Outpost Firewall Pro Review

Outpost Firewall Pro is by far one of the best firewall and probably the best value on the market. It shares many similarities as ZoneAlarm’s firewall. It blocks both incoming and outgoing communications from rogue programs on your computer such as spyware, adware, viruses, trojan horses, etc. Outpost beats ZoneAlarm in my option by adding many features that ZoneAlarm doesn't have. It does well with blocking internet ads, cookies, dangerous file attachments, popups, hidden browser windows, and hostile websites.

The biggest problem with all this power will be for users that never used a firewall before. ZoneAlarm tends to offer pretty graphics to help users, Outpost Firewall Pro doesn’t, but you will pay almost ¼ the price of ZoneAlarm.

Installation and Configuration (5 stars of 5)
Installation took less than 5 minutes to complete. While most firewalls require you to answer some questions during installation, Outpost Firewall Pro automatically configured itself. After installation, you'll need to reboot before the firewall can start protecting your computer.

Usability (4 stars of 5)
After reboot, there were a few pop-ups alerts. Outpost Firewall Pro, found a couple of unidentified program running on our computer trying to attempt to access the internet. Like many other firewall programs, you are asked if you want to allow, block, block once, and always allow the program to access the Internet. You'll only receive one pop-up per program, but you can always change your mind later from within the program. New users may see quite a few of these pop-ups as the firewall blocks spyware and adware on your computer. Note that Outpost Firewall Pro is a typical firewall program and won't remove spyware but can disable it.
Not as user friendly as ZoneAlarm, but it is more powerful. You can see every process on your computer that is communicating on the internet. You can also see the cookies, number of ads, attachments, javascripts.

Documentation (5 stars of 5)
Documentation to Outpost Firewall Pro is excellent, I even found some hidden secrets within the program because of the “tips” section.

Other Features
Outpost Firewall Pro is packed with useful features that ZoneAlarm doesn't have. While ZA stops at blocking incoming and outgoing attacks, Outpost Firewall Pro also blocks Internet Ads, cookies, suspicious email attachments, hostile internet sites, and hidden browser popups.

.........Two really cool features............

There is a branch off the treeview called My Internet which has four items – Network Activity, Open Ports, Allowed and Blocked. The first two allow you to change and view settings for processes connected to the network, while the second lets you check the open ports and which applications opened them.

There is also a Plug-Ins branch which is filled with useful tools - active content and ads blockers, attack detection, anti-spyware, attachment quarantine, content blocker and DNS cache monitor. Each of this plug-ins has a wide range of options but I strongly recommend you to check the documentation first, if you're not 100% sure about what you're doing.