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Agnitum Outpost Security Suite Pro
Price: £27 inc VAT for one user - £55 inc VAT for five users

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 03/01/2008
Featured in magazine:
Issue 178
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: Agnitum
Web Address: www.agnitum.com


Like ESET, whose Smart Security Home we reviewed last issue, Agnitum is a company best known for a standalone security product that is now moving into the security-suite territory dominated by the likes of Symantec and McAfee. Outpost Pro has a good reputation as a successful, powerful, paid-for firewall – can the Outpost Security Suite maintain this high standard of quality?

Features:
As with other relative newcomers to the suite market, Agnitum's product focuses on the core security programs. There's a firewall to stop hackers, anti-virus and anti-spyware to scan for malware, anti-spam to clean up your email (but only if you're using a Microsoft email program) and a heuristic, behaviour-based host-protection system. It also uses a blacklist to warn you off visiting potentially harmful websites. However, it falls short on features like network protection and parental control.

Performance:
The Outpost firewall is well known for offering superior protection (see www.matousec.com for some impressive third-party leak test results), as you'd expect from a paid-for service. It's also had anti-spyware, host-protection and web-blacklist software tied in with it for some time. The new addition here is anti-virus software. This pulls regular virus definitions from Virus Buster (www.virusbuster.hu/en) and ties it in with Outpost's existing anti-spyware scanning engine. Virus Buster has a fair, if not brilliant, record with third-party testers Virus Bulletin (www.virusbtn.com), but its only published failure this year was for a false positive (Virus Buster incorrectly suggested that a legitimate file might be contaminated with a virus).

Ease of Use:
Outpost has required a degree of technical knowledge from its users in the past. While the situation has improved a little, with sliders for setting general-protection levels and other user-friendly elements, it's still got a long way to go to compete with rivals like Symantec and McAfee on ease of use. If you're more technically adept, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, with information like a list of open firewall ports accessible with a single click. For the average user, this is just a meaningless list of words and numbers, but if you know what you're doing it could provide enough information to alert you to an intrusion so you can stop it in its tracks.

Value for money:
The pricing is very competitive – at £27 it's about half the price of most of its rivals, but only comes with a single licence for installing on one PC. The multiple licence version is more in line with the rest of the industry at £55, but comes with a generous five-user licence (most others stick to three) should you have a house full of PCs. There are also savings to be made if you're willing to commit to two years.

More Firewalls reviews:

• Symantec Norton 360 Version 2.0
• Microsoft Windows Live OneCare 2.0
• Trend Micro Internet Security Pro 2008
• Agnitum Outpost Security Suite Pro
• ESET Smart Security Home