ZoneAlarm a security, antivirus and firewall brand developed by Zone Labs which was acquired by the CheckPoint Software Technologies Ltd. Checkpoint is an Israeli company founded in 1993 which brought Zone Labs in 2003 for $203 million. ZoneAlarm was initially released in 2000 and has been improving ever since. They now boast their 100% virus free guarantee product, Extreme Security which is a phenomenal product.
Features
As mentioned above, the Firewall suite is a bit of a non-runner, it’s priced the same as the Antivirus and includes 5 less features. Pro Antivirus+ includes a lot of very useful features; Firewall tools, Antivirus and Anti-Spyware, Threat emulation which is really great but this is where Extreme Security really comes into it’s own. It includes all of what Antivirus+ has to offer as well as PC Tune-up tools, an Anti-keylogger, Parental controls and even a device locator. Then again if you’re only looking for an antiviru then is it worth spending the extra cash on these features?
Mobile security comes in a completely different package and only supports iOS. Mac devices aren’t supported whatsoever.
Security
As mentioned briefly, Mac devices aren’t supported at all so we had to jump on a Windows machine to test and funnily enough the software is great - easy to install, the interface is modern and it’s a simple to navigate around the settings and functions.
In terms of protection it can’t really get much better, ZoneAlarm scored 6.0/6.0 in protection from widespread and prevalent malware by AV Test, which is incredible. We’d be happy to run this software on all of our windows machines and feel 100% protected, it’s just a shame ZoneAlarm haven’t developed a solution for Mac and Android devices and that there isn’t a package which includes mobile security along with the PC antivirus.
Support
If you purchase Antivirus+ and Extreme Security you get free customer support, which includes in-depth information, forums and 24 hour live chat. So we put Livechat to the test and it was amazing, we had a customer representative on the other end within 2 minutes! The live chat was very simple to find, as soon as you hit support you’re prompted with live chat, it’s in a different league to a lot of other companies. The form to initiate the live chat was much shorter than competitors too. FAQs, Knowledge Base and Search functions all exist so fair play to ZoneAlarm great products with awesome support.
Affordability
ZoneAlarm’s PC Security has an arsenal of 3 products; Pro Firewall, Pro Antivirus+ and Extreme Security. As you’d expect the products come in different pricing brackets but strangely enough Firewall and Antivirus are priced the same ($39.95 per year for 3 PCs), even though the Antivirus includes the exact same Firewall features as the Firewall standalone suite. So obviously it wouldn’t make much sense purchasing a product for the same price as you can get one with loads of extra features, 5 extra in fact! We think $39.95 for 3 PCs for a year is a great price considering the bunch of features you get and works out at only $13.31 per device if you were to utilise the 3 device license.
Extreme Security, ZoneAlarm’s top of the range suite is an absolute weapon - it guarantees 100% virus free protection! The price does also reflect this though, at $69.95 per year for 3 devices it’s quite far up there on the price scale but when you see what you get for this price then we think the price is justifiable.
