When your company outgrows a consumer security suite, Bitdefender Ultimate Small Business Security offers effective protection with enhancements such as remote management of company PCs and monitoring the dark web for abuse of company assets.
When your nascent business moves from the garage to an office, complete with other employees, you can’t keep using your personal security suite for your company computers. You’re going to need a proper business-tier suite, one that secures several devices, including ones you don’t use yourself. Bitdefender Ultimate Small Business Security is designed for that next phase, supporting businesses with up to 25 employees. You get award-winning device-level protection from Bitdefender Ultimate Security for desktop and mobile devices, along with central management and business-specific exposure monitoring. Thanks to this, Bitdefender is our Editors’ Choice winner for small business suites. For those who value total remote management over a large local feature set, Avast Premium Business Security is our other top pick.How Much Is Bitdefender Ultimate Small Business Security?
When examining consumer-facing security suites, it’s common to see multiple pricing tiers that protect one, three, five, 10, 15, or 25 devices. If you get a big multi-license pack, you’re typically paying much less on a per-device basis. For example, Malwarebytes Ultimate costs $239.99 for a one-device license. However, at the 10-pack tier, the price drops to $40 per device, and at the maximum 20-pack tier, it reduces to $25 per device.
At first glance, Bitdefender’s pricing fits this model. It starts with a three-pack for $189.99 per year, a five-pack for $269.99, and a 10-pack for $399.99. Like the consumer-side Bitdefender products, this one maxes out at 25, which costs $799.99 per year.
However, Bitdefender’s numbers aren’t devices. Rather, they represent employees. At each tier, you can install protection on twice as many devices as employees. In addition, Bitdefender’s tiers include protection for Windows servers. At the three-, five-, and 10-employee tiers, you get protection for one, two, or three servers, respectively, while the top-level 25-employee tier protects five servers. I’m not equipped to test server-specific security, which is not something every small business will need.
I haven’t evaluated enough small business suites to provide accurate pricing references in other reviews. However, upon reviewing the shopping pages of various competitors, it appears that Bitdefender’s pricing is roughly in line. Malwarebytes for Teams charges $799.99 per year for 20 users, the same price Bitdefender charges for 25 users. ESET Small Business Security costs slightly less, at $512.50 per year for 25 devices. Both Avast Premium Business Security and AVG Internet Security Business Edition cost more than $1,000 per year at the 25-pack level.Getting Started
As with other Bitdefender security tools, your journey starts with a visit to Bitdefender Central. Here, you either create or log into a Bitdefender account and activate your purchase.
In a home setting, the person who installs security software is the administrator by default. With the Small Business Edition, you need to make a conscious decision about who’s in charge. As part of the activation process, you will name your business and identify yourself as either the owner and security administrator or just the administrator, not the owner.
At this point, you have a subscription but haven’t installed any protection, a fact the dashboard makes clear. You can install Bitdefender Total Security, the Bitdefender VPN, and Bitdefender’s SecurePass password manager on your devices. Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection and business-specific protection against asset exposure are handled entirely in the dashboard.
If your Bitdefender Central dashboard doesn’t look quite right, you may be in the wrong workspace. In addition to the business space where you manage Small Business Security, you also get a personal space, where you can manage your separate, personal Bitdefender installation (if you have one). A simple selector at the top right lets you flip back into the business space.Getting an Employee Started
You don’t have to do absolutely everything yourself—that’s what delegating is for. Once you’ve installed Bitdefender on the devices you personally use, it’s time to think about the rest of the team.
Clicking Business Dashboard in the online menu provides easy access to employee management. In the top left corner, you’ll find a panel for managing and inviting employee members. To the right is a scrolling feed of security activities, including activities by all members.
Extending protection to your team is as simple as clicking Invite members and adding an email address. You can choose to make the invitee a security administrator or just an employee. The former can share your responsibilities, helping to manage business assets and employees. Employee members are responsible for the business PCs and other devices assigned to them, as well as for maintaining the protection of their business identity.
From the employee overview online, you can see any invitations still awaiting a response. You’ll get an email notification when any invitee accepts and creates their Bitdefender Central account. And, as noted, you can see in the activity list when they’ve installed protection.Built on Effective Antivirus
At the core of every successful security suite is antivirus protection that eliminates any lurking malware infestations and stands firm against all future malware attacks. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus is the beating heart of this business suite. Here are some details on that protection.
Three of the five independent testing labs I follow include Bitdefender’s antivirus technology in their latest reports, all of which give it perfect or near-perfect scores. My algorithm yields an aggregate lab score for Bitdefender of 9.8, with a maximum possible score of 10 points. Also tested by three labs, McAfee+ scored the same, 9.8 of 10 possible points.
ESET made an impressive showing, with perfect scores from four of the five labs. Only Avast, Norton Small Business Premium, and Microsoft Defender Antivirus appear in the latest results from all five labs, with aggregate scores of 9.8, 9.6, and 8.9, respectively.
Bitdefender tends to earn mediocre scores in my hands-on malware blocking test. Indeed, the last time I tested the antivirus, it detected 93% of my samples and scored 9.0 out of 10 possible points. By contrast, UltraAV and McAfee scored a perfect 10. Malwarebytes and Webroot Total Protection detected 99% of the current samples, scoring 9.9 and 9.7, respectively.
To confirm, I ran this test separately with Small Business Security. There were some minor differences in handling malware samples, but in the end, the score came out the same: 93% detection and 9.0 points.
Those matching scores aren’t surprising, given that the samples have remained unchanged. I run a separate test using up-to-the-minute malware-hosting URL samples supplied by testing lab MRG-Effitas. The defending antivirus can score by blocking access to the dangerous URL or by eliminating the malware download. Bitdefender has often aced this test, but when last evaluated, it scored just 92%. I repeated that test using today’s latest dangerous URLs, yielding a score of…still 92%.
