You need antivirus protection on all your devices, whether you’ve budgeted for it or not. If ready cash is a problem, you can choose one of the many effective free antivirus tools on the market. Avira Free Security takes free protection to the next level, offering VPN, password management, ad blocking, and more. It’s not a typical security suite, though. You won’t find firewall protection, backup, spam filtering, or other common suite components. Its wealth of components will delight the right user, but its scores, both in our own tests and independent lab tests, aren’t all the best.
Avira does also offer a free standalone antivirus, but given that this suite is equally free, there’s no reason to opt for the less-powerful antivirus. No reason, that is, unless you’re a Mac user—the free suite is Windows-only.
Note, that Norton acquired Avira at the end of 2020. The company has stated it intends to retain the Avira brand, which makes sense given its mindshare, especially in Europe. Norton’s recently completed merger with Avast puts Avast, AVG, and Avira all under the Norton umbrella. BullGuard, previously owned by Avira, has been discontinued, with BullGuard users redirected to Norton products.
Getting Started With Avira Free Security
Avira’s installer is seriously self-sufficient. Once you launch the process, it advises you to take a break for the four or five minutes needed to complete the process. You get the choice to continue with a free installation or purchase a license that upgrades you to Avira Prime. After installation, the product offers to run a Smart Scan. You’ll also want to click the link that launches a check for updates.
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Last time I reviewed this product, it had undergone some serious integration, bringing previously disparate components inside the main application. That integration continues with the current version. Running an antivirus scan used to launch a separate process in its own window, but that now happens within the main app. The VPN and app updater components are likewise integrated.
The product’s main Status screen still displays oversized icons for Security, Privacy, and Performance. A simple menu down the left lets you dig into these three feature areas or return to the Status home page. Finally, you can click a button to run the all-in-one Smart Scan. If you don’t run a Smart Scan immediately after the quick, simple installation, the product will keep nagging you until you do.
Smart Scan checks for active malware, of course, but it does a lot more. It analyzes your settings to find privacy problems, looks for ways to improve performance, identifies apps that need updating, and checks the network for possible security problems. More about Smart Scan later.
Farewell, Avira Crypto
The addition of Avira Crypto to this product a few years ago wasn’t without controversy. On sufficiently powerful PCs, this component would offer to mine the Ethereum cryptocurrency using the CPUs unused cycles. Avira totally managed the process and took a 15% cut when users cashed out.
Some people felt it inappropriate to combine security with crypto-mining. Those people can relax. With the Ethereum merge complete, that sort of mining no longer exists, and Avira Crypto is no more. The same is true of the similar Norton Crypto feature.
Mostly Excellent Lab Test Results
To supplement my hands-on testing of antivirus products, I turn to reports issued regularly by four independent labs around the world. The mere fact that a given product appears in a report means that the lab’s experts thought it significant enough to merit the effort of testing and reporting on it. The more lab results the better, and, of course, high scores are important. All four labs consider Avira important enough to test, and most gave it high marks.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online
Researchers at AV-Test Institute evaluate each antivirus product on three distinct criteria. Naturally, they measure its ability to protect against malware. They also score products on how well they avoid erroneously flagging legitimate processes as malicious, an index they call usability. And they ensure the product does all this without dragging down performance. A product can earn up to six points for each of the three criteria. Avira, along with two thirds of the products tested, earns sixes in all three categories, a perfect 18 points.
Of the many reports coming out of AV-Comparatives, I follow three. This lab doesn’t use numbers. Rather, a product that passes the test earns Standard certification. Those that go beyond the basics can earn Advanced or Advanced+ certification. In this lab’s latest tests, Avast, AVG, and Bitdefendere managed three Advanced+ ratings. Like Kaspersky, Avira earned Advanced+ in the two tests involving actual malware detection and Advanced in the performance test, a fine showing.
With SE Labs, certification comes in five levels: AAA, AA, A, B, and C. Like all the products in the latest round of testing, Avira earned the top certification level, AAA.
