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.

K9 is a free web filter that provides a very good level of filtering for web pages only. It is not an all round content filter but certainly more than capable of being an adequate web filter. K9 is a server based filter which means it checks all web sites visited against a server before allowing them to be displayed.

Installation was relatively straight forward. The only setback was having to provide full contact details to the parent company Blue Coat to obtain the K9 License number.

Although K9 definitely has the key features required to be a web filter it lacks other features that make up an all round Internet content filtering package. These include chat monitoring, chat filtering, email monitoring and program access control. This is where K9 lost some points in the feature department and although it doesn’t lack the essential features and ability of a solid web content filter, more features are required to provide adequate protection from the Internet.

The K9 administration is very well set out and both easy to use and understand. It gives several options when a page is blocked. Using the administrator password you can temporarily or permanently allow that particular page or category which is very helpful in training the filter to better suit the user’s requirements.

Effectiveness

Adult Content      9/10
- K9 almost provided a perfect barrier against adult content. Only a few sites tested managed to get past it. Any searching for these sites would have resulted in a blockage.
Filter Cirumvention      8/10
- K9 successfully blocked almost every attempt to open a proxy site. It certainly blocked all searches for proxy sites but some known sites got through.
Obscene      8/10
- An excellent level of protection was shown by K9 in the obscene category.
Crime      4/10
- Unfortunately K9 slackened a bit in the crime department. Many sites to do with violence, bombs and various other illegal activities were both able to be searched and visited.
Over-blocking      9/10
- K9 did an excellent job at not over-blocking and the instant override feature was particularly handy as it provided several options for the override.

Free

Good reporting and categorisation of web content viewed and blocked

Time limiting

Effective against most inappropriate and adult content

Server based so it may impose on some privacy issues

No individual user profiles

No chat filtering or monitoring

No email monitoring

No program control

If you are looking for a decent web filter at no cost then you can’t go past K9 web protection as it definitely provides sufficient web filtering. However if you are looking for more all round computer protection then I would definitely opt for one of the more complete packages on offer.