X3Watch and Covenant Eyes – What are the key differences?
Porn Sunday. Porn and Pancakes. Porn Pastors. These are some of the buzz words associated with the ministry of XXXchurch. Often we hear about the ministry of XXXchurch here at the Covenant Eyes office. This ministry, started by Mike Foster and Craig Gross, has brought issues like pornography temptation and addiction to the forefront in the church like never before. XXXchurch has championed this cause in churches and has given resources to pastors and church leaders to help those fighting temptation. (Mike Foster, who is no longer with XXXchurch, has a website called “The Porn Talk.” It is a great resource for parents to learn practical information about Internet pornography and steps for talking to kids about it.)
XXXchurch offers a free accountability software program called X3watch. Both X3 and Covenant Eyes programs generate reports for accountability partners to view. We often get questions about the differences between the programs.
This is not intended to be “bashing” XXXchurch or their product. I’ve let the customers speak for themselves by linking to their personal blogs. I hope this post will present some simple but key differences between X3 and Covenant Eyes accountability programs.
I recommend that people do their homework before going with any program, especially when a person’s integrity is on the line.
For instance, I read one blog written by a man who put X3watch on his desktop and Covenant Eyes on his laptop and compared their services.
Despite the fact that X3watch was free, why did he end up going with Covenant Eyes?
1. Report Readability. “X3Church’s logging is much less tidy than Covenant Eyes. . . . The report for Covenant Eye is concise and clear, easy for your accountability partner to scan in a few minutes.” Because of our easy-to-read scoring, accountability partners can quickly review the reports.
2. Report Accessibility. Accountability partners “can also review reports online.” One of the drawbacks of X3watch is the reports are stored entirely on the user’s computer (which can then be erased). Because Covenant Eyes is server-based, the records cannot be erased or altered by users. The Covenant Eyes reports can be viewed on line 24 hours a day.
3. Report Accuracy. “Covenant Eyes generates nifty, accurate reports that are sorted for easy review by an accountability partner of your choosing. . . . it does a great job of catching/logging the questionable and bad stuff. . . . It’s outstanding at separating wheat (tame sites) from chaff.” Because Covenant Eyes has been around for 8 years, we’ve refined an accurate scoring system that we constantly update. X3 doesn’t score sites at all, but rather simply logs certain sites in the report. Unless the accountability partner opens the link to that site, there is no way of knowing its content (and opening the link might expose the accountability partner to objectionable material).
I can’t stress enough the benefit of a good scoring system. I recently read a blog of an X3 user. He was beginning to wonder whether the program was working. He reports that Joost sent him an email with a link to watch “trashy bikini spring break smut.” To test the X3 program, he opened the link and waited for his X3 report to come. X3 didn’t catch it: “apparently they don’t think spring break smut is bad enough to tell your wife about so the report is clean again.” I asked him to send me the link so I could run it through my Covenant Eyes program. What was the verdict? Joost came up the second highest rated URL on my report (right under MySpace) with a score of 33. A score like this can be grounds for a good conversation with my accountability partners.
I recently read another person’s blog page, someone who used Covenant Eyes and thought it did an all-round better job than X3watch. Speaking of the accuracy of the accountability report, another blogger writes about X3watch: “The drawback is that plenty of sites with porn slide in under the radar of this software so I would recommend paying the 7 bucks a month on covenant eyes.”
Similarly, another blog written by a couple missionaries and members of Wycliffe Bible Translators comments on how thorough Covenant Eyes is vs. X3watch. They highlight:
4. Report Flexibility. “Your accountability partners . . . log in to the covenanteyes.com to select how often they’d like to receive your Internet usage.” X3 watch offers weekly and biweekly reports, but Covenant Eyes allows partners to receive reports as often as they like via email and can access the report at any time from our website.
5. Complete Accountability. The Covenant Eyes report logs “every single URL with date and time.” Covenant Eyes reports all browsing activity, while X3Watch only logs sites that are deemed questionable by the X3 program. The approach used by Covenant Eyes makes it more difficult for possible holes in the system to be detected.
A Baptist pastor from Tulsa, Oklahoma, says that he has encouraged others to download X3watch and says that X3 “is great for those that don’t know where the holes are” but “is still no where near as comprehensive as CE.” He likes that X3 does not cost anything, but then remarks, “you kind of get what you pay for, as in most things.” He also likes how “extremely detailed” Covenant Eyes reports are. He likes the fact that reports are kept on the Covenant Eyes server, “so you can’t get to the report and delete it before your wife sees it, for instance.”