As you can see, most of the labs offer a range of scores to reflect a range of capabilities. Tests by London-based MRG-Effitas are scored differently. In this lab’s reports, a product either exhibits near-perfect protection or fails utterly. I follow one test that focuses on banking Trojans and another that tests all-around malware defense. Out of 11 tested products, only Bitdefender, ESET NOD32 Antivirus, and Malwarebytes passes both tests. Avira, along with Avast and Microsoft, passes the banking Trojans test but failed the all-around protection test.
Since all the labs use different scoring systems, I’ve devised an algorithm that maps the scores onto a 10-point scale and generates an aggregate score. As noted, I also consider inclusion by more labs to be better. Only Avast, Avira, and Microsoft span all four labs at present. Avira’s score of 9.5 is quite good, slightly bettered by Avast’s 9.6.
Among those tested by three labs, AVG and Bitdefender stand out with a perfect 10 points. It’s worth noting these two, along with three others that score higher than Avira, didn't have to face the daunting pass/fail tests from MRG-Effitas.
Much Improved Malware Protection Score
Lab results notwithstanding, I always perform my own hands-on tests. I start by opening a folder of malware samples that I've curated and analyzed myself. Avira immediately started quarantining those that it recognized. It eliminated 83% of the samples on sight, which is a little bit low. G Data and ZoneAlarm both wiped out 97% of the samples at this stage. On the plus side, Avira eliminated every ransomware sample on sight. After recording Avira’s initial reaction, I launched the samples that made it past this initial culling.
In the end, Avira detected 93% of the samples to score 9.3 of 10 possible points. Looking just at products tested with the current sample set, that score puts Avira right in the middle of the pack. When last tested, it was nearly at the bottom, so that’s a good comeback. Norton owns the top score among these products, 9.9 points. G Data and ZoneAlarm are close behind with 9.8.
Tested with my previous sample set, Malwarebytes did best, with 100% detection and a perfect 10 points. Emsisoft Anti-Malware and Sophos also detected all the samples; Sophos came in with a very respectable 9.9 points.
Avira’s full scan used to happen in a separate window titled Luke Filewalker. I don’t know whether George Lucas found out about it or not, but the slightly cheesy Luke Filewalker window is gone, replaced by fully integrated scan reporting. A full scan of a clean test system took 100 minutes, rather longer than the current average of 72 minutes. In previous tests I found that a second scan went much faster, but this time around the repeat scan still took 82 minutes.
Avira offers several browser extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera. These include a password manager, a shopping helper, and the security-centric Browser Safety extension. Among other things, Browser Safety aims to head off any possibility of malware infection by steering your browser away from malware-hosting URLs. To test this feature, I start with a feed of malware-hosting URLs recently discovered by researchers at British lab MRG-Effitas. I launch each URL, discarding any with errors, and note whether the antivirus blocked all access to the URL, eliminated the malware download, or did nothing.
I give equal credit for blocking the URL and for eliminating the download. Avira achieved 70% protection, down from 78% when last tested. Its detections were almost evenly divided between blocking all access to the malware-hosting URL and eliminating the malware immediately after download. That puts it near the bottom, score-wise. Sophos, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm achieved 100% protection when last tested, while G Data and Microsoft managed 99%.
Good Phishing Protection
Coding a Trojan horse or other malicious program that can steal passwords while evading antivirus utilities is a tough slog. Fooling unsuspecting consumers into innocently handing over their login credentials is a lot easier. Phishing fraudsters simply create a website that’s visually identical to, say, PayPal. Sometimes they manage a URL that’s close to the real thing, like paypal.loginuser.com. When an unwitting web surfer logs in, the fraudsters capture the username and password, and that unfortunate netizen is hosed.
