Best Antivirus Apps
Antivirus software is the most important software on your computer. Without it, your system can be easily infected with various malware and unwanted applications. Such infections have the potential to cause a considerable amount of damage to your computer. The threat of computer malware is constantly growing, so it is essential to choose the right security program for protection.
Malware can delete users' data, steal personal information, lock the computer, and ask to pay a ransom to unlock it and perform other rogue tasks. Infected computers become unstable, cybercriminals can access your data and perform other malicious tasks.
Which antivirus software is best?
Choosing the best antivirus program can be a complicated task. We at pcrisk.com are dealing with adware, malware, and ransomware infections on a daily basis, so we can give you professional advice on which antivirus suites work well and which fail to detect and remove various security issues.
EDITOR'S NOTE: When adding software to our top antivirus lists, we check every aspect of our recommended antivirus. However, we give the most value to detection and removal capabilities. We perform various tests and analyze independent testing companies' recommendations (AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives, etc.).
Here's our list of best antivirus programs:
Combo Cleaner is an anti-malware application for Windows computers (also available for Mac computers). It's developed by a company RCS LT which has been working in cyber security industry for over 10 years. The accumulated experience in internet security allowed us to create a robust anti-malware solution that is capable of defending user's computers from nowadays prevailing cyber threats. Combo Cleaner is designed to work with all the most popular operating systems from Microsoft, alongside Windows Defender.
Combo Cleaner is an antivirus and system optimizer created by a company called RCS LT. This application runs on Mac computers and works with all recent Mac operating systems, including Yosemite, macOS 13 Ventura, and macOS 14 Sonoma. This application takes a different approach as compared to traditional antivirus suites. As well as an antivirus function, Combo Cleaner includes a disk cleaner, big files finder, duplicate files finder, privacy scanner, and application uninstaller. This app can be used to clean computers of security threats and free up significant disk space cluttered by redundant files.
Finding additional security features for Windows users can be a mammoth task, altering the settings even more. For those who do not regard ourselves as technologically inclined, the less time spent getting a security suite up and running, the better.
There has always been a fine line that antivirus vendors have trod when developing products, with one side being too simple and the other being too complex. Avira Prime has approached the problem differently by focusing on the less tech-savvy user base and providing a product in which they can be confident.
While the user experience has been paired down and simplified, additional features provided by the product are surprisingly deep. This is done while still providing strong threat protection.
One of McAfee Total Protection's major bonuses in the past was its unlimited license package, which covered all your devices, regardless of operating system.
Total Protection has done away with the unlimited licenses, but does offer an unlimited VPN and a few more features.
The question then is, does the addition of an unlimited VPN, and the additional features make up for the lack of cross-platform licenses?
One of the major advantages modern security suites have is the bundling of several components so that you don't have several competing products running on your system and several different bills needing to be paid.
In ESET's product range, Home Security Premium is the company's security mega-suite. Existing ESET customers may know the product by a different name, ESET Smart Security Premium.
Home Security Premium includes what made Smart Security Premium a popular choice but with a few more quality-of-life improvements.
As the name suggests, Norton's AntiVirus Plus gives you the basics you'd expect from a basic antivirus suite plus more. Included extra features with Plus have a firewall, a spam filter, a password manager, hosted online backup, a vulnerability scanner, and other less notable inclusions.
Added features are great, but they need to be useful. More importantly, does the malware protection protect the end user against threats?
Avast has traditionally provided good protection against malware threats and a great-looking interface. However, it was often felt that users had to pay for that great interface over standout features
It has also struggled to balance paid products and its free antivirus software. The free version was so good that it is hard to justify paying the extra fee for a few additional features.
In reviewing Avast Premium Security, the first paid tier, the question is, is paying for the additional features Premium offers worth it?
Many reviewers and journalists are running out of ways to say how good Bitdefender has consistently been over the past several years.
Nonetheless, hose looking for a review not following this trend need to look elsewhere, as despite how critical this publication becomes, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus is still a great product with only minor complaints.
In total, Bitdefender offers three paid subscription models that can protect Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Antivirus Plus is the entry-level option, but that should not discourage buyers from thinking they are getting an entry-level product.
Over the years, signature-based malware detection has proven vulnerable to abuse by malware developers. Good companies will quickly adapt to new malware versions, creating new and better signatures for malware detection.
However, there is still a time delay between discovery and detection. Behavioral analysis looks to curb the failures of signature-based detection by being able to detect modern polymorphic malware. In recent years, Malwarebytes has been developing a behavioral analysis and several other technologies to provide a product offering superior protection. The question then is, has it achieved its goals?
How do we test antivirus programs?
Our malware researchers are dealing with various malware infections (including adware, ransomware, and potentially unwanted applications) daily. We manually test malware samples, we visit countless rogue and phishing websites. Our email honeypots attract thousand of malicious emails. We test tens of unique ransomware infections on our virtual machines every day.
This puts us in a unique position. With all of this real-world malware data, we can thoroughly test antivirus applications and determine which are best at cleaning and preventing them. Arguably most technology websites can test the speed, usability, and other antivirus features visible to the naked eye. However, our staff can test antivirus against real-life cyber threats.
To our mind, reliable protection from malware threats is the most important thing in choosing the best antivirus program. Antivirus programs that perform best in our tests are added to our best antivirus list, which is actively updated. Note that Combo Cleaner is developed by the same company that is running the pcrisk.com website.
Nowadays, an antivirus program has become a must. If you care about your computer's security and your privacy, you should always use one.
IMPORTANT: Be sure you have only one antivirus software installed on your computer; having two different programs may cause problems.
