Outpost Firewall Pro Review

The overall champion!

Submitted by misha on Thu, 2007-10-18 14:43.
Author's Product Rating:
Ease of Use: 
Effectiveness: 
Help/Support: 
The lowest price: 35.96$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
Reliability, stability, basically impenetrable, ease of use (once you get the hang of it), uses
Cons:
Greater CPU usage than other firewalls, sometimes needs almost a minute to launch (growing app configuration settings?), issues with ICS
Review:

Since one year ago, my computer has had to be online almost 24/7, leaving it vulnerable to the hackers' attack most of the time. Of course, at the time I was using the Windows Firewall (yes, people, it's true - the WF offers almost no protection at all, and if you're using it at the moment, download any other free firewall right away) and Zone Alarm (which had compatibility issues with other software I had installed), yet soon after I've decided to get myself a real firewall.

So, I've tried and tested many of them: Zone Alarm, Kerio, Filseclab, Outpost, Look'n'Stop, etc...I was testing each of them for a day or two - running some strict firewall tests and Outpost showed 10-20% better results than the other ones. Note: there are a lot of firewall version for each firewall listed above, so they have probably improved a bit since then, but so has Outpost.

So why choose Outpost? Beginner users will find it very easy to use thanks to its auto-presets and basically no tweaking needed, while advanced and expert users will like the outstanding rule system which allows you to manually control every single aspect of every application you have installed. Very powerful and very thorough.

The problems I've encountered using the Outpost Firewall Pro are related to ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) - more specifically, I had a lot of problems allowing other computers to connect to the internet via the gateway computer which had Outpost installed. Problems are probably due to the very ICS, because using a router solves all the problems and works like a charm. Eventually, I came up with a solution thanks to Agnitum forum and support team.

Conclusion:

Fully recommended to all users spending a lot of time online. Awesome configuring possibilities make its defenses practically impenetrable.