Avira’s web protection extends to detecting and averting these phishing attacks as well. To test it, I first scraped hundreds of reported phishing URLs from websites that track such things, including both verified frauds and reported pages that were too new to be blacklisted. I launched each URL in a browser protected by Avira, and simultaneously in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, relying on each browser’s built-in protection. I discarded any that didn’t load properly in all four browsers. I also discarded any that didn’t clearly fit the profile of a phishing fraud. When I got enough data points, I ran the numbers.
Avira detected 97% of the verified frauds, a nice bump up from its 91% score when last tested. Still, several products have done even better, topped by the 100% score shared by Bitdefender, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm.
Phishing is completely platform independent. If you can browse the web on your internet-aware lawnmower, you can give up your login credentials there just as easily as on your computer. However, third party phishing protection isn’t necessarily the same from platform to platform. Some products earn wildly different scores on Windows than on macOS. Avira shields you from frauds in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera, regardless of the operating system. Tested at the same time, Avira Free Antivirus for Mac earned precisely the same score.
While it's good to use software that protects you from phishing, you should also know what to do to protect yourself. We’ve pulled together some tips to help you learn how to avoid phishing scams.
See How We Test Security Software
Security Features
Selecting Security from the left-rail menu opens the Security page, which offers access to five security features: Virus scans, Protection options, Quarantine, Software updater, and Firewall. Selecting the Virus scans panel lets you launch or schedule the expected quick or full scan. You can also scan just removable drives, active processes, or Windows system files. Out of the box, Avira runs a weekly quick scan and a daily active process scan. Once the antivirus has trapped some prey, you can click Quarantine to see just what it bagged. Here you can permanently delete found threats or, in the very unlikely event of a false positive, restore legitimate programs that got quarantined.
Clicking the Protection options panel reveals just what you don’t get for free. In the free edition, only Real-time protection is enabled. If you try to enable Web protection or Ransomware protection, you trigger a page advising you to upgrade to Avira Prime. If you decline, Avira offers a 60-day Prime trial to tempt you. Do note that Web protection is a browser-independent component, completely distinct from Browser Safety.
When ne’er-do-wells discover security holes in popular programs, they exploit them to the max, knowing that the program’s maker will soon release a security patch to close those holes. If you don’t install available patches, you put yourself at risk. The Software Updater component scans your installed apps and flags any that have outstanding security patches. You’ll find buttons to update each app, or update all of them, but these trigger an upsell page.
To be fair, it’s not hard to just open each app that Avira reported as out of date and check for updates manually. Avast's product line has a similar app update feature, even in the free Avast One Essential. But here again, you don't get automated installation unless you spring for the top-of-the-line Avast One suite.
I mentioned earlier that this free suite doesn’t include a firewall, so you may be surprised to see a Firewall panel on the Security page. Avira’s firewall controls simply let you turn Windows Firewall on or off, and you can also change whether it treats your network as public or private. If you click for Advanced settings, it diverts you to the complex and confusing Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security page.
Privacy Features
When you click the Privacy option in the left-rail menu, you get access to five useful privacy-related components: Browser safety, VPN, Passwords, File Shredder, and Privacy settings. Clicking Browser safety installs the Avira extension in your default browser (provided that your default is Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Opera). I’ve already discussed that feature’s ability to steer users away from malicious and fraudulent sites, but it can do more, if you allow it.
Click the toolbar button and click the settings gear to see this extension’s capabilities. By default, it just sends a Do Not Track header with the browser’s every web page request, something most browsers can do themselves. Since websites are free to ignore this header, it’s pointless. For actual protection, you must turn on blocking of ads and web trackers, and separately set it to block social media sites from tracking you.
Once you’ve enabled the feature, Avira watches for tracking ads and other third-party trackers, and actively stops them from tracking you. It also blocks ads in general, though by default it allows ads it deems relevant and non-intrusive. A numeric overlay on the browser extension button shows the total items blocked, and you can click that button for a breakdown. You can disable blocking for specific sites, but you don’t get the option to exempt certain trackers or certain ads.
