The 4 Best Antivirus Programs You Can Install Today, and the 4 You Should Avoid One Notoriously Bad

The 4 Best Antivirus Programs You Can Install Today, and the 4 You Should Avoid One Notoriously Bad

Not all antivirus programs protect us in the same way. If we want to go online and be protected from hackers hiding behind every website, it is essential to have good and trustworthy software. On the Internet we can find a large number of antivirus brands, which promise us comprehensive protection against all types of computer threats. However, do they all protect us equally from threats? How can we know?

Testing antivirus software ourselves, one by one, is a very tedious task. It is practically impossible to get a set of malware to test every antivirus software on the market. It is much more complicated when you are able to measure other basic aspects, such as performance or false positives.

Fortunately, there are companies and organizations dedicated to this very thing. AV-Comparatives is one of the most prestigious and trusted companies in this business. This platform is responsible for periodically analyzing the level of security offered by the main antivirus programs on the market. In this way, it is possible to know, at a glance, how well each antivirus protects us so that we can make the right decision.

A few hours ago, this platform just published its latest security reports. Thanks to them, we can find out which antivirus programs we can install on our computer right now. And also, which ones we should avoid.

- Best Antivirus Software for Windows

Av-Comparatives has tested what we believe to be the leading antiviruses we can find on the market. While there are many other brands out there, their reliability and lack of experience in the security sector means they are not even remotely recommended.

The complete list of antivirus programs analyzed by this platform is:

Avast

AVG

Bitdefender

CASE

G DATA

Kaspersky

Total Defense

Avira

F-Secure

McAfee

Microsoft

TotalOFF

Norton

Panda

Quick Heal

Trend Micro

Of all these, only 3 received a (nearly) perfect score. We are talking about Bitdefender, F-Secure and TotalAV, three security programs that were able to successfully detect and block 99.98% of all viruses analyzed. In fourth place, which we can also consider the winner, we find Total Defense, which blocks a total of 99.97% of viruses, letting through only 3 threats.

But, out of the four above, which one is really the best? To find out, what we will do is analyze the number of false positives reported. This way, we find that Bitdefender only had 5 false positives, the same as Total Defense. TotalAV, for its part, reported a total of 13 false positives, and F-Secure reported a total of 17 false positives on the PC.

That leaves us with a clear winner : Bitdefender is the best antivirus, at least for now.

- Worst Antivirus Software for Windows

We’ve already seen which antiviruses are the best based on malware detection rates and the false positives they report. Now let’s see which four have the worst scores. And the data is surprising.

Of course, any antivirus that detects less than 99% of computer threats is a sieve. Oddly enough, we have two in this category: the worst of all is  Trend Micro , which detected only 96.12% of computer threats, and Quick Heal, which detected a little more, but still far behind the rest of the competition.

Panda, the popular and “prestigious” Spanish antivirus, remains the third worst antivirus on the list, detecting only 99.25% of malware. Curiously, the world’s most widely used antivirus, Microsoft Defender, detected only 99.84% of computer threats, leaving it in fourth place from the bottom.