AaronXP, Crispy, Doggie - why do you like Kerio? I'd never even heard of it before this thread. I'm using ZoneAlarm Pro v4.0 right now. I'm always interested in trying new things. Maybe I will install Kerio Personal Firewall2 v2.1.5 the next time I reformat. Please tell us the reasons you choose it over other firewalls.

For starters, I didn't like the new GUI that was introduced in ZoneAlarm 3.x, I used to use ZoneAlarm before then switched over to Kerio. ZoneAlarm's handling of ICS was terrible, never worked 100% whereas Kerio does the job. Kerio also makes precise rules on applications and does them better than ZoneAlarm. One example is when I discovered edonkey uses a wider port range than those mentioned on the edonkey site, ZoneAlarm blocked those outgoing requests, but with Kerio you can set edonkey to use TCP/UDP on *all* ports.

More good features of Kerio is that it gets MD5 checksums on files and alerts you if its been tampered with, and also shows you a detailed list of current open connections to the Internet, and their speeds (no more netstat in command prompt!)

Overall Kerio or ZA ,which is better?

wait, how about Sygate?

it seems that there is lots of downloads for ZA in download.com .So which one?.. I wanna get one..

ZoneAlarm got a lot of PR from Steve Gibson who recommended it from his GRC site, hence the high number of downloads. You should try out all the freeware firewalls before sticking to one. Those are ZoneAlarm, Kerio, Sygate, and Outpost.

Please use the edit button instead of three seperate replies in future!