Avira also installs its password manager (discussed below) and the Safe Shopping extension. Safe Shopping doesn’t aim to protect you from online pickpockets or sleazy merchants. Rather, it aims to keep you from paying too much. I spent a little time poking around shopping sites and searching for popular items. In a few cases, Safe Shopping found what it considered a better offer (even though the price was higher). It also offered coupons on a couple major sites. I still don’t see a lot of value in this feature.
The VPN component is an integrated and feature-limited version of Avira Phantom VPN, which connects with servers in 28 countries, most of them in North America and Europe. In the free suite, you don’t get to choose a location; the VPN just hooks you up to the nearest location. In addition, the free VPN caps your bandwidth at 500MB per month. Removing those limitations costs you $10 per month or $78 per year. Paying for the all-inclusive Avira Prime is another way to get VPN protection without limits.
Bitdefender Antivirus Plus includes a similarly limited VPN with a more generous bandwidth limit of 200MB per day. Lifting Bitdefender’s limits costs $6.99 per month or $39.99 per year, a good bit less than Avira charges. Note that Bitdefender licenses VPN technology from Hotspot Shield VPN, while Avira developed its VPN in house.
The password manager installs as a browser extension in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera for Windows or macOS, and offers apps for Android and iOS. It handles basic tasks like capturing login credentials you enter, replaying them as needed and syncing across all your devices. You can enable multi-factor authentication, which functions by texting a code to your smartphone. But it doesn’t offer form-filling, secure sharing, digital inheritance, or other top-tier features. See our review of Avira Password Manager to learn more.
When you delete a file, it just goes to the Recycle Bin. That’s handy in case you deleted the wrong file, but not so good if you’re trying to wipe out sensitive data such as the plaintext original of a file you encrypted. Even if you empty the Recycle Bin, forensic software can often recover deleted files. To delete files beyond the possibility of forensic recovery, just drop them on Avira’s File Shredder.
When you use it on an SSD, the shredder invokes the TRIM function to clear out old data. On a traditional hard drive, Avira overwrites the data once before deletion, which is sufficient to prevent software-based forensic recovery. Bitdefender, McAfee AntiVirus Plus, Vipre, and Webroot offer a similar feature. Webroot can overwrite files seven times and wipe all traces, foiling even forensic hardware.
Privacy Settings Check
The most significant component on the Privacy page is Privacy Settings. This feature incorporates the functionality of the separate Avira Privacy Pal, which is no longer in development.
If not configured correctly, Windows and popular apps can potentially leak information about your computer and browser usage. Avira puts you in control of over 140 settings in 17 categories, among them: Sharing data with Microsoft; Telemetry and user experience; Edge configuration; and OneDrive. A single click can align all your settings with the recommendations of Avira’s experts. Alternatively, you can dig in and customize the settings, or just view exactly what those settings are.
Curious users will want to choose Custom settings and view the many dozens of privacy settings. Who knew that by default you were subject to “Microsoft experiments,” for example? In the Custom view you can see what settings Avira marks as Recommended, and what additional settings it changes when you switch to Enhanced.
The Privacy Shield component of iolo Privacy Guardian performs a similar service, though it manages only about 30 settings. It also lacks expert recommendations for proper configuration, leaving the user to turn everything off, leave it all on, or laboriously consider items one at a time.
Performance Features
People sometimes blame their security software for performance problems. Avira works to head off that kind of thinking by including a collection of features designed to improve performance. Clicking Performance at left reveals a page with six button panels: Optimizer, Battery saver, Driver updater, Duplicate finder, Advanced tools, and Game Booster. Game Booster requires an upgrade, and three of the buttons (Battery saver, Duplicate finder, and Advanced tools) just launch the corresponding components within the separate Avira System Speedup application. Even more than the rest of this suite, System Speedup is loaded with locked Pro-only features, scans that find problems but won’t fix them without payment, and other upsell attempts.
