Compare Antivirus Software
Protection rate, performance impact, price, and features — side by side.
When a Head-to-Head Is the Right Page
Reach for a direct comparison once you've already narrowed your decision down to two specific products — usually because they scored close together, or because you keep seeing both recommended for the same situation. Instead of re-reading two full reviews side by side in separate tabs, this page puts their scores, pricing, and features next to each other so the actual difference is easy to spot at a glance.
Same Criteria, No Exceptions
Every comparison is scored on the identical four criteria as the main rating — protection rate, performance impact, pricing and value, platform coverage and UX — plus a direct look at bundled extras like VPN and password manager quality. We don't invent comparison-specific measures, because that would make a head-to-head result disagree with how the same two products are scored individually everywhere else on the site.
Where a Comparison Beats a Ranking
A ranking tells you which product scores higher overall; it doesn't tell you that the lower-ranked one might genuinely beat the other on the one thing you personally care about most — a generous device limit, say, or a meaningfully lighter performance footprint on older hardware. That specific gap is exactly what a comparison page is built to surface.
How We Choose Which Pairs to Cover
We prioritize pairings people are actively searching for — usually two products competing directly on price or reputation, or a well-known free option against a well-known paid one. If there's a specific pairing you want covered that we haven't published yet, our Contact page is the right place to ask.
These Pages Update Automatically
Because a comparison pulls live from each product's own current score and pricing record, it updates the moment either underlying review does. You should never see a comparison page quoting a price that's already been corrected in the individual review — both draw from the exact same source data.
When There's Genuinely No Clear Winner
Sometimes two products trade real advantages with no single overall winner, and we say so directly rather than forcing an artificial verdict for the sake of a tidy conclusion. When that happens, your own priority — squeezing out the last fraction of detection versus a noticeably lighter system footprint — becomes the actual deciding factor, and we try to spell that trade-off out explicitly rather than picking a winner ourselves.
Comparisons Involving a Free Tier
When one side of a comparison offers a genuinely usable free plan and the other doesn't, that's often the deciding factor for light or occasional use even when the paid product wins narrowly on raw detection numbers. We call this out specifically in the comparison table rather than letting a marginal protection edge silently outweigh a real cost difference for a reader on a tight budget.
Pairings We Haven't Published Yet
Not every possible product pairing gets a dedicated comparison page — we prioritize by genuine search demand and real head-to-head relevance, not by trying to cover every mathematically possible combination. A pairing's absence here isn't a judgment on either product; it usually just means that specific matchup hasn't come up often enough yet to justify a dedicated writeup.
Choosing Between Three or More Products
If you're actually weighing three or more candidates rather than two, a single comparison page won't cover the decision cleanly — read the individual reviews for each candidate instead, then use the same shared scoring criteria across all of them as your common yardstick. A comparison page is built for narrowing a decision that's already down to two finalists, not for the earlier, wider stage of a search.
Comparisons Can Age Differently Than You'd Expect
A comparison written when two products were close in score can become lopsided months later if one vendor ships a major engine update and the other doesn't. The page updates automatically as the underlying reviews change, but it's genuinely worth re-reading a comparison you bookmarked a while back rather than assuming the original conclusion still holds today.