Net Nanny is probably the most recognized name in the internet filtering business. Despite that recognition, however, it's a sub-par monitor compared to the competition.

If you're simply trying to clean up the internet for kids under the age of ten, then you might be able to get away with this software. But if you have older kids, forget it.

It's cheap, easy and effective for young kids, but aside from that, especially when older kids enter the picture, its weaknesses begin to show. Really, it does not do much more than block, but in that capacity--in terms of policing the internet, it’s a great value for money.

  Features

Net Nanny breaks with industry protocol a bit and lets you view their secret list of blocked sites, which is very nice, but they donít group the sites into categories.

This oversight makes the list a bit daunting for parents who would like to modify it to more accurately meet their individual needs.

Also, while Net Nanny has the capability to scan documents and websites for vulgar language and replace the offending words with the pound sign, we found that offensive material slipped through much more than we would have thought. The worst offenses came from images, which are not filtered at all by Net Nanny.

One feature that we did like was the time control features, and the ability to completely block entire categories of web content such as newsgroups. By doing so, you can eliminate some of the more embedded objectionable content that kids often stumble across.

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  Ease of use

This is where Net Nanny stands out. With a simple interface, and a setup process that lets you easily establish a default user account, this kind of basic, stripped down application may save some potential frustration for parents who have recently started using computers or who just want something in place quickly.

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  Monitoring effectiveness

While their activity report is fairly detailed, covering the number of online sessions, Web sites visited, files traded, and filter violations, the programís over all effectiveness as a monitoring application is low because it has no ability to capture screen shots of activity.

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  Accessibility of information

You can set the program to email you activity reports daily, weekly, or monthly. Putting aside our objection to emailed activity reports for its huge inherent (in)security problems, we were glad to see that direct access to the monitored computer wasn't necessarily required after setup was done. (You will need to access it often to adjust the blocked sites though.)

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  Customer Support

Their customer support was good, offering free support by email or a $19.95 per incident phone support option. We wish more companies offered phone support--even when they charge for it as NetNanny does.