eConceal Firewall Pro is an advanced and well rounded firewall solution for the home and home office. It includes many features from standard options such as Stealth Mode all the way to real-time bandwidth reporting. It also reports all the active connections coming to and leaving your computer. As many firewall products are beginning to do, eConceal Firewall Pro allows you to perform rule changes at the application level as well as the port level.
The management panel is one place where we found that eConceal Firewall Pro falls behind the pack. While it is very clean and easy to use, some of the options you would expect are not there. This does not take away from the overall greatness that eConceal Firewall Pro presents though, and may actually make the product more appealing to the average user. After all, less is more sometimes.
Feature Set: 
eConceal Firewall Pro offers a plethora of standard features commonly seen in firewall software. However, it does lack some of the extras including virus scanner integration and spyware scanner integration. Overall though, this is a very traditional and powerful firewall program. The features you can expect are things such as Stealth Mode, Port Monitoring, some very powerful log options, and Data/Packet Filtering.It also has a predefined rules database that is quite nice and very usable for the home user, and in many cases, a small office as well.
You will notice immediately that eConceal Firewall Pro doesn’t offer some of the features that have become common place in the market.. Things such as spyware scanning and virus scanner integration are not available. While these would be nice to have, they are not crucial in a standalone firewall product.
eConceal Firewall Pro does have a couple extra features such as popup blocking, webpage scanning and password protection that help to redeem it.
The webpage scanning feature is especially useful feature in the realm of parental control. It will scan a page for any pornographic or offensive materials and block the site if it passes a certain threshold. It worked well for us, but missed on some of the flash based sites that we used to test. If parents notice some of these sites slipping through the system eConceal allows you to add those sites manually within the WebScan Administrator.
The popup blocker was perfect in all the tests we threw at it. It is smart enough to decide which popup windows are good and which are bad. All in all, it was impressive.
Ease of Use:
The webpage scanning feature is especially useful feature in the realm of parental control. It will scan a page for any pornographic or offensive materials and block the site if it passes a certain threshold. It worked well for us, but missed on some of the flash based sites that we used to test. If parents notice some of these sites slipping through the system eConceal allows you to add those sites manually within the WebScan Administrator.
The popup blocker was perfect in all the tests we threw at it. It is smart enough to decide which popup windows are good and which are bad. All in all, it was impressive.
Ease of Installation:
The installation of eConceal Firewall Pro was fast and simple. It seemed lean and mean from the beginning and did not disappoint during the install phase. Installation took less than one minute and only required one reboot.
Reliability:
eConceal Firewall Pro is very reliable. It blocked every attack we threw at it while still allowing us to use my computer effectively. The popup blocker was also very effective. In fact, it was perfect.
The WebScan feature was a little less powerful, but still worked to a large degree. It missed some sites that were based on Flash technology, but caught all but one of the non-flash sites.
It was also effective in blocking most of the searches we tried on Google that had to do with pornography and other offensive subjects.
Help/Support:
Support options for the product are pretty standard. Online chat using either Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger is available as well as a stocked knowledgebase and phone support. They also have an email support option.
One thing we did notice is that the help option in the program refused to open. However, the online help was more than enough to offset this small issue.
Summary:
eConceal Firewall Pro is a great product. The lean machine style that just screams from this product is a great relief in a sector so filled with fluff. While it may not have some of the additional options that come with some of the better known names, it does protect you just as well as any of the others on the market. Where it lacks in extra features such as spyware scanning and virus scanner integration, it is very strong in its simplicity. The predetermined rules that it comes with are better than many others we have seen.We especially liked the parental control features. They were successful in blocking most offensive sites we tried to access while they were in effect.
Overall, eConceal Firewall Pro is a great product that will keep your computer and your family safe from all the bad and offensive things out there on the net.
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