Your thoughts...Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro vs ZA PRO

Just curious as I have ZA PRO...

How is Outpost on resources, protection and ease of use compared to ZA pro?

TIA!!!

 

Personally, I have found OP to be much better at managing resources, security is about the same although I prefer OP's setup and there a few more things you can tighten up a tad bit easier on OP than ZAP. ZAP has a memory leak which uses up quite a bit of memory on my systems, OP never seems to be more 5-10MB of RAM where as ZAP (ZASS actually) never got below 24MB on my systems at least. Firewalls tend to go the same as AV's, you need to trial a few and see which works the best on your system and what you feel comfortable setting up and using. Both these two will give you excellent protection though as I said I tend to lean towards Outpost.

 

I have used both. I like OutPost better. It has been a while since I have used ZA Pro. Since I am satisfied with OutPost I see no reason to go back to ZA. For me better tweaking of settings. Also OP seems to be more informative about what it is doing. seems to give more instruction when a box pops up for those of us with some but less then others in experience and understanding about firewalls. Resource useage between the two I'll leave that one to others.

 

ZA Pro is using 11 megs of ram only for me even after a whole night of using BitTorrent.

 

Count yoursefl lucky then, ZA is notorius for problems with P2P programs, True Vector usually crashes or consumes huge amounts of memory when handling such demanding traffic. ZL forums are full of complaints about just this issue.


Note; the latter versions do not seem to become as unstable as previous versions do. 5.0 and 5.1 were particularly bad for this.

To get an accurrate resource usage you must add the use of memory for zlclient and vsmon. I find it hard to believe both are less than 11 megs each much less combined. Especially while using bittorrent.

 

vsmon.exe is only taking up 9-10mb on my machine while zlclient.exe is only taking up 2+mb. At the very most, the total RAm used goes up to around 15+mb. Its only the startup which takes a total up about 24mb but then drops to around 11mb within half an hour. If I use BT, it only rises to about 15mb at the very most.

 

As I said count yourself lucky, My experience was not the same, vsmon was always in the 24-30 range and going up into the 60-80 range during heavy use, somtimes even consuming all available RAM and causing lock ups. That is one of the reasons I suggested that the OP trial both to see which works best on his/her system. The reverse may be true and Outpost may not be stable, ya never know until you try it.