We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. Do you need a straight antivirus utility, or would you prefer one that comes with a firewall component? If the latter, Check Point ZoneAlarm PRO Antivirus + Firewall may be worth a look. It combines a time-tested firewall with antivirus technology licensed from Editors' Choice Kaspersky. However, the premium-level firewall enhancements are too arcane for most users, and the antivirus component earned mediocre scores in our hands-on testing. ZoneAlarm costs $39.95 per year. That price or thereabouts is by far the most common for commercial antivirus products. Bitdefender, Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security, and Webroot are among those clustered around the same price as ZoneAlarm. View All 8 Photos in Gallery You can get more bang for your buck if you spend $59.95 per year, which lets you install protection on five PCs. Kaspersky skips the one-license price and offers three licenses for about the same price as ZoneAlarm's five. That price gets you unlimited licenses to install McAfee on all your Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. As always, I report the list prices; you may pay less. At the time of this writing, for example, Check Point offers the five-license ZoneAlarm for the one-license price. Three large panels dominate the product's main window, which is tinted in serene tones of gray, green, and blue. Check Point must truly love this layout, as its been the standard for eight years or more, and spans the current product line. The names and contents of the panels vary, of course. In this product the panels are: Antivirus & Firewall, Web & Privacy, and Mobility & Data. Shared Features Of course this product gives you all the features that come for free in Check Point ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus+. You can read my review of the free product for complete understanding, but I'll summarize here. Lab Test Results Chart Malware Protection Results Chart Like its free cousin, this product relies on Kaspersky's technology for its malware protection, but you get more Kaspersky when you pay. You can see on the Premium Features settings page that real-time cloud-based scanning, web monitoring, and email monitoring are enabled by default. You can optionally turn on scanning of files on network drives and scanning mailbox files. The paid edition also checks for antivirus updates more often. Those using the free edition can manually check for updates at any time, but automatic updates happen just once per day. The paid edition checks every hour, by default, but you can set it to intervals between 30 minutes and 24 hours. Free users get DIY-style tech support, with FAQs, forums, and knowledge base articles. When you pay, you move up to premium support. That means you go straight to live chat support, with remote-control diagnosis and repair if necessary. While the independent antivirus testing labs heap honors on Kaspersky, those honors don't automatically carry over to ZoneAlarm. The labs make it very clear that results apply only to the actual tested product. That being the case, there's simply not enough information to come up with an aggregate lab results score for ZoneAlarm. Given that the premium product includes antivirus features that the free product lacks, I went back to the beginning and ran my hands-on malware protection test again, with no change in the results. ZoneAlarm detected 86 percent of the samples and scored 8.4 of 10 possible points. That's on the low side, but Kaspersky Anti-Virus tends to score lower in my hands-on tests than in lab tests. For my malicious URL blocking test, I start with the most recent list of malware-hosting URLs supplied by MRG-Effitas. I launch each URL and record whether the product diverts the browser from the URL, eliminates the payload during or immediately after download, or sits idly by doing nothing. ZoneAlarm's free antivirus doesn't include any web-based protection, and it fared poorly in this test, only eliminating 32 percent of the verified malware downloads. Tested with the very latest malware-hosting URLs, the premium edition scored better, defending against 86 percent of the samples, roughly half by blocking access to the URL and half by quarantining the malware payload. That score of 86 percent is decent, but almost half of recent products have done better. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and Trend Micro scored 99 percent, while McAfee and Sophos managed 97 percent. Both the free and paid products include a year of free credit monitoring from partner Identity Guard. I didn't actively evaluate this component because, although free, it requires a credit card to register. The Identity Lock feature aims to prevent transmission of user-defined private data, but it doesn't work on HTTPS pages and failed in testing on unsecured HTTP pages. Limited Phishing Protection The web monitoring feature that steered my test browser away from some malware-hosting URLs operates below the browser level, protecting not just browsers but any web-aware applications from dangerous connections. ZoneAlarm's Web Secure feature, which aims to protect against fraudulent websites and poisoned documents, only works as an extension to Chrome. To test this type of protection, I start by scraping hundreds of recently reported fraudulent URLs from websites that track such phishing attacks. I make sure to include plenty of samples that are too new to be on common blacklists. I launch each simultaneously in four browsers, one protected by the product under testing and the other