Each month, we stop over 1.5 billion cyberattacks all around the globe thanks to an unrivaled threat detection network, which is why professionals and amateurs alike love our free and paid antivirus protection.
Your antivirus should certainly have the ability to root out existing malware, but its ongoing task is to prevent ransomware, botnets, Trojans, and other types of nasty programs from getting a foothold. All the free antivirus programs we've selected here offer real-time malware protection. Some take the fight to the browser, working to ensure you never even browse to a malware-hosting site or get fooled into turning over your credentials to a phishing site.
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Avast has been supplying antivirus protection for as long as there's been an antivirus industry. With Avast One Essential you get award-winning antivirus protection for free, and much more besides. All four of the independent testing labs we follow include Avast in their reporting, and it aces almost every test. It also takes high scores in our own hands-on testing. Other protective services include a permission-based ransomware protection system, a basic firewall, and a bandwidth-limited VPN.
Many free antivirus utilities work only on the Windows platform. Avast has varying degrees of protection for macOS, Android, and iOS. Its macOS edition earns high scores from the labs, and its ransomware protection, browser trace cleanup, and VPN work just as they do on Windows. On Android you get antivirus, VPN, junk cleanup, and privacy protection, among other features, though anti-theft is noticeably absent. As is common, protection under iOS is limited, but it does include VPN, filtering fraudulent and malicious websites, and extra protection for your photos.
If you spring for the commercial antivirus, you get vastly more features, more features than found in some security suite products. Among these are a basic password management system, a hardened desktop for secure browsing, a Rescue Environment to recover from malware that disables Windows, and a Wi-Fi security analyzer. None of these come for free.
Kaspersky Free is the free anchor for the new Kaspersky line; the not-free Kaspersky Standard, Plus, and Premium all build on the same antivirus engine. Kaspersky's antivirus prowess generally awes the independent testing labs, who routinely assign it perfect or near-perfect ratings. Unfortunately, we can't recommend it anymore. Here's why.
If free antivirus tools are so good, why should anybody pay? For one thing, many of these products are free only for noncommercial use. If you want to protect your business, you must pony up for the paid edition. At that point, you should probably consider upgrading to a full security suite. After all, it's your business's security on the line.
In addition, many companies don't offer full-scale tech support for users of their free editions. The first time you need extra help digging a particularly stubborn piece of malware out of your system, you might regret the lack of support.
Security companies typically pay for the privilege of being included in testing. In return, the labs supply them with detailed reports that can help improve their products. The number of labs that include a particular vendor serves as a measure of significance. In each case, the lab considered the product important enough to test, and the vendor felt the price was worthwhile. The labs don't necessarily test a vendor's free product, but most vendors pack full protection into the free product, enhancing premium versions with additional features.
In addition to carefully perusing results from the independent labs, we also run our own hands-on malware protection test. We expose each antivirus to a collection of malware samples, including a variety of different malware types, and note its reaction. Typically, the antivirus will wipe out most of the samples on sight and detect some of the remaining ones when we try to launch them. We derive a malware blocking score from 0 to 10 points based on how thoroughly the antivirus protects the test system from these samples.
Since we use the same samples month after month, the malware-blocking test doesn't measure a product's ability to detect brand-new threats. In a separate test, we attempt to download malware from 100 very new malicious URLs supplied by London-based testing lab MRG-Effitas(Opens in a new window), typically less than a few days old. We note whether the antivirus blocked all access to the URL, wiped out the malicious payload during download, or did nothing.
Any antivirus should eliminate spyware along with other types of malware, but some products include features designed specifically for spyware protection. Features like encryption to protect your sensitive data and webcam control to prevent remote peeping typically show up in commercial products, not free ones. But some free products include features like a simple on-screen keyboard to foil keyloggers.
