This limited suite adds little to what Avira gives away for free
Giving away antivirus or security suite protection for free gains a company mindshare and goodwill, but unless some customers pay for the product, the bills don’t get paid. Some companies take a hardline approach and say that the free product is only for noncommercial use. Others make the paid edition enticing by teasing paid-only features in the free edition. Avira Internet Security is in an awkward spot. It doesn’t bring much more to the table than Avira Free Security, yet it’s significantly lacking compared with the top-tier Avira Prime. If you’re going the paid route, consider Editors’ Choice suite Bitdefender Internet Security. It includes all the expected suite features and more, and the antivirus labs routinely give it top scores.What’s the Price of Avira Internet Security?
For a single installation of Avira Internet Security, you pay $70.99 per year. When I last reviewed this suite, that price got you three licenses. The current price for a three-license Avira subscription is $83.99 per year, a figure that used to get you five licenses. Three licenses for Bitdefender Internet Security, ESET, or Trend Micro Internet Security run a bit less, just under $80.
A $96.99 yearly payment gets you five Avira licenses. That’s the highest five-license price for an entry-level security suite, more than $89.99 for Bitdefender Internet Security and more than the $85.99 you’d pay for Panda Dome Advanced. At the low end, you pay just $61 for five licenses of K7 Total Security. A subscription to McAfee+ at the lowest tier goes for $149.99, but for that price, you can protect all the Android, ChromeOS, iOS, macOS, and Windows devices in your household.Shared With Free Security
This suite’s main window looks almost exactly like that of Avira Free Security. A left-rail menu lets you choose Status, Security, Privacy, or Performance. A banner across the top reflects security status. Big icons for Security, Privacy, and Performance dominate the main portion of the dark-themed window. A large button launches Avira’s Smart scan, which checks for privacy issues, performance issues, malware, and outdated programs.
Three of the four antivirus testing labs that I follow consider Avira important enough to test, and all three gave it excellent scores. Failure is common in the stringent tests from MRG-Effitas, but in the latest report most products passed both tests, among them Avira, Bitdefender, and ESET Home Security Essential.
Along with most antiviruses tested, Avira earned a perfect score in the most recent test from AV-Test Institute. Of the three tests by AV-Comparatives that I follow, Avira earned the maximum rating in two and the second-from-top rating in one.
I use a complex algorithm to map all the lab scores onto a 10-point scale and derive an aggregate score for any with two or more scores. Avira’s aggregate score of 9.7 is quite good, but a few other products tested by the three labs score higher. McAfee achieved 9.8 points, ESET 9.9, and Bitdefender a perfect 10. The best score among the few products tested by all four labs goes to Avast One Silver, with 9.8 points.
In my hands-on malware protection test, Avira detected 97% of the samples but allowed partial installation of several, knocking its score down to 9.3 out of 10 possible points. About half the antivirus apps tested with my current set of malware samples scored better. Avast, AVG Internet Security, and UltraAV top the list, each with 99% detection and 9.9 points.
Avira’s free Browser Safety component installs as an extension in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera, and does its best to steer the browser away from dangerous web pages. In a test using malware-hosting URLs recently discovered by experts at London-based MRG-Effitas, Avira blocked all access to 98% of the dangerous URLs and wiped out the malware payload from the rest, for a perfect 100% protection score. Bitdefender, Guardio, Sophos Home Premium, and Trend Micro also reached 100% in their respective tests.
While the Browser Safety extension comes with Avira’s free suite, paying customers get a separate component called Web protection, which serves much the same purpose. I’ll discuss Web protection below.
Writing a sneaky Trojan that can steal passwords and other sensitive information while dodging detection by security programs is tough. It is much easier to gather a copycat website to fool unobservant web surfers into simply giving away their passwords. Phishing sites, as we call these fakes, exist to capture login credentials for the sensitive sites they imitate.
In my phishing protection test, Avira successfully detected and defeated 100% of real-world phishing frauds. Guardio and McAfee also managed 100% detection, as did VPN-centric Surfshark One and NordVPN. Norton Genie, which has phishing as its main focus, also reached 100%.
As noted, most of this suite’s features are available at no cost in Avira Free Security. On the Security page, access to quarantine and all the variations on malware scanning are free.
