Sygate Personal Firewall Pro Reviewer's Comments

Sygate Personal Firewall Pro by Sygate Technologies, Inc. has potential. This firewall can stop intruders from hacking into your system, and that's the point with a firewall. But Personal Firewall Pro doesn't offer all the perks that our top ranked products do to block ads, popups and other undesirable content online. Sygate Personal Firewall is also a challenge for beginners.

Feature Set:  

Sygate's Personal Firewall control panel has an informative graph that details incoming and outgoing traffic as it is blocked. The program also offers an attack history graph, helpful for tracking intrusion trends. Sygate Personal Firewall Pro's control panel allows you to view and manage running applications so you can instantly stop a data transmission if you want.

Sygate has some advanced firewall features, but these are best suited to experienced computer users since understanding them requires extra reading. For example, Sygate Personal Firewall Pro is one of the only software firewalls that will let you assign specific port rules and time restrictions, but doing so is challenging.

Ease of Use:  

Sygate Personal Firewall is not as easy to use as our higher-ranked products. This firewall is for those with plenty of computer experience.

Ease of Installation:  

This product is easy to install.

Reliability:  

Sygate Personal Firewall Pro did well on several firewall tests, but Sygate did allow cookies onto my computer. (Cookies are identifying bits of data stored on your computer by websites you visit.)

The firewall also failed the referrer test. The referrer test checks to see if the firewall allows general computer information (such as your operating system, browser, location, IP address) to be seen by others online.

But Sygate Personal Firewall Pro protected the computer from Trojan viruses, kept the system stealth (kept personally identifying information hidden) and successfully checked for and protected open ports (doorways for data in and out of the computer). Sygate Personal Firewall also passed our exploit test—the program responded well to unknown data that was designed to slow or crash the computer.

Help/Support:  

Sygate Personal Firewall Pro's help documentation is excellent. You can search for a topic or read the outline provided by Sygate. They also offer several levels of tech support online with a FAQ and tech tips section, but some levels of support require registration and a password.

Summary:  

Sygate Personal Firewall Pro may be too difficult for beginners. Learning to operate Sygate Personal Firewall Pro properly takes time and work.

For example, when Sygate Personal Firewall Pro sends you a message about blocking a particular website or application, the program doesn't provide any detailed information about the process being blocked. Because of this, it's difficult for beginners to make the right decision.