Refog Personal Monitor Review And Features Overview

Refog Personal Monitor Review

Very functional and easy to use keylogger. Will come in handy if you are interested in home surveillance or parental control. Can be also used for employee monitoring. Available in 12 languages. In our testing, it gets 934 out of possible 1172 points.

New version of REFOG Personal Monitor supports Windows 10!

Advantages:

Multi-OS support
Grouping of the intercepted information into categories
Nice-looking, user-friendly interface
Very good file-activity monitoring
Multi-language interface
Good URLs interception
Strong visual surveillance
Both sides interception in messengers
Microphone Audio Recording
Webcam Capture Recording
Real-Time Remote Viewing

Disadvantages:

Not enough stealthiness level
A bulk of pre-installation windows to follow

Today we are writing about REFOG Personal Monitor. The primary usage keys, identified by REFOG Personal Monitor developer, is home computer's monitoring and parental control. But in our test all products are tested according to a single method, so there are no corrections for the intended usage range.

The installation process begins with choosing the language of installation. There are four languages to choose among: English, German, French and Spanish. The next screen is EULA screen. After accepting the license agreement and clicking "Next", we see "Information" screen. After reading the information about the program and choosing the folder to install it to, choosing whether to install shortcuts and help file, we confirm our choice in the last installation screen and the installation process begins. After it is finished, we choose "Launch REFOG Personal Monitor" and click "Finish" button.

The next thing that appears on our monitor is a screen asking us to order the full version of the program, register it or to continue a three days’ trial version. We choose the second variant and put in the information kindly provided by REFOG team. After registration is finished, we see the Configuration Wizard. Next five screens give us an opportunity to choose whether we want to monitor all users, what exactly we want to monitor, allows us to configure e-mail sending of log-files, choose whether to hide the program or not, and finally to choose if we want the program to update itself automatically.

Finally, we see the program interface and we must admit that it was worth waiting. It has all the features that the pleasant-to-look-at product should have: grouping of monitored information and settings into categories, abundance of nice icons and usability. Another strong point of the program interface is its availability in 12 languages (English, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian). Very well!

As for the monitoring capabilities, this keystroke recorder also has a lot of qualities to boast of — it intercepts both sides in all chat messengers, except Skype, mouse-clicks and URLs in four of five browsers (IE, Mozilla, Opera and Chrome). It is able to perform all the operations with screenshots and log users' log off time. It is strange that it is unable to log the log on time, though… We should also add the following to the strong points of REFOG Personal Monitor: "Alarms" features, that correspond to the "Reaction to a specific keyword" point in our table, an ability to choose the users to monitor, automated clearance of the log file and an ability to set maximum size of log files for each user. The keylogger also has good, though not great, stealthiness level, as we were able to find its folder by the means, available to an average user. Few previous versions of REFOG Personal Monitor were bad at file activity monitoring, but this one is capable of monitoring of all the file activities, except creation of the files.

The good news is that the product has been improved with new features added. One of them is Microphone Audio Recording, which makes it possible to intercept and register the sounds from around via microphone - so the live voice conversations near the PC will also be saved. Another new important function is Webcam Capture Recording – at any moment the owner can take photos to see what is happening near his computer. The added Real-Time Remote Viewing ensures constant monitoring, i.e. the process of checking the activities on one’s computer can now be implemented in the online mode.

However, like all the products this one has its own disadvantages. The first one is, like it was already mentioned, a bulk of pre-installation steps to follow, the second one, is interception of only one side of chat conversations made in Skype. We are also a bit disappointed that such a great and functional program still doesn't intercept outgoing and incoming e-mail messages. Though we hope that this feature will be added soon.

Summing it up, we can say that for the purposes, that the developer of keystroke logger identifies as primary (monitoring usage of a home computer and parental control), this product works great. This computer monitoring software will come in handy for absolutely all the groups of users, except those who pay a lot of attention to complete stealthiness of the program.

Review by Keylogger.Org Team

Monitoring Software Features

Monitoring this group analyzes what monitoring functions the products has, such as keystroke, clipboard, file-activity, etc monitoring.

System logon (password)

Typewriter keys pressed

System keys pressed

Created files

Deleted files

Copied files

Renamed files

Opened files

Clipboard

Started applications

System logon

System logoff

Printer queue

Mouse clicks

Sounds

System inactivity time

Screenshots

Adjustable screenshot frequency

Adjustable screenshot quality

Desktop or window shot option

On-mouse-click screenshots

Microphone Audio Recording

Webcam Capture Recording

Online Monitoring the group that reflects the availability of the functions to monitor users’ online activity, such as URLs visited, 2-side chat conversations interception and emails sent/received.

URLs opened in Microsoft Edge

URLs opened in Firefox

URLs opened in Safari

URLs opened in Opera

URLs opened in Chrome

Client-based emails logging

Screenshots of visited web-sites

ICQ chats (2-side)

Skype chats (2-side)

WhatsApp chats (2-side)

Viber chats (2-side)

Social network monitoring

Security this group shows how hidden the product is and what self-protection mechanisms it has.

Invisible program folder

Password protection

Accessed by keyword

Accessed by hotkey

Configurable self-removal

Configurable warning message

Hidden in Task Manager

Hidden startup entries

Secured emails

Pre-configured Installation

Reports the group that basically analyzes the convenience of the intercepted information reading, including not only the ways to filter and show it, but also to deliver it remotely.

Monitoring certain users option

Events duration

Specified programs monitoring

Search by keywords

Several days report building

Logs sent via email

Logs sent via FTP

Logs sent via LAN

Logs copied to a portable device

Maximum log-files' size

Automated clearance of log-files

Logs sent via Dropbox

Other other functions that cannot be part of any of the other groups listed, though a still very important such as parental control functions, languages, reactions to specific keywords, etc.