Firewall face-off: Tiny V5 vs Kerio V4

Both are in beta. I’ve been running Tiny Personal Firewall V5.0 beta for the past few weeks and like it a lot — it appeals to my geeky side cause I get to configure rules and roles and filters and application capabilities and stuff like that. For example, you can define a set of authorizations as a “group” and you can assign an application to one of the groups, giving that application all of those authorizations. You can move apps between groups, thereby modifying the authorizations of all of those apps in exactly the same way. Authorizations come in several different flavors: IP addresses, port definitions, file/directory access (read, write, create and delete) and registry key access (like file/directory access).

Kerio V4 beta 5, on the other hand, is a lot simpler. There are applications. You can authorize apps to start, start others and modify (don’t really know what this is yet … the help is less than helpful) and access the network in various ways (by port and/or IP or by network group). There is also an intrusion detection module with high- medium- and low-priority intrusions (why? dunno … yet).

Of course, both can display the active connections. Kerio groups the display by application (with no way to undo the grouping) whereas Tiny has no grouping, just a list … which you’re supposed to be able to sort.

Right now I’m WAAAYYY in favor of Tiny but I just switched. Gotta give Kerio time to grow on me.