actually did |
| Third-party scripts | Cannot be rebuilt, so cannot be hardened | Inventoried, fingerprinted, and archived when they run |
| Build coupling | Part of your release process | None — a response header, independent of releases |
| Intellectual property | Obfuscation makes your logic hard to lift | Not addressed; a different problem |
| Script payloads | Yours, by definition | Anyone's, fetched and hash-verified against the browser's fingerprint |
| Report types | Script and page integrity | Fourteen, spanning scripts, connectivity, isolation and identity |
| Pricing | By quotation | Published on the site |
Card skimming, cryptojacking and data exfiltration overwhelmingly arrive through a third party rather than through your own bundle. That is the code you cannot rebuild, and therefore the code that needs observing.
A tag manager loads a tag, which loads something else. Those later dependencies never appear in any repository you own, never pass a review, and execute with the same privileges as everything else on the page. Because reporting comes from the browser, they are visible on the same footing as your own code.
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Subresource Integrity lets the browser refuse a script whose contents have changed, and Integrity Policy reports or enforces that every eligible script carries it. CSP Integrity fingerprints what actually executed and names the library and version. None of that requires access to anybody's source, which is what makes it applicable to third-party code.