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.

Optenet is a solid web content filter and despite its minor flaws it does provide good all round effective filtering. Optenet has a good reputation for providing a quality family friendly filter.

The installation process was very easy and user friendly. No problems were faced during the installation and I would suspect that the average user would also agree.

Optenet has limited configurability options to train the filter to how you want it to work. There is no ability to change the dynamic filtering level, only the ability to add sites to an allowed list which can get quite frustrating if you find the filter is over-blocking. Despite this it does contain the necessary features to make it a solid and worthy filter.

The user interface of Optenet is laid out well and easily navigated however it would benefit from combining some of the features into the same categories. It was a little confusing that option like personal URL lists were not in the configuration section where I expected it to be. The ease of use may however be a consequence of its limited configurability.

Effectiveness

Adult Content      6/10
- Performed well at blocking most content but it seemed to let through some new sites which suggests that the software is running on a blacklist and not dynamic analysis as well. It also let through many explicit adult images via an image search using numerous search engines as it does not force the search engine safe image filter which most filters have.
Filter Cirumvention      9/10
- The filter stood up well to almost all attempts to bypass it. I would certainly be confident in knowing that children would not be able to bypass this filter.
Obscene      9/10
- Almost all the unpleasant content that was tested against the filter was blocked successfully and the filter performed well.
Crime      7/10
- Optenet provided a satisfactory barrier for some crime related pages but lost points because it let through some very common illegal pages including pages documenting the Anarchist’s Cookbook.
Over-blocking      7/10
- Optenet performed relatively well here but lost points because of the lack of an instant override feature. Most sites that would be considered appropriate yet borderline went through fine which was good. But for those that didn’t, the user was left with no option to override immediately or for a temporary time period either.

Easy to install

Good inbuilt documentation.

User interface is easy to use

No instant override after a blocked page only the option to request a category change for the website. Have to login to the administration and add the site to the allowed list if you want to view it.

No chat reporting.

Uses a lot of memory (Over 100Mb of RAM)

Does not force search engine safe image filters.

Some of the inappropriate content was shown for several seconds before the page was blocked.

Limited configurability to train the filter to how you want it to work.

Despite the fact that Optenet did provide worthy protection I do believe that it lacked certain features that make for an all round content filter such as chat and email filtering and reporting, individual application control, personal information protection and user defined keyword lists. These last two mentioned features are particularly important in the fight to protect children from Internet predators.