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.

Filterpak seems to be a bare minimum web filter. When compared to similar software on the market it does not meet the standard required to be an all round Internet Content Filter.

Installation of Filterpak is very straight forward and simple.

Filter Pak has the necessary features to be an average web filter but that is all. There are no configurable options that let you adjust the filter to work the way you want it to. There are no features that allow you to monitor, filter or even block chat programs.

The software is extremely easy to use and navigate but this has a lot to do with the fact that there are next to no features. The user interface is set out well and can be learnt in a matter of minutes.

Effectiveness

Adult Content      6/10
- Filterpak did a reasonable job of filtering adult content
Filter Cirumvention      2/10
- Filterpak failed to block any of the proxy sites that were tested and the user was also able to search for and use the proxy servers using a search engine.
Obscene      6/10
- Was able to view many unpleasant web pages by both searching and using known URL’s
Crime      7/10
- Filterpak was able to satisfactorily block most criminal content.
Over-blocking      1/10
- Even when a certain category was disabled in the user profile it still blocked the web site category. There is no flexibility whatsoever. - No ability to do anything about the over blocking. If a page is blocked then it is not viewable until you uninstall Filterpak as there is no option to disable Filterpak or apply a temporary or permanent override for a blocked site

Enforces safe search

Lightweight software

No chat monitor or filter

Reporting feature does not work

No ability to train or customize the filter

Server based so it may be considered an invasion of privacy by some, as all web pages are checked by the FilterPak servers. There is also a possible issue with downtime if the FilterPak servers go off-line.

Very few features and extremely limited configuration.

Too many logins. To access the reports feature you must first login to the administration and then login again to access the reports using the same details. Not necessary.

A few minor glitches such as allowing me to create a profile with a 2 character password but not allowing me to modify the profile settings without creating a longer password.

Overall Filterpak is a very simple and easy to use filter but unfortunately does not make a good compromise between functionality and simplicity. It lacks some very essential features such as user defined white and black lists, program control and time limiting just to name a few. Although it was relatively effective at blocking inappropriate content it was not able to be trained to better suit individual users’ needs which can lead to frustration as a user.