Are free Anti-Virus and Firewalls really good enough?

Are AVG, Avast, Comodo Anti-virus really good enough for us? Same with zonealarm, kerio 4, Comodo for free firewalls? Are are we better paying hard earned cash for NOD32, Norton, McAfee and such like?

Are free Anti-Virus and Firewalls really good enough?matchless

AVG and Kaspersky are actually among the best virus scanners available today.

Norton is good, but in my personal opinion, it's not worth the money, especially when it's competitors are offering a free version of their software.

As far as firewalls go, I don't see much difference between the free and paid versions, other than some free versions are limited to certain tasks.

ZoneAlarm is a good firewall, and does it's job. It hides your identity on the Internet, it stops certain programs you request from accessing the Internet and it stops abusive users from accessing your computer. That is all you would ask from a free firewall, and ZoneAlarm does it very well.

Other firewalls you pay for, however, give you much more advanced features, such as the ability to block certain port ranges, or even only open specific ports, such as 80 for HTTP and 21 for FTP.

If an antivirus has very regular updates, and the updates are reliable, then there is no reason why a paid one can be a better than a free one such as AVG and Kaspersky. The only reasons I would see is if it would scan for viruses, spyware and adware, all in one search, instead of needing two or three applications to do it all.