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.

Net Nanny is the pioneer when it comes to Internet Filtering. However Net Nanny was recently bought by Content Watch who are the creators of Content Protect. The new Net Nanny is essentially Content Protect re-named and is still referred to by that name in some areas. Although it is a worthy product it would seem that much of it’s popularity is based on its name which was established by a different product.

The installation was quite a lengthy and arduous process. First, Content Protect is downloaded, and then during the installation it prompted me to download Net Nanny. The user is then redirected to the Net Nanny site to download the software. Once the Net Nanny installer is run, it sends you back to the Content Protect website’s login page to obtain the serial number. Couldn’t they simply send you the serial number via email?

What Net Nanny may lack in configurability it certainly makes up for in simplicity. It has all the necessary features for web content filtering and does quite a good job of this but does not have some of the necessary features required to provide more computer wide protection such as chat filtering and program blocking.

Net Nanny lost a lot of points here because one of the key features - Time Settings, failed to work for the allocated time. It appeared that the time zone that Net Nanny was using was different to the actual system time which means that when a time was set to block, it did not block at all. There was also no setting to check or change the time zone which makes it very hard to use this feature. Not the kind of thing you want to see from such a well known filter and this is the kind of thing that will prevent consumers from purchasing the software altogether.

Net Nanny is very straight forward and easy to use. The user interface is set up well and the features can be easily navigated – but this may be due to it’s lack of configurability. A successful filter needs to make some compromise between ease of use and configurability but Net Nanny seems to have sacrificed too many features to make it easier for the user.

Effectiveness

Adult Content      6/10
- Net nanny failed to block many popular adult dating websites which can be used for chat and to view adult content.
Filter Cirumvention      9/10
- Was able to use a few known proxy websites to circumvent the filter however all attempts to search for these using a search engine were blocked.
Obscene      7/10
- Although it blocked some unpleasant images it still let through quite a few obscene images and sites.
Crime      7/10
- Successfully blocked most crime sites tested but let some sites that related to making home made explosives through.
Over-blocking      7/10
- Net Nanny performed well in this area but lost points because it did not provide an instant override feature for the sites that were over blocked.

Logs Instant Message chat

Very simple and easy to navigate

Time settings did not work. It seemed as though the time zone was out and there was no way to check or change it

No way to change the dynamic filter sensitivity

Does not monitor email

Does not filter inappropriate language in chat

Does not log or filter all chat programs such as Myspace messenger

License is single user

Not a good mix of simplicity and features

Net Nanny is a well known product when it comes to internet filtering software and was a pioneer in the Internet Content Filter industry. Unfortunately it seems that they are beginning to fall behind some of their competitors. There are definitely some younger filters that are by far a better choice for all round content filtering.