Zonealarm is one of the best, went out of fashion for a while partly due to a few mistakes as did most of the security softwares, the difference was that zonealarm picked their feet up and have been almost impeccable since. Their partnership with kaspersky has worked out very well.
People don't understand how the economic/business model of freeware works and so think its no good because its free but the figures say it all
CLICKY inside the top 1000 companies for profit and market value.
I've only ever had one thing slip through zonealarm and it was undetected by everything else as well (including malwarebytes) I found it but there was no information on the net - I spotted it by fluke because it had a filename that popped up in a directory name search that I had programmed incorrectly, its location and name were very suspicious and obviously designed not to be found. Zonealarm detected it two days later, others were still not detecting it months later.
The free version has got limited amount of user control but more than enough for someone that isn't prepared to adjust settings manually on a regular basis.
Avira is ridiculously slow when you switch on all the options which are necessary for reasonable protection.
AVG I gave up on with ongoing compatibility problems for years on end.
Norton was a joke, slow and useless
McAfee went from one of the best to one of the worst, three different infections sailed through in a month at work.
Some of these have possibly picked up their performance by now but until zonealarm lets me down I have no reason to look around.
