Best free firewall???

davmail

I currently have zone alarm pro,but don't want to keep paying for it,is there any other firewall which is just as good,but FREE??????

Thanks......:T

debitcardmayhem

Your router, and if you want more Windows Firewall, or Comodo

fwor

When you say "as good", what do you mean?

What features do you want that Zone Alarm's free edition does not provide?

IMO if you are behind a router and have decent antivirus installed, you probably don't really need anything more than the firewall that's shipped free with Windows.

Gillor

For a good, basic review of free firewalls take a look at Gizmo's website here:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-firewall.htm

Barney30

I always use Windows Firewall. It does the trick for me.

Gillor

Your router's built in firewall plus Windows firewall is more than adequate for inbound protection.

If you then want simple and straightforward outbound firewall security you could add Windows 7 Firewall Control which is based on the same platform as the built-in Windows firewall so doesn't install potentially troublesome third-party drivers..... see review link in my previous post.

esuhl

As above, your router will provide suitable inbound protection using SPI. If you want outbound protection, Comodo seems to be the best free one around... but it's not brilliant. There isn't really much choice.

I used ZoneAlarm Pro till about 2006 when it caused endless problems and just seemed to block traffic arbitrarily. I quite liked the UI at the time, but the software needs to work! I'd look at it again in the hope that they've fixed the problems, but I mainly use Linux these days anyway...

Gillor

esuhl wrote: »

If you want outbound protection, Comodo seems to be the best free one around......

I agree but you almost need a degree in computer science to set it up properly and make sense of some of the pop-ups. Perhaps not for the novice.

Inner_Zone

What's wrong with Zone Alarm free version?

esuhl

Gillor wrote: »

I agree but you almost need a degree in computer science to set it up properly and make sense of some of the pop-ups. Perhaps not for the novice.

The pop-ups are okay, but it wasn't easy to get it working as I wanted. The default installation fails leaktests and automatically generates rules for the software it finds on your PC! Isn't the whole point of a firewall that you get to decide what's allowed in and out?! Grrr!

But if you disable Defense+, immediately put it in "custom policy" mode and delete any unwanted rules it may have created automatically... it works pretty well.

If they fixed that (maybe they have...?) and had a much more logical UI, it would be quite good...