Sygate Or Outpost

I am currently using Outpost Pro 2.6 on XP Home SP2. My license is coming due shortly and I'm thinging about switching to Sygate free. Outpost is ok, but I'm not that crazy about it that I wouldn't switch to something else. It's probably hard to compare a paid for firewall to a free one, but still would like to know if Sygate would be a good choice, or stick with Outpost. Any opinions?

 

I think you can continue to use Outpost 2.6 beyond the renewal date, but if you want upgrades then you have to pay the annual fee in your case. You might go ahead and test Sygate for a while before deciding. You can probably renew Outpost at any time (I'm guessing). Both firewalls are pretty good, each has a few shortcomings. My own opinion on those two would be that I don't think Sygate Free (or Pro for that matter) would be particularly any better than Outpost Pro.

 

Both are a great firewalls, and they have its pros and cons, but Outpost Pro use less cpu resources than Sygate Free, and for me this is a great advantage...

 

Sygate will use less resources and less memory than Outpost if you were to turn off its detailed logging feature, otherwise, Outpost is renewed way more frequently than Sygate. Also why not check out ZA as well.

 

Arup,

I tried your suggestions in Sygate, but I didn't see any significative change...

 

I used to use Sygate Pro until very recently, but I didn't much care for the additional 3 minutes or so it was adding to my boot time. As the only vaguely meaningful response in the Sygate forum to this problem had been to uninstall/reinstall, I decided to take the opportunity to try out a different firewall, so I tried out Kerio, and was very impressed. The free version of Kerio gives me all I require and seems - unlike Sygate - to have been designed in this millennium. So while I still have more than 6 months of my license for Sygate Pro to run, I prefer to use Kerio free.

 

I was a sygate pro user, switched to outpost because of loopback vulnirability, I wonder if this has been fixed or not?

 

Loopback or proxy vulnerability still exists, Sygate Pro or free consumed aroudn 15mb on my system and I had logging turned on, compared to that, Outpost consumed slightly more at 17mb on the very same system.

 

Outpost is superior to Sygate when leak tests are taken in to account.

 

I'm talking about CPU usage...

 

Another thing to prefer Outpost over Sygate

 

If leak tests were the Yardstick, Kerio 2.15 would fail, latest Jetico passes all the leak tests out there, CHX would never even be considered, thankfully there is more to a firewall than leaktests, Sygate has good SPI engine and lets you write your own rules, the best part is that even the free version supports ICS, the pro version has features like easily upgradeable IDS signature, Anti Spoofing, Anti OS fingerprinting as well as totally stealthed browsing where your browsers identity is not available to anyone on the net. All this feature truly still make it a good firewall to consider and there still remains a strong following to Sygate, having said that, it sorely needs an upgrade and has been lagging behind that department lately.

VC,

If you mean CPU usage, I had no such issues with Sygate pro or free version.

 

The CPU usage is not so high, but it always consume between 1-10% of CPU, even if it we not transfer any data throught the net...

 

VC,

Thats really strange that there is CPU usage even when idle, are you on a LAN by any chance?

 

Yes...

On my PC, Outpost use less CPU usage than Sygate, and NetVeda use even less resources than Outpost...

 

Agreed about NetVeda, it is the lowest among the newer group of firewalls, the only one that beats it is Kerio 2.15

 

Yep, NetVeda is the firewall that I know that use minor resources...

I would like to see in Sygate the loopback issue fixed and the cpu usage improved, because I really like this firewall...

 

VC - I can confirm your CPU usage problem. Sygate uses more cpu than ANY other firewall I've tried. On my Win2k system, when idling, cpu usage is typically 0 (zero). With Sygate installed idling, it runs around 2-4%. I too prefer to avoid Sygate for this reason, although in general I think it is a pretty good firewall otherwise. The proxy issue doesn't affect me. Also, in Sygate I do not have packet logging turned on, so that isn't the problem. I think it just uses more resources than all the others..

 

While witholding browser/OS information may be useful for some people, it is far from offering "totally stealthed browsing". Assuming you mean hiding activity from your ISP, this would mean using an encrypted connection to an anonymising proxy service (think Tor or JAP) and really is outside the remit of any firewall.

 

I think Outpost because Sygate still hasn't fixed the loopback problem.

Also, with Outpost, you get to use thead blocking feature, DNS Caching and many other features.

FYI, I'm using Kerio, because Outpost used too much CPU for me.

 

I used ZA free for a while. I was using ZA free 5.5 when when Comcast gave us customers a connection speed upgrade. When I would run the speed test at dslreports, it wouldn't show the new upgraded speeds. I decided to give ZA 4.5 a try and speed tests showed the new upgraded speeds. I didn't want to use an older version of ZA, I figured newer was better protection, and since I already had an Outpost Pro license, I started using Outpost. Anybody else have that kind of a problem with ZA 5.5?

From what I'm reading here, maybe I'll give Kerio a try. I can always go back to Outpost.

 

My experience with Outpost was pretty good compared to Kerio. Outpost didn't use any cpu here. In fact, Kerio seemed to use far more ram as well. I'm speaking of the Kerio 4 line, not 2.1.5.

 

It's funny that you had speed problems with ZA. I have no speed probs with ZA 5.5 here, however, I recently used Outpost for a week and DID have some slowdown issues with Outpost Pro 2.6. I otherwise found Outpost to be excellent, however, I am now running ZAP due to the slowdown problem I had with OP. I could actually see web pages loading slowly in FF with OP, but not with other firewalls. Don't know why either... Seems like everyone has a different experience..

 

The weird thing was that I didn't notice any slow downs when loading web pages and going from site to site while using ZA 5.5. It was only when I ran the speed tests. When Comcast upgraded to 4000mbps, the speed tests would show I was only getting about 2800mbps while using ZA 5.5. When I went to ZA 4.5, the speed tests showed I was getting my 4000mbps. Maybe it is something about those speed tests that ZA 5.5 didn't like.

 

Interesting indeed.. I just went to toast.net/performance and ran the speed test with ZAP 5.5 (latest) and got 3612 and thereabouts several times. That's about typical for me. No problems with speed here.

You gotta use what works best though, regardless...