One easy way to keep your PC protected is to install all security updates, both for Windows and for browsers and other popular applications. Windows 11 makes it easier than ever to stay up to date, but there are plenty of security holes in older Windows versions, in popular apps, and in add-ons. Scanning for vulnerabilities in the form of missing updates is a feature most often found in commercial antivirus products, but it does turn up in some free ones. In the list below you can see which products include these useful features.
Numerous free utilities devoted entirely to ransomware protection have come on the scene in the last few years. Alas, many of those have fallen by the wayside, among them Bitdefender Anti-Ransomware, Cybereason RansomFree, CyberSight RansomStopper, and Heilig Defense RansomOff. In any case, these are useful companion products, but they don't do the job of a full-scale antivirus utility.
There are also numerous free antivirus utilities that work solely to clean up existing malware infestations. You bring out these cleanup-only tools when you have a nasty malware problem. When the malware's gone, they have no further use since they offer no ongoing protection. Our favorite in this category is Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, and it's one you should try if you've got a malware problem. But since they're free, you can keep trying others if the first one doesn't do the job. When the scare is over, you'll need a full-blown antivirus for ongoing protection.
Avast One Essential takes the place once held by Avast Free Antivirus as Editors' Choice for free antivirus utility. It appears in lab reports from all four labs we follow with almost universally perfect scores, and it includes many suite-level features. If you do have a little cash in your budget for security, the best paid antivirus software does offer more and better protection. If not, try a few of these free tools and see which one you like best.
Google gets its name from the immense number googol. Baidu, the go-to search engine in China, has a different story. Its name comes from a poem that "compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream." The free Baidu Antivirus 2015 is definitely attractive, and its antivirus capabilities have improved markedly since the last version, but it's still not a top choice.
Baidu licenses antivirus protection from Avira, but unlike Ashampoo Anti-Virus 2015( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) it also includes its own antivirus engine. By default, it uses the Avira engine for scanning, but not for real-time protection.
To balance the static nature of my malware-blocking test, I also check how well each antivirus protects against malicious downloads from newly discovered malware-hosting URLs. Some products block all access to the malicious URLs, and some wipe out malware payloads during download. Most use a combination of the two approaches.
I didn't observe Baidu blocking access to any malware-hosting URLs, but it visibly popped up a notice for every downloaded file, announcing that it was running a scan. I was surprised at how long these scans took. Even for files smaller than 100KB, some scans required several minutes. In fully 64 percent of cases, the scan actively reported the file to be safe. I consider that worse than merely not detecting it as malicious.
Mixed-Bag Toolbox The Toolbox page, new in the 2015 edition, offers ten security-related tools, of varying usefulness. I'm not sure why the Malicious Plug-in Cleaner isn't simply rolled into the full malware scan, and I don't think many users will spend the time to create a full translation of Baidu's interface into a new language with the Language Translator tool. The Traffic Firewall simply provides a real-time view of network traffic, for those who can interpret it.
On the other hand, Baidu made no noticeable improvement in protecting against malicious downloads or detecting phishing websites. Just because it's better doesn't mean it's actually good. If you're looking for free antivirus protection, our Editors' Choice Panda Free Antivirus 2015 should serve you well.
Of course, with a free antivirus you effectively have an unlimited license. For example, Avast One Essential, a stripped-down version of Avast One, costs nothing and protects all four popular platforms.
It takes a long time to collect, curate, and analyze a new set of samples, so I don't change to a new set often. For a view on how antivirus products handle current in-the-wild malware, I use a feed of the latest discoveries from MRG-Effitas(Opens in a new window). This feed is simply a list of malware-hosting URLs discovered in the wild over the last few days. I feed the list into a small program that launches each URL and makes it easy to record whether the antivirus blocked access to the URL, eliminated the malware download, or did nothing.
In theory you only need that drawn-out full scan once, as real-time antivirus should handle new threats. However, as a second tier of protection McAfee schedules a full scan every other week. You can switch to scanning once a week or once a month, or you can create your own custom schedule. 2ff7e9595c
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