We’ve covered all of Bitdefender’s consumer security products, evaluating exactly how they stack up in 2021.
Bitdefender 2021 is the Romanian firm’s latest power-packed family of top-of-the-range antivirus and security suites. The consumer range starts with Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition, a simple Windows tool which focuses very much on the core security basics: antivirus, blocking of phishing and other scam sites, and that’s about it. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus is the first-tier commercial product, and as you might guess from the name, it’s crammed with useful security and privacy extras: an additional layer of ransomware protection, Wi-Fi security scanning to detect network problems, banking protection via a secure browser, secure file deletion, a vulnerability scanner and a password manager. Antivirus Plus also gets you the free version of Bitdefender VPN. That’s limited to a minimal 200MB traffic a day, but it could be worse — the unregistered version of Avira’s Phantom VPN restricts you to 500MB a month. Bitdefender VPN gains the most new functionality in the 2021 edition, too. OpenVPN is out, Hotspot Shield’s Catapult Hydra protocol is in, significantly boosting speeds; a kill switch protects you if the VPN drops; there are apps for mobile and desktop, and the service now unblocks US Netflix. It’s a strong set of enhancements, and means Bitdefender VPN can now genuinely compete with many specialist VPN providers. Bitdefender 2021’s other enhancements can’t quite match that, although they’re still welcome. The Vulnerability Scan detects more security issues and poorly configured settings, helping reduce the chance of you becoming infected; reporting tools now enable monitoring protection level and security activity across individual devices, as well as offering an all-in-one account view; and there are assorted interface and app tweaks (iOS web protection benefits from performance improvements, for instance.) Antivirus Plus Pricing starts at $19.99 for a one year, one device license ($39.99 on renewal), and there are significant discounts if you extend your subscription. A three device, one-year license is $29.99 in year one, for instance, $59.99 on renewal; a five device, two-year license is priced at $109.99, and a ten device, three-year license is $179.99, or just $6 per device per year. Bitdefender Internet Security extends the package with a firewall, spam filter and parental controls. Webcam protection enables blocking unauthorized access to your webcam, and a microphone monitor lists any apps accessing your microphone. A one device, one-year Internet Security license is $29.99 in year one, $59.99 on renewal,50% more expensive than Bitdefender Antivirus Plus. But again, the price premium falls away as you add more devices and years. A three device, one-year license is $39.98 in year one, $79.99 on renewal; a five device, two-year license is $129.99, and the maximum ten device, three-year license is only $169.99, or $6.67 per device per year. At the top of the range, Bitdefender Total Security adds device clean-up and optimization tools, a simple anti-theft system, and introduces apps to cover Mac, Android and iOS devices, as well as Windows — a huge bonus. Total Security pricing isn’t quite as flexible as the rest of the range (there are only 5 and 10 device options), but it’s such good value you’re unlikely to care. A baseline five device, one-year license is $44.99, for instance, $89.99 on renewal. A ten device, three-year license is $137.99 for the first term (such a good introductory discount it’s cheaper than Antivirus Plus or Internet Security), $229.99 ($7.67 per device year) on renewal. Some of these headline prices can look high, especially when there’s no introductory discount, but they’re generally good value in the long-term. Kaspersky Anti-Virus costs a low $120 to protect 5 devices for the first three years, for instance, but renews at $240. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus covers the same hardware for $150 from the beginning (even covering 10 devices costs only $180). If you’re not yet convinced, no problem: every product has a 30-day trial build available. There are no credit card details required, just register with your email address and you can check out Bitdefender’s abilities for yourself. Installing Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2021 is quick, simple and largely automatic. We pointed, we clicked, and within a couple of minutes a reassuring ‘Bitdefender is successfully installed’ message told us it was time to get started. Browsing our system, we found the installer had added Bitdefender’s Anti-Tracker extension to Google Chrome, and Bitdefender Anti-Tracker and Wallet to Firefox. (Anti-Tracker also works in Internet Explorer and Safari, but there’s no support for Opera or Edge). Bitdefender equipped our test system with 13 new background processes and Windows services, some filter drivers and assorted other low-level clutter. That’s not unusual for an antivirus, but it can be a problem if it’s a drag on your system speed. AV-Test’s Windows Home User report for August 2020 found no performance problems, rating Bitdefender at its best possible 6/6 for minimal impact on speeds for various tasks. AV-Comparatives’ more detailed October 2020 Performance Test wasn’t quite as kind, placing Bitdefender in a very mid-range 9th out of 17. The margins are very small, though, and the report didn’t uncover any serious problems. We ran PCMark Professional on our review system both before and after installing Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2021 and found performance dropped by 0.95%. Some products do fractionally better — Kaspersky Anti-Virus reduced our score by 0.62% — but that’s not a difference you’ll ever notice in real-world use. Next up, we ran our self-protection tests, where we check security apps to see if malware can disable them. Steps include attempting to delete or replace files, suspend or close key processes, stop core services, remove or edit scheduled tasks, unload filter drivers, and change key settings. Bitdefender has always been a very well defended product, though, and this time was no different: the package shrugged off our attacks and carried on as normal. Launching Bitdefender Antivirus Plus for the first time fires up a simple tour highlighting key areas of the interface and explaining what they do. Experienced users will probably figure this out on their own, but it’s good to have this guidance available for those who need it. Bitdefender’s nicely designed dashboard gives you speedy access to the functions you’ll need most often, with Quick Scans and the VPN just one click away. A left-hand sidebar organizes Bitdefender’s other tools into Protection, Privacy and Utilities areas, and tapping any of these lists the various functions they contain. Most of these are sensibly named, and if you’ve ever used another antivirus you’ll quickly find your way around, but tooltips are on hand if you need a hint. If the standard dashboard layout doesn’t quite suit your needs, you can customize it to remove default features or add new ones. Not interested in the VPN, maybe? In a click or two you could replace it with links to the full system scan, the password manager, disk clean-up module or a host of other tools. If only everyone was this flexible. Overall, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus offers a polished and professional interface which delivers in just about every area. It’s easy and comfortable to use for beginners, but also offers the configurability and control that experts need. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2021 supports several scan modes. Quick Scan checks the most commonly infected areas, and System Scan examines everything. Furthermore, File Explorer integration enables scanning objects from Explorer’s right-click menu, and there’s a bootable rescue environment to assist in cleaning the most stubborn threats. A Manage Scans tool lets you create new scan types to check specific files and folders, as well as configuring how the scan works, and setting it up to run on a schedule, or on-demand only. This doesn’t quite provide the expert-level options that we’ve seen from vendors like Avast and Avira (you can’t define specific file types to check or archive types you’d like to handle, for instance), but there’s more than enough power here for most people. Unfortunately, you can’t pin your custom scan type to the main dashboard, so it’s always at least three clicks away. Bitdefender’s antivirus settings can’t match the geek-level configurability of some of the competition, either, but they’re well-judged and focus on the functions you’re more likely to need. You don’t get intimidating and overly technical options to scan RAR archives to a nested depth of 4, but not scan TARs, for instance – there’s just the usual ‘scan archives, yes or no?’ setting. But in an unusual touch, you’re able to control whether Bitdefender scans incoming and outgoing emails, incoming only, outgoing only, or ignores emails entirely. That may well prove pretty useful. Default scanning speeds are decent, with Quick Scans taking around 15-30 seconds on our test computer. Regular scans started at 39 minutes to check our target files (209,000 of them,50GB in total.) That’s a little slow, and for example Kaspersky Anti-Virus took 19 minutes 14 seconds to scan the same data. But smart optimizations meant Bitdefender’s scan time dropped to 27 seconds by the second run (Kaspersky’s was 2 minutes 50 seconds), and future scans only check new or changed files. The scanning engine is smart enough to handle simultaneous scans without difficulty, too. If you’re running a lengthy full system scan, for instance, you can still run an on-demand scan of a recent download, or anything else you like. A window pops up to display the results of your second scan, while the first scan continues to run in the background. The total sum of this is a polished set of malware-hunting tools which go well beyond the basics, but remain easy to use for not-so-technical types. Experts might wish there were a few more fine-tuning options, but in general Bitdefender gets the configurability balance right. Bitdefender has a great name for protection, and its products have regularly topped the charts with most of the big independent testing labs. The news hasn’t been quite as positive in recent reports. AV-Comparatives’ July to October 2020 Real-World Protection report placed Bitdefender in an unspectacular (though reasonable) 7th out of 17.
