Review of Spector Pro

Installation & interface

One of the bad things of all Spectorsoft products for the end user is unavailability of the trial versions for their products. That is why we hope our review will have our visitors to understand whether they need this software or not.

The installation requires you to process through approximately 9 screens. What is good about that? After installation is finished and reboot is made an average user doesn't need to configure anything – just to read logs. What is bad? Nine screens are A LOT. Moreover if you are an experienced user and want to configure some extra-functions such as "Reaction to a specific keyword", you will still need to at least create this list of keywords, i.e. configure the program.

As for the interface it is not only easy to use, it also looks great. All the information is smart-grouped and easy to access; menus and buttons are not only pleasant to use, but to look also.

OS support

According to the Spectorsoft website Spector Pro supports Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. We tested it on all these systems except Vista and found no problems in functioning. So, 55 out of 80 points.

Security

Spector Pro's folder is greatly hidden, it is password protected and can be accessed by pressing the hotkey combination. User can also configure both text and the sheer fact of warning message appearing. However ability to access the software by keyword and its configurable self-removal features were left out in the cold. In total – 50 points out of 80.

Monitoring

What necessarily should be said while analyzing this section is that Spector Pro has fully implemented file-activity monitoring – it logs their opening, renaming, removal and copying. Really good! The software also logs all the keys pressed, system log on/off and inactivity time, documents printed. As for the screenshot-related features user can configure their quality, interval of making and whether to make them when user clicks the mouse button. Unfortunately the user cannot choose if he wants to make screenshots of the entire desktop or active window only. What is also strange is that Spector Pro doesn't log the clipboard content that is actually a thing that majority of monitoring software has. 253 out of 300 points in total.

Online monitoring

In few words Spector Pro is perfect at chat conversations logging and not very good at logging URLs. It logs both sides of chat conversations made in all the messengers listed in out testing including Skype, but intercepts URLs visited only in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. One important feature that is also fully implemented in Spector Pro is emails logging ¬– both sent and received emails can be found in log-viewer of Spector Pro. It is 154 points out of 193.

Reports

In this section Spector Pro is good at everything except the remote log delivery – they cannot be sent anywhere or viewed remotely. The rest is brilliant – Spector Pro can be configured to monitor only some of the users or applications, to clean the log-file when it reaches a pre-specified size. User can also see the duration of the logged events and, of course, perform a search. However Spector Pro loses lots of points on inability to view log files remotely and gets 69 out of 150 points.

Other

Spector Pro can react to keywords from a pre-specified list, block access to programs and websites and work on a schedule. The only thing it is missing in this section is translation to other languages. That is why it receives 62 out of 66 points.

The bottom line

Spector Pro by Spectorsoft is easy to use monitoring software with reach functionality. However taking into account its lack of options for remote log-files viewing we recommend it for all the groups of users, but as a tool for home monitoring.

Points total: 643 out of 869