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 Sentinel makes a poor attempt at filtering web content. The only sites that were blocked properly were the ones added to the user defined blacklist and nobody really wants to have to define a whole blacklist themselves, do they? It appears more suited for a corporate environment in which it can be mainly used as a monitoring tool rather than filtering.

Very easy to install, just a shame the user interface wasn’t as easy.

From the outside it appears that Cyber Sentinel has the required features to make a decent content filter it just fails to apply these when it comes to the crunch.

Once you’ve familiarized yourself, the user interface is easy to use but it does take some getting used to. It could have been more user friendly but it appears to be designed with many users in mind which has limited the user interface.

Effectiveness

Adult Content      0/10
- Was able to view any content
Filter Cirumvention      0/10
- Was able to view any content
Obscene      0/10
- Was able to view any content
Crime      0/10
- Was able to view any content
Over-blocking      10/10
- Was able to view any content so no over-blocking was not an issue

Can be used as a monitoring tool without restricting access whatsoever which can tell you what users are using the Internet for

Takes screenshots of pages that should not be viewed

Has the ability to log chat conversations

Did not actually block any content whatsoever

I would not be confident at all entrusting this filter to help protect children online. It may however be useful just to know what pages are being viewed in a situation where the user is mature enough to be viewing the content. This software would work well in a corporate environment as it warns the viewer and logs both the URL and a screenshot of unauthorized pages. Although the screenshot feature does seem like a good idea it might cause a problem if it takes up too much storage space.

Cyber Sentinel would definitely be more suited to a corporate environment as monitoring software than in a home environment where there wasn’t as much concern over what content a user may view.