What is your opinion of Comodo products?

[hugoga]

I use Comodo firewall from a couple of years and all is working fine until now (so it seems), but I read that some people are not so happy with Comodo, I would like to know the community opinion about Comodo Firewall and Comodo Antivirus (I was thinking of use his antivirus, but I don't have any reference of his effectiveness)

Regards

[Medico]

I am very happy with the Win 7 Windows firewall and MS MSE AV/AM app. I tried Comodo a while back and felt it's user interface was not very intuitive. I have not tried it in a while, but since Windows and MS have free alternatives that work well I do not feel the urge to try it again.

[Deadeye81]

Hi Hugo,

My son made a gift of Windows XP Pro 64 bit edition to me some time back. He did not want it. Most folks never wanted that one! I installed it on an Acer laptop that came with Vista Basic, just to try it out. I settled on Comodo Firewall at the time because it was one of the very few firewalls compatible with a 64 bit OS. I have never had a problem with Comodo Firewall. It has demanded a little more attention than some, but it has been effective for me.

I have never used the Comodo AV. I have been hooked on Avast! Home Free Edition for the last two years, and more recently I have been using Microsoft Security Essentials on one PC and have been content with it as well.

[SpiritWind]

Hi Hugo :

For quite a long time, I have avoided all Comodo products, due to their
Adware Past ( I do not "forgive" very easily when it comes to security
programs ). Last I heard, their antivirus program was very poor and they
do NOT submit to "Testing" by my favorite Independent Researchers at
http://www.av-comparatives.org , which makes me suspicious .

At One time on the Avast Antivirus Online Support Forums there was
quite a long Thread about Comodo, and the most interesting Comments
were by a former Poster on the Online Comodo Forums .

I choose Avast over Microsoft Security Essentials primarily because of
the excellent Avast Online Support Forums . In the latest
"Retrospective/proactive" Testing done by the AV Comparatives, MSE
was only 3% higher than Avast, and for that difference I rather have the
excellent Support forums .

[Medico]

In defense of MSE, thanks for the info on it's find rate. The support forums are only needed when problems arise. In the 6 months or so since I switched all 3 of my PC's, my 2 daughters PC's, my 2 son-in-laws PC's, my granddaughters PC and my mothers PC to MSE none of us have had to contact the MSE support forums. Perhaps we are all just lucky, but as I said I love MSE. It runs very quietly in the background, only pops up when an unwanted file is found, updates signatures every day, and generally does what it is designed to do. Thanks to MS for both an excellent OS (Win 7) and an excellent AV/AM app.

[hammondmike]

I have used Comodo AV and Firewall for a couple of years. It was highly rated, and for Home use the price is right: Free. For business use, their paid programs offer more bells and whistles. Comodo Back Up is a Free back up program which images the Hard Drive, but the present version does not do incremental back ups. When the next version emerges, I will use it and dump my paid-for imaging software, which does not work on Win7 in its present iteration. Comodo has a Free Cleaner which is very powerful, but use with caution as you can disable your computer if you do not use it correctly.

[hugoga]

Thank you all for your opinions

[MarkSJ]

Comodo Firewall pulled an adware stunt and changed my dns settings from automatic lookup to their dns service. That disabled access to the settings of my router which uses javascript through my browser. Every time I tried to access the settings of my browser I would be redirected to comodo's website as comodo's dns couldn't find it on the web. Needles to say I uninstalled it (I could have just fixed the dns settings top automatic but comodo pissed me off with their arrogance.) My computer also runs much faster without Comodo.

[hugoga]

Comodo Firewall pulled an adware stunt and changed my dns settings from automatic lookup to their dns service...

This is not forced, it's an option of Comodo that you select at installation time, however I agree that the choice should be off by default.

Until now I only used the Firewall and Defense+, and I must admit that I'm very happy with it in those tasks, especially for his advanced options.

[kermidge]

For a free and effective software firewall I think it's hard to beat Comodo. I've used it for about four years, starting on XP Home, XP Pro, and finally Vista HP 64-bit. Don't have Win7, didn't use its firewall when trying out the RC as a vm.

[genej313]

I've been using "just" the firewall for a couple years, dumped Zone Alarm for it, it has worked perfectly for me, nothing has gotten past it and as someone pointed out the price is right, free. For my purposes it is an outstanding product. :^) gene

[hugoga]

Finally a reference to Comodo AV!

In the Windows Secrets Newsletter of this week Robert Vamosi show a reference to an analisis of Comodo AV made by PCWorld:
New findings update WS Security Baseline

In base of this Comodo AV is not recomendable as antivirus solution, at least for now (they just test the AV). I'll continue with his firewall, which is classified as outstanding in other tests.

[DavidFB]

I began using Comodo Firewall (not AV) a few years ago and have been very happy with it until recently. It came well recommended, gave me the level of control I wanted, and once I'd approved various programs, stayed out of the way.

Recently however, it's begun giving me grief on new software installs. It used to be that when you told it this was an "install or update" it would then let the rest of the process complete. But now it stops and asks for every component, even in install mode. This causes most installs to fail. Thus, I have to shut down Comodo to install software - not the behaviour I find desirable. (I do also have a hardware firewall) I have begun looking at other options. As I'm planning a new Win7 system, I may just go with that.

[Medico]

Recently however, it's begun giving me grief on new software installs. It used to be that when you told it this was an "install or update" it would then let the rest of the process complete. But now it stops and asks for every component, even in install mode. This causes most installs to fail. Thus, I have to shut down Comodo to install software - not the behaviour I find desirable. (I do also have a hardware firewall) I have begun looking at other options. As I'm planning a new Win7 system, I may just go with that.

Check out MSE a free AV/AM from MS. Very good reviews, tests and highly regarded in these forums.

[bobprimak]

For Windows Vista or Windows 7, I would not recommend any third-party firewall, but I would recommend a third-party interface to help with the Windows Outbound Advanced Firewall settings.

I run Windows XP Pro, SP3, and Comodo was my second choice, after the Zone Alarm Firewall began getting increasingly unfavorable reviews and test results a couple of years ago. The Comodo Firewall is excellent, and causes me no system performance hit on my old single-core Pentium 4 processor in my laptop. Their Antivirus I would not touch with a ten-foot polecat.

I also do allow Comodo to redirect traffic through their DNS service, because this offers many of the security advantages of a VPN or Proxy Service, but is free of cost. And Defense Plus, even though it generates a lot of pop-ups at first, is in my experience manageable once trained. And highly informative once I got to know what all those processes and programs on my computer really are. I use the predefined Rule Sets to classify processes which generate pop-ups, and this reduces the remaining pop-up alerts by over 80 percent in my experience. Everything can be configured from within the pop-up balloons. Zone Alarm was never so easily configured to reduce pop-ups without reducing firewall defense levels.

I think this thread is not the place to argue about which antivirus is best, except when the AV is being offered alongside a firewall. For the record, my active AV is Avast Free Edition, and I scan with Malwarebytes and Super Antispyware Free Editions for second-opinions. Super Antispyware has caught some rootkits not found by Malwarebytes, and Malwarebytes has caught some suspicious files not idientified as such by Super Antispyware, so I like this mix. But I am not arguing that these are the best products out there -- only that they do a very good job in combination. And without conflicting with each other.

And yes, Comodo pushes adware, but it is avoidable if you choose to do a selective install, which you must do anyway to get the firewall without the AV. Just learn to uncheck the boxes, as with any freeware installation. Most freeware has similar "offers" checked off by default, so Comodo is no different, IMHO. This is not a reason to avoid the best free firewall out there for Windows XP.