Glasswire Premium

www.snipca.com/44167 Price: £24 a year Free trial: 7 days What you need: Windows 7, 8.1. 10 or 11

Glasswire is an excellent program for monitoring network activity on your computer and checking your bandwidth usage by day, week and month. However, it’s slightly frustrating because it lets you try all its tools for free for seven days, then charges you £24 a year for its Premium plan to keep using many of them.

Annoyingly, this applies to the two new features in its latest version, Glasswire 3.0, which are both potentially useful. Anomaly Detection compares the volume of data currently being used by programs on your PC with the average used by other Glasswire users, so it can identify unusual network traffic.

The second new option, Glasswire Safety Score (see screenshot), rates each active program according to how many other Glasswire users have run it in the past week. This is supposed to highlight uncommonly used tools that could be unsafe, but it’s not completely reliable. For example, we were told that the trustworthy Google Drive app had a worrying score of 10 per cent, because only 198 of 1,863 Glasswire users had recently opened it.

These additions alone don’t justify paying for Glasswire, but you do get several other features in the Premium plan. The most notable are the firewall, which makes it easy to block specific processes or force them to ‘ask to connect’, and the Wi-fi scanner, which tells you the names and IP addresses of all devices connected to your network. You can get alerts when devices connect and disconnect, and even monitor your network remotely.

Even if you stick with the free version of Glasswire, you need to create an account to use the software, which is a bit of a hassle, though you don’t need to enter any payment details until you upgrade.