Integard - Our winner - Feature packed, easy to configure and well priced.

  Safe Eyes - Great product but high price, limited features and few issues found during testing place it in second place.

  Cyber Patrol - Our Second Runner up - Overall a good product but has less features and is complicated to configure.

  Net Nanny - Well known product but has been surpassed by several other products.

  Optenet - Performs well but lacks the features to make it attractive

  K9 - Free - But only performs web filtering and is only single user.

  FilterPak - Very simple and easy to use but lacks essential features.

  Parental Control Bar - Great Free product, If you are after very basic web filtering only.

  Vista Parental Controls - Decent performance in filtering area but only available on Windows Vista.

  Cyber Sentinel - Does more monitoring than filtering.

Cyber Patrol is a satisfactory program that works well in filtering web content but lacks in other monitoring areas such as logging chat and email, and sending email notifications of breaches and alerts. Despite these setbacks the software is still a solid contender but for the price, you can get this and more, from other filters.

The installation process is quite simple but it may require some fiddling to get the filter functioning the way you like, and taking into consideration the confusing user interface this may become quite frustrating. If you are tech savvy then you will find your way around eventually but for those of you that aren’t then you may want to look for something still just as effective but a little more user friendly.

Cyber Patrol has a huge range of features and configurable options to the point where you could spend a great deal of time setting up each individuals profile and access levels but this is not always desirable. Despite the huge range of features it does lack some important ones like logging of chat and email, email alerts and blocking of inappropriate language used in inbound chat sessions from popular chat programs such as MSN. The only 3 supported chat programs for inbound filtering are AOL Messenger, ICQ and IRC.

Once the software is setup I found it relatively easy to use. This probably had something to do with the time taken to set the software the way I wanted after already familiarizing myself with the seemingly endless menu system. Blocked pages could be seen by entering the password and sites added to the Sites Allowed list prevented over-blocking of sites that I chose to permanently allow.

Effectiveness

Adult Content      7/10
- Cyber Patrol performed adequately at blocking most inappropriate content however it did let through several popular adult dating websites.
Filter Cirumvention      5/10
- Proxy sites were easily accessible as well as searchable using this filter
Obscene      10/10
- The software performed exceptionally well in this area and blocked all of the obscene content that was tested.
Crime      8/10
- Almost all crime related websites were blocked leaving some minor sites to get through that many would deem to be harmless.
Over-blocking      8/10
- Cyber Patrol performed well in this area and gave an easy override process if over-blocking was to occur.

Lots of configuration options

Prevents time-restriction tampering

User based allowed and blocked lists as well as keyword lists

Trial version available.

User interface is confusing and at times very hard to find certain options

Does not provide inbound filtering of chat on popular chat programs such as MSN

No chat logging at all

No email notification system

I found that my Internet Explorer window kept crashing on a regular basis

Does not force search engines safe search filters on

User is unable to select anything longer than a 1 minute instant override.

All in all I would say that this software is quite effective but for the average user it would not be suitable. If you’re someone that just wants to install the software for maximum effectiveness but minimum hassle I would definitely look for a more user friendly filter. However if you don’t mind a bit of complication, do not require email notification and chat logging then Cyber Patrol is definitely a filter that does what it is designed to do and should be considered as a an option when purchasing a filter.