Antivirus Performance Comparison
They are capable of doing a wide range of things, from stealing your hard disk space to getting access to your personal data or draining your CPU. Fortunately, there are numerous anti-virus programs available to help protect your devices from these types of problems. It is important to choose an anti-virus that has minimal impact on performance of your system. Every antivirus program we offer is tested against this aspect. The results depend on how long it takes each program to complete an operation. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free, for example, had a background effect of 6% while conducting a full scan while ESET had an impact of 12 percent.
Avira, a German-based firm, has a solid reputation in our tests. It has consistently scored above 90 percent in all three categories: Protection (False positives), Performance (False Positives) and Usability. Its interface is also user comfortable and has a wealth of features, including a smart firewall and other privacy tools. Avira’s subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis rather than a fixed 1-3 year period, making it easier to cancel or alter the subscription at any point without having to worry about second-year renewal price shocks.
A relatively new name that we’ve tested, Essentware – which was previously known as PCKeeper uses the Avira engine in its core and generally scores pretty well across the spectrum. Its performance and UI are both user-friendly however there are a few issues with stability such as scanning jobs freezing which have reduced the score. However, the detection was satisfactory, and a perfect run through the certification sets earned it the VB100 award.