Comodo 3 vs Outpost Pro 9

[egale]

Since upgrading to Vista, I stopped using third party firewalls as initially there were no Vista compatible firewalls.

Back in the old days, it seemed Zonealarm Pro was king. I liked it because it was application based rather than rule based. I used Outpost Pro for a while and having to set up rules was just way too complicated for me.

Now I am jumping back into the firewall market. I read good things about Comodo. The fact that it is free is not a real factor for me. I would rather pay for a product and know that the product will be supported rather than get something for free where support may be lacking.

Zonealarm no longer receives the great reviews it used to and if you read their forums, there are lots of problems with it not turning off, or not uninstalling properly and generally messing up your system. So I tried Comodo. I emailed their support with a couple of questions so far and they are very quick to respond - Great!

I load it up, seems to work well. But, I try leaktest. I get a popup, I block it all is good. I then want to unblock it. Thats where the fun begins. The only way I see to unblock it is to delete the rule. I do and it is no longer blocked but now I no longer get the popup asking if it should be blocked. I fussed with it for a while before uninstalling Comodo. I did email support and got an answer in a matter of minutes with a fix but it involves changing some settings, rebooting and then changing a bunch of settings after the reboot.

In the mean time I installed the new Outpost Pro 9. It now has an application list similar to Zonealarm but with rules behind it. Outpost allows you to allow, block or allow/block once which is nice if you are not sure. Also, I did the leaktest test and after I deleted the application, the popup came back.

So with just a few minutes of testing, I am leaning towards Outpost Pro. I know that is not enough time to really evaluate a product and I was impressed with Comodo's support.

Has anyone dealt with both these products and have any real thoughts on which is a more stable, easier to use, better supported product? Any other product to look at?

 

[George P Burdell]

I've never used Outpost. I was a ZoneAlarm user for many years until about two years ago. ZA was getting too bloated for my taste. I've found Comodo to be a superior product. They have a native 64bit version of the firewall, which runs great on Vista x64. I don't use the Defense+ feature, just the firewall (in "Custom Policy Mode").

I load it up, seems to work well. But, I try leaktest. I get a popup, I block it all is good. I then want to unblock it. Thats where the fun begins. The only way I see to unblock it is to delete the rule.

You can edit the rule and change block to allow.

 

[nova2]

agnitum outpost is probably still a viable choice, i've used it in the past, but this newer version of it, 6.5, is probably even better.
On the outpost website the version mentioned is 6.5, when you say version 9, i assume you mean outpost 2009, in which case I know what you mean.

comodo is also a viable choice, but the defense+ feature may need to be disabled, but if you have no problems then you can keep it on. I disabled it because this perl sendkeys module stopped working with it on. Another weird thing with it on is that, all my startup processes that should startup and then exit, are left temporarily running when I view the process list.
defense+ needs more configuration options so I can disable more of it so less of my programs break, maybe not for you, but for me definitely.

there are some other firewalls that can certainly be considered, see the leak test results at matousec, below.

outpost and comodo both do great on the leak tests.
http://www.matousec.com/projects/firewall-challenge/
http://www.google.com/search?h...+leak+test&btnG=Search

 

[egale]

Yes, I meant Outpost Pro 2009.

One reason I liked Zone Alarm is that I didn't have to write rules. I don't understand sometimes what rule I even need to write or what it is. I think I will stick with Outpost for now until it does something I can't live with or something better comes along.