When it came time to remove malware infections, again, the results were close, but paid antivirus software held a slight advantage.Īll the products we tested–both paid and free–detected all the test infections we threw their way, but paid products did a slightly better job overall at removing the active components of an infection, scoring a 74 percent success rate on average. In real-world detection tests, free products missed 15.2 percent of samples, while paid products missed 10.2 percent of samples.
By comparison, free products’ scores were ever-so-slightly worse, detecting 95.7 percent of samples. In traditional signature-based detection tests, paid antivirus software that we tested found 96.2 percent of the malware samples overall. We found that, on the whole, paid antivirus products did a slightly better job at detecting malware than their freebie counterparts. And one company, Avast, says that its free product is intended for average users, and that its paid antivirus is for more advanced users. How about malware signature updates? The security software companies I spoke to tell me that they treat their free and paid products the same as far as signature updates are concerned, although there may be some under-the-hood differences between their free and paid products (as is the case with Panda’s software, for example).
#Panda antivirus free upgrade#
Avast Free Antivirus has an upgrade link in the upper-right corner of the main window, and Avira AntiVir Personal will display an ad for Avira’s paid antivirus software. Avast does offer e-mail support for its free customers most others provide only a knowledge base or forum where users can go for help.Īnother tradeoff is that free antivirus products often have some sort of advertisement for the company’s paid product. While most companies offer some sort of phone support for paying customers, free antivirus users usually must fend for themselves. One of the biggest drawbacks to going with a free product is the lack of technical support. Paid antivirus straddles a middle ground between the basic freebies and the feature-packed security suites: They typically offer more comprehensive security tools (such as parental controls and identity theft protection) and more flexibility than a free antivirus package, but they have fewer additional features than suites, which are intended to be one-stop security shops.
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