Antivirus Performance Comparison

They can be anything from the theft of your hard disk space to accessing your personal information and draining your CPU. There are a variety of antivirus tools available that can help safeguard your devices from the kinds of issues. It is important to select an antivirus program that will have a minimal impact on your system’s performance. Each of our antivirus programs is tested against this aspect. The results are based on the time it takes each application to complete an operation. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free, for instance had a background effect of 6% when conducting a full scan while ESET had an effect of 12%.

Avira is a German company has a good reputation in our tests. It consistently scores above 90% in the three categories of Protection (False positives) and Performance (False Positives) and Usability. Its interface is also user friendly and provides a wide range of features, including a smart firewall and other privacy tools. Avira subscriptions are priced per month instead of for a fixed three-year period. This makes it much easier to cancel the subscription or modify it at any time.

A fairly new name that we have tested, Essentware – which was previously known as PCKeeper is a program that runs the Avira engine under the hood and generally scores well across the range. Its interface is easy to use and its performance was decent this month, but a few features of the board software stability issues – mostly related to scan jobs locking up reduced the score. However, detection was good, and a perfect run through the certification sets earned it an VB100 award.