He also notes:
6. The Panic Button. “If you are severely tempted, there is a ‘panic button’ that you can hit that will shut down your internet access until you call tech support and get it turned back on. That also generates a report to your accountability partners.” For those who seem overwhelmed with temptation to view pornography, the panic button has proved very useful.
Another blogger writes about his reasons for liking Covenant Eyes over X3:
7. Difficult to Bypass. “Covenant Eyes is by far the best option I’ve seen to date. And I’ve tested and hacked about 15-20 of them. . . . Covenant Eyes is not going to be hackable by the common Joe. There are aspects of X3 that may leave it more susceptible.” If a program that is supposed to be a tool of accountability (like X3) is easily bypassed, then we run into the issue of a potential double sin: first we view the objectionable website, then we use our accountability program as a cover for lack of integrity.
8. Browser Support. “No matter what browser you use to access the Internet the surfing is monitored. X3Watch doesn’t have this feature.” Multiple browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) can be monitored simultaneously by the Covenant Eyes program. X3 only monitors Microsoft and Mozilla browsers, not browsers like Opera, for instance.
9. Inexpensive. Covenant Eyes “is pretty doable for most budgets.” At about a quarter-a-day, we offer a very inexpensive program. While X3watch is free, Covenant Eyes does have a Hardship Program which offers our accountability service free for those who truly cannot afford our service.
XXXchurch provides a program for the public that is free, but we know how easily it can be circumvented. Currently download.com has several reviews of X3watch, many of which give it a positive rating, but many customers write about it being very easy to bypass or turn off. One reviewer writes, “This is better than nothing, I guess, and it’s nice that they provide it for free, but Covenant Eyes (covenanteyes.com) is far superior in every way. It is worth the money.“
If someone finds freedom and integrity from using X3watch, as many have testified, then I am happy when I read about it. I’ve read great testimonies from both men and women who have found X3watch to be life-changing. What changes lives, for both X3 users and CE users, is not the quality of the software, but the quality of the accountability relationship. I do fear, however, that X3 could offer only the illusion of accuracy to an otherwise healthy accountability partnership. My prayer is that both XXXchurch and Covenant Eyes can continue to increase the quality of our products.
this program is stupid, my dad uses it to restict everything i try to do on the web
i am trying to create a website and your stupid program wont let me do it
and by the way the site im making is about beekeeping not porn
Will,
We’d love to help you out. I’m assuming you are referring to our filter, not our accountability program, because our accountability program doesn’t block at all. Perhaps we can talk about how to adjust the settings of the program so you can create your website. Please contact me at luke.gilkerson@covenanteyes.com
Luke Gilkerson
I’m in the process of reviewing all the softwares, and will be looking at covenant eyes next. I have found that X3 works well for certain types of people, and not for others. The reason that I use it is that I am in the IT field and I need accountability, but I cannot be constantly hassled by software that blocks things it shouldn’t and that hog my resources to do it. Also, X3 is free.
X3 is easy to circumvent, it’s true, but for someone who WANTS to be accountable, it works well.
Also, I have ran into situations where CovenantEyes blocks online hardware configuration pages, like for routers and cable modems, making my job impossible.
I understand the difficulty in making an all-encompassing blocker, and how useful that is, but it seems they are either too sensitive, or not sensitive enough, and I don’t have the time to tweak every little setting, nor do I want to have to test it out by going to sites I don’t want to go to.
Like I said, I will be reviewing CovenantEyes soon, and I will probably be recommending it if it works well, but I don’t think I can use it personally.
In conclusion, as a tech, if I really wanted to look at porn, a software package would never really stop me — but since I don’t want to, accountability works well.
David, I’d be curious to know the situations you ran into where hardware configuration pages were blocked… you must have been using the filter. It sounds like you don’t need a filter, just the accountability. As for cost, you should know that our hardship program allows anyone to use the program for free, no questions asked. Of course, we have 43 families to support, so we need to cover our costs, but we have some great members who contribute to the program so we can make it freely available. If you’d like to test Covenant Eyes, when you sign up, enter onefree in the promocode box (anyone can do this) and you will get the first month for free. I think you’ll find that, even for your needs, CE provides a much more complete accountability than any other program, free or not.
umm….ok… i’m not sure about all this comparison, but i am very interested in accountability.
blocking/filtering aside, does x3 eyes (or is there any other free software that) simply log and/or email all visited websites like covenanteyes?
i think that would provide enough accountability for me that my discipleship group leader and a partner can view this.
Hello JC. There are a number of accountability software option out there. Some filtering software companies now offer accountability as an added bonus, but usually these tools are designed for parents and guardians to keep track of their children, not for an adult to hold another adult accountable. I have another post from youth ministers who use different types of accountability software. You might like listening to that.
