Security, VPN protection, and more for all your devices
While Norton’s standalone antivirus packs plenty of suite-level features, upgrading to Norton 360 Deluxe expands on the collection to protect Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. This security suite adds a full-powered cross-platform VPN, a dark web monitoring system, parental controls, and more. Windows users get plenty of bonus components, including webcam protection and 50GB of hosted storage for online backups. For all that you get, Norton 360 Deluxe earns our Editors’ Choice award for cross-platform multi-device security.How Much Does Norton 360 Deluxe Cost?
A year’s subscription to Norton 360 Deluxe lists for $119.99, which gets you five security suite licenses and VPN licenses to use on your devices. McAfee Total Protection costs the same for five cross-platform licenses. If purchased separately, Norton Secure VPN and Norton Family would cost $79.99 and $49.99 per year, respectively, for a total greater than the cost of the entire suite.
Note that while Norton Secure VPN remains available, it has effectively been superseded by Norton Ultra VPN Plus. While the underlying VPN technology and a worldwide array of servers are the same, Ultra VPN offers much finer control than Secure VPN. In addition, Ultra VPN Plus includes virtually all the same features as Norton 360, though many are presented in a more hands-off fashion. At $129.99 per year, this suite costs $10 more than Norton 360 Deluxe, but you get 10 licenses for device security and 10 VPN licenses.
Other competing suites do cost less. Webroot’s cross-platform suite runs $79.99 for five licenses, and Trend Micro Maximum Security is $89.95 per year for five. Still, you don’t get the same comprehensive security coverage with these two or with most competitors.
At its lowest pricing tier, McAfee+ costs $149.99 per year, a bit more than Norton. However, this tier doesn’t offer big-time identity theft protection; that requires a $50 upgrade to the Advanced tier. A McAfee+ subscription lets you install McAfee’s top protection on every device in your household, including devices running Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and even ChromeOS.
If you have only a few devices to protect, you might consider Norton 360 Standard. This three-license subscription costs $94.99, $25 less than Deluxe; it also limits your online backup storage to 2GB, the same as the standalone antivirus. There must be a market, or Norton wouldn’t bother with this offering, but for most users, Norton 360 Deluxe is a much better deal.
On the flip side, if you’re shopping for Norton at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, or certain other retailers, you may encounter Norton 360 Premium (10 licenses) or Norton 360 Platinum (20 licenses). This review focuses on Deluxe.
If you show your support by signing up for automatic renewal, Norton reciprocates with a Virus Protection Promise. That means if malware infests one of your devices despite Norton’s protection, a tech support expert will remotely log in and remediate the problem. You can apply for a refund if the support expert can’t make things right. McAfee and ZoneAlarm Extreme Security offer similar guarantees.What Is the Gen Stack?
Years ago, Norton was a Symantec property. It now belongs to Gen Digital, a company that also owns numerous other security brands, including Avast, AVG, and Avira. Avast and AVG merged almost 10 years ago, and they’ve used the same antivirus engine for many of those years. Norton and Avira retained their own separate technologies, until now.
Gen’s developers have merged the best of these technologies into a single antivirus engine that they call the Gen stack. New installations of Norton, Avast, and AVG rely on this engine, and existing users will gradually upgrade to the new version. My Gen contacts note that Avira will follow before long. Whether the visibly different antivirus tools using the stack will perform differently in testing remains to be seen.Getting Started With Norton 360 Deluxe
As with the whole Norton product line, your adventure begins when you register your purchase and set up your Norton account online. From the online console, you can download protection to the current device or send a link to install it on another device. As you’ll see below, there are also security features that exist strictly within the online account rather than having an in-app presence on your devices.
Put last year’s Norton 360 next to the version from 10 years ago and you’d hardly notice the difference, but that long-standing facade is no more. Along with the switch to the Gen stack, Norton 360’s user interface has undergone a complete makeover. The old layout featured a status banner across the top with five large feature panels below. There’s still a status panel in the current interface, but it occupies the center, flanked by a menu on the left and a set of feature buttons on the right.
From the left-side menu, you can select Home, Security, Performance, Privacy, Identity, Search, or Settings. All except Identity are also present in Norton AntiVirus Plus. A menu item titled Set Up Protection exists only until you’ve performed all five of its steps. These include activating the cloud backup system, enabling automatic VPN protection on unsecured networks, and configuring the password manager.
Down the right side of the main window, you find a series of large buttons to launch features such as Privacy Monitor, Password Manager, and Parental Control. The previous user interface relegated most of these to a separate app called My Norton. Having them fully integrated seems like an improvement.
Below the central status panel, Norton displays the number of licenses you’ve used, with a link to extend protection to more devices. Norton uses the space below that for important notifications. For example, shortly after I installed the suite, it displayed a notification about performance issues. Chasing details from that notification revealed that it was an upsell attempt, offering a trial of Norton Utilities Ultimate.
After installation, be sure to run a Live Update. Even though the status panel indicated my protection updates were current, the Live Update found more to install. You’ll also want to install Norton’s extensions in each browser you use. Getting all of those installed in a browser could be a chore, even more so if you use more than one browser. Fortunately, Norton has streamlined and automated the process as much as possible. Once you click to install all the extensions, it automates the process as much as possible, leaving you to click where and when it tells you.Shared Antivirus Features
Of course, this suite incorporates all the features of Norton AntiVirus Plus and adds even more. Please read that review for my detailed findings; I’ll summarize them here.
