Best Antivirus Apps 2023
Antivirus software is the most important software on your computer. Without it, your system can be easily infected with various malware and unwanted applications. Such infections have the potential to cause a considerable amount of damage to your computer. The threat of computer malware is constantly growing, so it is essential to choose the right security program for protection.
Malware can delete users' data, steal personal information, lock the computer, and ask to pay a ransom to unlock it and perform other rogue tasks. Infected computers become unstable, cybercriminals can access your data and perform other malicious tasks.
Which antivirus software is best?
Choosing the best antivirus program can be a complicated task. We at pcrisk.com are dealing with adware, malware, and ransomware infections on a daily basis, so we can give you professional advice on which antivirus suites work well and which fail to detect and remove various security issues.
EDITOR'S NOTE: When adding software to our top antivirus lists, we check every aspect of our recommended antivirus. However, we give the most value to detection and removal capabilities. We perform various tests and analyze independent testing companies' recommendations (AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives, etc.).
Here's our list of best antivirus programs for the year 2023:
Combo Cleaner is an antivirus and system optimizer created by a company called RCS LT. This application runs on Mac computers and works with all recent Mac operating systems, including Yosemite, macOS 13 Ventura, and macOS 14 Sonoma. This application takes a different approach as compared to traditional antivirus suites. As well as an antivirus function, Combo Cleaner includes a disk cleaner, big files finder, duplicate files finder, privacy scanner, and application uninstaller. This app can be used to clean computers of security threats and free up significant disk space cluttered by redundant files.
Combo Cleaner is an anti-malware application for Windows computers (also available for Mac computers). It's developed by a company RCS LT which has been working in cyber security industry for over 10 years. The accumulated experience in internet security allowed us to create a robust anti-malware solution that is capable of defending user's computers from nowadays prevailing cyber threats. Combo Cleaner is designed to work with all the most popular operating systems from Microsoft, alongside Windows Defender.
In our modern households we now have multiple devices and more often than note running on different operating systems. Antivirus vendors have cottoned on to this and now offer packages to install their product of multiple devices and across multiple operating system platforms. McAfee has long been the king of this approach and their latest antivirus offering, Antivirus Plus is no different.
Several antivirus vendors have employed the “Plus” moniker at the end of the years to indicate a better product than their basic antivirus. Some vendors bolt-on secondary features while others look to provide a greater user experience with features more discreetly packaged.
The other question is whether the additional features are worth the increased price of admission and if customers are better served by the basic package. This is the main question we will look to answer in our review of Bitdefender Antivirus Plus.
The primary goal of any antivirus package is to protect the device before malware can complete its programmed task and then maintain a watch on the system to prevent further exploitation.
Over the years two prevailing theories have been developed to meet this primary goal, focusing purely on the malware prevention aspect or including secondary features that in some assist in this task. ESET NOD32 Antivirus is certainly in the latter camp with several outstanding features being added to its core product.
In 2019 when Malwarebytes released the fourth version of it's incredibly popular anti-virus engine much changed and generally all for the better. This year saw the release of version 4.3 and this publication deemed it fit to do a full review of Malwarebytes Premium to see how it compares to their competition.Unless you are specifically using the free version of a specific anti-virus suite, price is always an important factor to consider. Like many of Malwarebytes’s competitors including Kaspersky, Bitdefender, and Trend Micro to protect one Windows or Mac device will cost 39.99 USD per year.
How do we test antivirus programs?
Our malware researchers are dealing with various malware infections (including adware, ransomware, and potentially unwanted applications) daily. We manually test malware samples, we visit countless rogue and phishing websites. Our email honeypots attract thousand of malicious emails. We test tens of unique ransomware infections on our virtual machines every day.
This puts us in a unique position. With all of this real-world malware data, we can thoroughly test antivirus applications and determine which are best at cleaning and preventing them. Arguably most technology websites can test the speed, usability, and other antivirus features visible to the naked eye. However, our staff can test antivirus against real-life cyber threats.
To our mind, reliable protection from malware threats is the most important thing in choosing the best antivirus program. Antivirus programs that perform best in our tests are added to our best antivirus list, which is actively updated. Note that Combo Cleaner is developed by the same company that is running the pcrisk.com website.
Nowadays, an antivirus program has become a must. If you care about your computer's security and your privacy, you should always use one.
IMPORTANT: Be sure you have only one antivirus software installed on your computer; having two different programs may cause problems.