Has CE conducted any benchmark tests to access the effect of the filtering on throughput, effective bandwidth, or dynamic content (flash and embedded video, applets, java, etc…)? I would be very interested in this. Our church just began using Baraccuda over a typical proxy method, which seems to work well and fast, but it does deny access to some appropriate sights. Do you know if CE works much like Barracuda, as far as the filtering service goes?(see BWF at http://www.barracudanetworks.com for reference). Thanks!
One of the problems that I see with X3 is that it assumes that once one is no longer accessing pornographic sites, that the battle is over.
The root problem that needs to be addressed in our sinful human hearts is our tendency to pursue temptation and to get as close as we can to “sinning”. I put “sinning” in quotes because we are actually fooling ourselves when we think that we aren’t sinning just because x3 software doesn’t consider us to be doing anything wrong, or just because our Covenant Eyes score is below a certain threshold.
Proverbs 6 tells us seven things that the Lord hates and one of them is “feet that make haste to run to evil.” (v. 18). Covenant Eyes is the only program that I have seen that helps me address that problem BECAUSE it reports everything that I do to my accountability partners. If my partners understand that my goal is not just to avoid porn, but to honor God with EVERY choice that I make in my web browsing, then they can ask me questions like….
“Bryan, why did you need to go to funnypics.com? Were you testing the waters? Trying to see if you could access something and not come up with too bad of a score?”
Anyone who thinks that they can handle “the small stuff” and they only need something to protect them from “the big stuff” hasn’t yet come to grasp just what their sinful flesh is capable of. Pride comes before a fall!
[...] Comparing Covenant Eyes with X3 filter [...]
Saying “I’m not bashing this software, I’m just saying what people who bash the software say” is such a lame duck excuse.
If you believe your software is superior, say it! The fact that you lamely hide behind ‘blog claims’ makes you look uncredible in this article. It also makes you seem like you are taking a holier than thou road.
Honestly, XXXChurch does so much work ministering to people that you wouldn’t even bother to look at. They aren’t just about helping porn addicts, but porn stars as well.
What a novel idea…not to just cure the addict but cure the dealer as well.
I am not amused with this trite.
@tom – I agree XXXchurch’s focus has been different than ours, and we really appreciate the work they do in many respects. We’re merely saying that when their free software is compared to a well-made paid version, it isn’t very good. I am honestly not trying to take a holier-than-thou road, and I am sorry if it comes off that way. It would seem pretty disingenuous if Covenant Eyes tested X3watch and said, “Our software is better.” You’d expect us to say that. That’s why I went about quoting other bloggers.
I tried to stick to the specifics of the software features, not their ministry to porn stars and the church directly. By the way, one of the reasons we’ve specifically partnered with groups like the Pink Cross Foundation is because we want to help the dealers of pornography as well.
@tom – Plus, the force behind this post is in the last paragraph: “I do fear, however, that X3 could offer only the illusion of accuracy to an otherwise healthy accountability partnership.” Personally I’ve experienced great failure on the part of X3watch, not reporting specific sites, constantly shutting down. If someone is depending on X3watch to be a trustworthy tool for help them find freedom, I would hate to see people disappointed.
x3watch is free. Isnt comparing a 55 dollar program and a free one like comparing apples to cucumbers? They are both good for you but in totally different ways.
x3watch works for the person whos not very computer savvy and doesnt know that Opera doesnt work and that it doesnt catch everything. Covenant Eyes would be for someone who is craftier, knows their way around and needs extra protection. At that route I might go with Safe eyes because the only way I found around that was through proxies but that was garbage and nothing ever really showed up. Someone with enough skill can probably bypass something that “watches” a program instead of a program that literally is a bypass or proxy filter much like what schools use these days.
Why not compare against something comparable like a Safe Eyes or another pay-per-program? I never liked when free software was compared with pay-per because of course youll find glaring defects unless someone is literally giving away something worth money for free.
@Anthony – Point well taken. We compare ourselves to X3 because they are the most widely used software that tries to do something similar to Covenant Eyes. Safe Eyes has recently added an accountability feature, and we mean to do a comparison to that product as well. At first glance SE’s accountability reports are far too unorganized and long. As filtering goes, SE does a fine job.
I tried X3 for a couple of months before going over to CE.
The problem with X3 was that it was just too easy to get around it. CE is extremely difficult to circumvent. I have found only one way to get around CE so far, because the program is well designed.
At teh same time, I do applaud X3’s ministry among workers in the industry – they need to receive grace and mercy as much as any one else.
However, I do think that having the ministry to addicts and do industry workers so close together was a bit of a problem for me as well. You would not have a drug addict ministry and a children’s ministry in teh same physical location – would you?