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.

Installation was straight forward and also required creating an account on the Safe Eyes servers to complete it. This process was hassle free.

The installation process is quite simple but it may require some fiddling to get the filter functioning the way you like, and taking into consideration the confusing user interface this may become quite frustrating. If you are tech savvy then you will find your way around eventually but for those of you that aren’t then you may want to look for something still just as effective but a little more user friendly.

Safe Eyes displays a great number of features and is a worthy all round parental control software. It contains all the necessary features such as web blocking, chat monitoring, email blocking, personal information and application blocking.

The user interface of safe eyes was quite user friendly and I found it easy to find and navigate the available features. Unfortunately during the time of testing none of the features that were changed actually made any difference to the performance of the filter. There seemed to be a delay of up to 30 minutes for the selected changes to take effect. There were no options to recover a forgotten password.

Effectiveness

Adult Content      7/10
- Most adult content was blocked however Safe Eyes only enforced safe search through the Google search engine. All other search engines that use safe search were viewable and as such a lot of adult content could be displayed through the image search feature of these search engines.
Filter Cirumvention      10/10
- All efforts to disable and bypass the filter were thwarted and Safe Eyes will serve well against the persistent teenager.
Obscene      9/10
- Safe Eyes performed very well at blocking the tasteless and unpleasant content. The user was unable to view anything that would be considered offensive. Some searches would return but the pages would not be viewable.
Crime      6/10
- Approximately half of the test sites regarding Crime were let through with no apparent blocking. Many of these included bomb making sites and others that would definitely be inappropriate for a younger child to be viewing.
Over-blocking      6/10
- Safe Eyes lost points here because of the time delay in updating the profile online. Because the program is server based there is a delay in the activation of changes in the profile. This can be quite frustrating for the user.

Large number of website categories

Personal information and keyword blocking

Email blocking unless contact is approved.

Logs internet chat programs

Server based so it may impose on some privacy issues

Time delay in updating your profile to get the settings to take effect

Going by the feature list and performance alone Safe Eyes would definitely be recommended. However one of its major flaws is that it is server based which poses problems such as privacy issues and the above mentioned time delay for profile changes to take effect. This delay in itself would be frustrating enough to prevent some users from purchasing this software. Barring these flaws, Safe Eyes performed well but these are issues that need to be taken into account when choosing a filter.