In addition to the expected full, quick, and custom antivirus scans, you can configure the suite to run a special scan at system startup. The Startup Scan runs before Windows has fully loaded and before malware can load, giving it extra protective power.
All four independent antivirus testing labs I follow include Norton in their latest reports, and its scores are almost all perfect. Like all the antiviruses in the latest report from SE Labs, it earned AAA certification (the best of five certification levels).
The experts at AV-Comparatives assign a Standard certification to any antivirus that passes one of this lab’s many tests. Companies that do more than the minimum can earn Advanced or Advanced+ certification. In the three tests I follow, Norton often gets top marks. This time around, false positives knocked some scores down, yielding one apiece of Advanced+, Advanced, and Standard certifications. Avast, AVG, and ESET achieved a trifecta, with Advanced+ in all three tests.
The testing experts at London-based MRG-Effitas rate antivirus apps using a pass/fail system. Unless an antivirus exhibits near-perfect protection, it simply fails. Like most of its competitors, Norton passed both tests. AV-Test Institute rates apps on protection, performance, and usability, with six points available in each category. Norton, like most of the antiviruses in the latest report, holds a perfect 18 points.
My aggregate scoring algorithm combines results from two to four labs to yield an overall score on a 10-point scale. Looking at security tools tested by all four labs, Norton has the next-best aggregate score, 9.6 points, topped by Avast with 9.8. Tested by three labs, Bitdefender Total Security and McAfee both managed an excellent 9.8 points, while ESET reached an even better 9.9.
Norton typically earns excellent scores in my hands-on malware protection tests. This time around, it didn’t disappoint, with 99% detection and 9.9 of 10 possible points. Avast, AVG, and UltraAV share those top scores.
Challenged with 100 recently discovered malware-hosting URLs, Norton defended the test system by blocking the browser from accessing more than 80% of the samples and wiping out most of the remainder by quarantining the malware payload. With 99% protection, it’s among the best. Even so, Avira Prime, Bitdefender, Guardio, Sophos Home Premium, and Trend Micro edged higher with 100% protection.
Phishing sites are fraudulent pages that ape secure sites and try to fool heedless visitors into giving away their credentials. Out of more than a hundred verified phishing pages, Norton fended off 99%. In a parallel test under macOS, Norton scored precisely the same. While 99% is good, quite a few competitors reached 100% in their latest phishing protection tests. Among these were the phishing-specific Norton Genie, the VPN-focused NordVPN Plus, and Surfshark One.
Norton’s Data Protector component aims to prevent malicious programs, especially ransomware, from modifying protected files. To test it, I turned off real-time antivirus and other protective layers and released more than a dozen real-world ransomware threats. In almost every case, it detected the attack and prevented harm to files of protected types in protected locations. However, most attacks succeeded in encrypting unprotected files, anywhere from 50 to 10,000 of them.
One sneaky ransomware sample completely evaded Data Protector, encrypting everything in the Documents folder. But please remember that I couldn’t begin to perform this test without turning off multiple components of Norton’s regular antivirus protection. With all protective layers working, Norton whacked every ransomware sample.Other Shared Features
As the « Plus » in the name suggests, Norton AntiVirus Plus goes beyond the features of a simple antivirus. Its Intrusion Prevention system aims to block exploits at the network level, and in past tests, it has blocked all or most of the exploits I used to attack it. This time around, its network-based protection only caught 37%. Note, though, that none of the exploits did any harm to the fully patched test system. In addition, scores on this test have been steadily falling overall. The best recent scores go to G Data, Vipre, and Bitdefender, all over 50%.
Most security companies reserve firewall protection for their suite-level offerings. Not Norton; it includes a full-powered firewall right in the antivirus.
Norton’s firewall protects against outside attacks, as any firewall must. It also aims to prevent programs from misusing your network connection. Its program control system automatically configures permissions for known good programs and scrutinizes the behavior of unknowns. In my testing, it proved tamper-resistant.
All security tools in the current Norton line come with online cloud backup. The only difference is the amount of hosted online storage Norton provides. With the antivirus, you get just 2GB, while this suite gives you 50GB. It’s worth noting that dedicated online backup services such as IDrive typically measure storage capacity in terabytes, while backup components in security suites offer much less storage space. As noted earlier, if you accept the prompt to enable backup during the initial configuration, Norton sees to backing up your important files automatically.
In a departure from past versions, Norton no longer lets you create multiple backup jobs and no longer supports backup to local, removable, or network drives. Long-time users who’ve already created local backups can keep using them, though an initial bug currently interferes with adding new updates to existing local backups. That bug should be fixed in a December release.
Norton offers to install its Secure Browser alongside Norton 360. This is a Chromium-based browser with an emphasis on security. Its Security & Privacy center offers seven large panels representing privacy features, but six of them either duplicate features already in the browser or aren’t very useful. The exception is Privacy Guard, which blocks ads and trackers at three levels. At the strictest level, it blocks browser fingerprinting. However, it’s not as flexible as, for example, Bitdefender’s Anti-Tracker feature.
Your Norton installation gets you Norton Password Manager, which is also available for free as a standalone. The password manager syncs across all your devices and handles all common password management tasks.
