Pros

• ZoneAlarm Pro Firewall provides you with one year of identity-theft protection
• It’s a slightly better firewall than Trend Micro, but not as good as BitDefender
• It monitors behaviours within your computer and stops them before they harm your PC. This includes traditional and new threats

Cons

• The help section is not as good as some of the competition
• Nothing new worth mentioning in the latest version

View side-by-side comparison of Personal Firewall Software

ZoneAlarm Pro Firewall is one of the best personal firewall software programs. And that’s because it stops traffic threats that are arriving or departing from your computer through email and IM communications.

You won’t be disappointed with its effectiveness. And you’ll find the software very easy to use.

If you already have an antivirus or antispyware program installed, you will find it works easily with these programs. Of course it will depend on which security software you have, but you’ll find that ZoneAlarm Pro cooperates with all popular anti-virus and anti-spyware programs.

Features

ZoneAlarm Pro has some noteworthy features. And we’ve found them able to match and surpass other Personal firewall software programs like Norman Personal Firewall, Outpost Firewall Pro and Sunbelt Personal Firewall.

It prevents any malware threats sneaking past it. And in cooperation with your antivirus program, it removes those already infecting your PC.

It also has the ability to analyse the potential danger of a downloaded program on your PC. And it’s also able to authenticate when and where a website you visit was registered and whether it’s safe or dangerous.

Although ZoneAlarm Firewall Pro is not able to scan your incoming mail, it has the ability to scan your outgoing mail. So this helps prevent the spread of malware and other threats.

Ease of Use

ZoneAlarm Pro is a firewall for both experts and beginners alike. It allows easy configuration and management and as a beginner you won’t find its features taxing.

And if you’re a more experienced user, you’ll find the advanced features very powerful and easy to configure. If it detects that it is being hijacked, it retreats into a protected state and ensures that it is not compromised. And the toolbar supports the antiphishing features.

Your firewall also trains itself to configure settings based on your PC use. It automatically updates itself to maintain current security lists. And you can control when and where the firewall sends alerts. You can easily suppress these alerts when you’re gaming for example, to prevent interruption.

Help and Support

ZoneAlarm Pro Firewall has an outstanding support service and it’s one of the best we’ve seen in any security software.

They have a Knowledgebase, a blog, a forum, Facebook and Twitter accounts. And all these you can use to find solutions to your software or threat problems, or if you have a general query.

Summary

ZoneAlarm has a community of users who share information and tools to defeat new security threats. And this helps ZoneAlarm maintain an up-to-date software that protects you from all malicious threats.

DefenseNet is a feature managed by the research team and receives data from users anonymously to identify the signatures of quick spreading threats.