three using the antiphishing ability baked into Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Discarding any URLs that don't load, or that aren't verifiable phishing pages, I measure the product's raw protection rate, and I also compare its success with that of the three browsers. ZoneAlarm takes an unusual approach to phishing protection. The point of a phishing page is to trick you into entering your credentials for a valid financial site, or other secure site. The page is harmless until the point where you give away your password. That being the case, ZoneAlarm doesn't check for signs of fraud until you click in the username or password field. If it smells trouble, it blocks data entry and offers a clear explanation of what it did. ZoneAlarm detected 76 percent of the verified frauds. Web Secure did most of the heavy lifting, though the web monitoring feature kicked in a few times, for fraudulent pages that also tried to plant malware. That score is barely above the current average; others have been vastly more successful. In particular, McAfee AntiVirus Plus and Kaspersky managed 100 percent protection in their latest tests. And again, Web Secure only works in Chrome, an unusual and bothersome limitation. Threat Extraction When you think of a virus or other malware, you probably picture an executable program of some kind. However, plenty of attacks, in particular targeted attacks, arrive in the form of a gimmicked document. The document itself looks fine; you can open and view it just like any other file. But when you open it, something fishy happens in the background. ZoneAlarm's new threat extraction feature, managed as part of Web Secure, takes over the process of downloading documents. It scans each download for suspicious scripts or other dangerous inclusions, stripping out any problems it finds. You still get to see the original document, minus its dangerous payload. I don't have samples of poisoned document files on hand, so I couldn't see threat extraction in action. However, just by downloading some random PDFs I did get to see the scanning process. On finishing its scan, ZoneAlarm reported no problems, and offered to open the document. Note, though, that like phishing protection, this feature only works in Chrome. Enhanced Firewall Firewall protection in this product goes beyond what you get in ZoneAlarm's free antivirus plus firewall product. However, the enhancements go beyond what an average user would understand. Even the free edition of ZoneAlarm successfully stealthed all ports and resisted Web-based attacks in testing. In addition, it resisted my attempts to disable protection using techniques available to malware coders. It didn't block exploit attacks, but then, it's not meant to. If exploits are your concern, look to Symantec Norton AntiVirus Basic. Even though it doesn't include a full-scale firewall, Norton scored better than any other product in my hands-on exploit protection test. ZoneAlarm relies on a huge online database of known programs to configure the firewall's application control without peppering you with confusing queries. By default, it also lets unknown programs access the internet. If you turn up this feature's protection level, you'll have to decide for yourself whether each new, unknown program should receive network permissions. Turning up the sensitivity also enables a raft of behavior-based detections that flag both good and bad programs. Where the free edition allows you to make broad changes to settings for the Trusted Zone and Public Zone, this paid version offers extremely fine-grained control over what network events are permitted in each zone. Unless you're a network wizard, you shouldn't touch these settings. Likewise, only a firewall expert should consider using the advanced option to manually define firewall rules. The same is true of the advanced features added to application control. The point of these features is to catch programs that try to evade detection, but enabling them results in more pop-up queries that you may not be qualified to answer. For the average user, the paid edition's firewall enhancements are just too complex. See How We Test Security Software There Are Better Choices for Security If you want to use ZoneAlarm's firewall and antivirus combo in a business setting, you must pay; the free edition is licensed only for non-commercial use. Home users should just stick with the free edition. Better still, use one of our Editors' Choice free antivirus products, such as Kaspersky Free. If you're willing to pay, considering going straight to Kaspersky Anti-Virus itself. Along with Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, it's a perpetual winner in third-party lab tests. Symantec Norton AntiVirus Plus also does well in testing, and its Intrusion Prevention System blocks exploit attacks that ZoneAlarm doesn't. Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus is the tiniest antivirus around, and its unusual journaling system promises to reverse any actions by malware, even ransomware. And for the price of five ZoneAlarm licenses, McAfee AntiVirus Plus offers unlimited cross-platform installations. With these five Editors' Choice antivirus tools to choose from, there's no real reason to consider ZoneAlarm. Check Point ZoneAlarm PRO Antivirus + Firewall Bottom Line: Check Point ZoneAlarm PRO Antivirus + Firewall offers advanced features not found in the free edition, but those features are too advanced for most users. In addition, it earned mediocre scores in our hands-on antivirus testing.

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