Editor’s Note: Guardian Monitor has been removed from viewing as part of the Monitoring Software Review site because the product's website is not maintained and no product support is available. You can still read our original review below, but TopTenREVIEWS is no longer updating this product’s information. To view side-by-side comparisons of other products in this category, please visit our Monitoring Software Review site.
Guardian Monitor is a very good product. It is easy to use and extremely easy to install. Guardian Monitor offers a Standard version and a Professional version, the main difference being the email alerts function. This review is based on the Standard version.
Guardian Monitor does capture the text in both incoming and outgoing emails. Occasionally, it would miss the capture of both incoming and outgoing emails, but most of the time it did work. You can also see both sides of the conversations in chat. It supports AOL 7 & 8, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and ICQ lite.
Guardian Monitor also has another interesting feature that the competitors don't offer; it records the downloading of P2P (peer-to-peer) files. Typically P2P files are any type of files that are shared by Internet users. The standard edition doesn't have email alerts (activity reports that are sent to a specified email address), but the professional version does.
The product is very easy to use. The user interface is very good, but not quite as intuitive as a few of the other products. For the average user, this product will be easy to use.
This product is very easy to use and to install
It has a very good stealth mode feature. If you don't want anyone to know the application is running in the background, the stealth mode allows you to completely hide the application. You can't even see the application running when you display the Windows Task Manager. It is easy to re-display the application with certain hotkey keystrokes that you can customize for easy remembering.
Overall, Guardian Monitor is a very good product for getting an understanding of your children's computer activity. You may want to consider purchasing the Guardian Monitor Professional version to get the email alerts function. Guardian Monitor does offer a money back guarantee.
