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.

Parental Control bar is a free web content filter that installs as an add-on to your browser. It works well as a web filter and is definitely worth considering.

No hassles were encountered during the installation of this filter and I can say that almost all users would find the installation process a breeze.

Parental Control Bar performs well as a web content blocker but that is all. It lacks the features of an all round filter. If all you are looking for is blocking web content then this product may be something to choose from. Once the filter is installed, all you can do is modify the allowed and blocked lists and that is all.

Very easy to use. The parental control bar is an add-on to your web browser and is exceptionally easy to configure because the only modifiable settings are the allowed and blocked lists and changing the admin password.

Effectiveness

Adult Content      7/10
- The software performed well as an adult content blocker.
Filter Cirumvention      2/10
- Parental Control Bar was very easily bypassed by installing and using another browser. It was also easily bypassed using proxy servers.
Obscene      8/10
- Blocked almost all obscene content that was tested.
Crime      7/10
- Almost all content tested was blocked however some crime related websites could be viewed.
Over-blocking      9/10
- Parental Control Bar did an exceptional job of not over-blocking and any sites that were blocked when they shouldn’t could easily be viewed using the administrator password and the override feature on the blocked screen.

Free

Easy to use and maintain as the features are limited and not overwhelming

Effective at blocking inappropriate web pages

Easily circumvented using proxy sites or by installing a new browser

No other features to provide all round filtering as it is only a web filter

Only installs into the default browser

If all you need is a filter to block inappropriate web pages then Parental Control Bar is worth considering as it does a great job at doing this and this alone. It is very easy to use, straight forward and it’s free so you can’t go wrong by giving it a try. However if you are looking for something with more features and the ability to monitor the overall use of the Internet connection then you may want to take some of the more comprehensive filters into consideration.