The simple Optimizer aims to free up space by removing junk files, speed up your device’s performance, and clean up things like cookies and erroneous Registry data. On my sparsely populated test system, it found 285MB of junk files and two slow startup apps. One click cleaned up the junk files but said nothing about those slow apps. The results page offered to unlock my “full cleaning potential.” Clicking the Unlock button I learned that I could pay $57.99 per year for Avira’s Optimization Suite, or just get it all as part of Avira Prime.
Driver updater is similar in purpose to the Software updater described above. However, rather than finding missing security patches it scans your system for device drivers that could be updated for better performance. In testing, the scan went quickly, reporting just one driver requiring an update. As with the software updater, clicking to update all outdated drivers took me to an upsell page. However, clicking Update next to a single driver caused Avira to take care of the update even in this free edition.
Selecting Battery saver launched Avira System Speedup with the energy management component open. Of course, the virtual machine test system has no battery, but it still let me choose among five modes, ranging between best energy saving and best performance. Or rather, it offered me three of those modes, as choosing either of the extremes triggered an offer to purchase System Speedup Pro
Storing useless temp files and other junk wastes space on your hard drive, but so does storing more than one copy of documents and other files. Clicking Duplicate finder opens the corresponding component in System Speedup. In testing, Avira quickly found groups of identical files, in each case marking all but one for deletion. However, clicking the button to delete those redundant files just brought up an upsell screen. If you don’t want to pay up, you’ll have to reference Avira’s report while performing deletions manually.
Clicking for Advanced tools once again opens System Speedup, this time with the Startup optimizer page selected. After a quick scan, the utility listed apps that may slow down the device and offered to perform a basic optimization. I wasn’t at all surprised to find that full use of this feature required an update to System Speedup Pro.
I ran through the other features of System Speedup, with similar results. Quick Optimizer did a partial cleanup job but pointed out that its Pro edition could do more. Power Cleaner located almost 3GB of items that should be cleaned up but wouldn’t perform that cleanup without payment. The app’s many pages are riddled with orange Pro-only flags. At least when you see those, you know the feature’s not available before you spend time scanning something. Even so, I found the preponderance of Pro-only features in the separate System Speedup component to be seriously annoying. I’d be happier if Avira’s designers continued the integration trend by pulling the handful of available speedup features into Avira Free Security.
Smart Scan
Now that I’ve run through this suite’s many features, I can spell out just how Smart Scan puts them all to work. You click a button on the main page to start the fun. Smart Scan checks for privacy issues and performance issues. It runs a quick scan for malware and checks for outdated apps. Finally, it runs a scan for network threats. That last item refers to any times you’ve connected to an insecure Wi-Fi network. The whole thing just takes a few minutes.
When the scan finishes, it summarizes its findings, broken down into Security, Privacy, and Performance issues. You can click a button to fix everything or choose to view detailed results. Well, fix everything may be the wrong phrase. Avira clears cookies, fixes Registry problems, and frees up some disk space. If you want to fix the rest, including outdated apps, privacy settings, and more wasted disk space, you’ll have to pay for an upgrade.
Integration Continues
While most of the Performance features call on the separate Avira System Speedup tool, Avira’s Privacy and Security components are thoroughly integrated, even more so now that the VPN, software updater, and malware scanning components run right in the main window. We’d be even happier if its designers built the performance components into the main product rather than launching the separate, flashy, upsell-riddled System Speedup tool; perhaps that will come. While it’s bursting with features and utilities, it doesn’t cover the full range of expected suite components, and many of the features it does boast aren’t fully functional without payment.
Our current Editors’ Choice for free antivirus is Avast One Essential. Like Avira Free Security, it’s a stripped-down version of a full security suite. It tracks fairly closely with Avira feature-wise, but its protection against dangerous and fraudulent websites is significantly better, the bandwidth limit on its VPN is much more generous, and it includes protection aimed squarely at ransomware. Of course, when you’re looking at free antivirus tools you have the luxury of evaluating as many as you want to pick the one that suits you best.
Avira Free Security goes beyond basic antivirus with dozens of security-related utilities. However, many require payment for full functionality.
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