Feature Set:  

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.

Ease of Use:  

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.

Ease of Installation:  

This product is very easy to use and to install

Monitoring Effectiveness:  

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.

Help/Documentation:  

Guardian Monitor has really improved the help section of their product. Even though the help is not context sensitive in the application, it is well done once you have found the topic you are looking for. It has a very good index to easily find what you are looking for. The company also has excellent customer service.

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.