As in past years, I don't have my own testing lab. I don't have time to test out each and every product that comes out, and I don't have anyway to bombard these products with thousands of different viruses to check them out.
What I can and in fact do is review six or eight different resources that I routinely read about (sources who have high paid staffers and the resources to afford independent testing labs), and then tally those results to create my own "best in breed" anti-virus software list.
None of the products mentioned in this article are associated with any specific 'operating system' vendor, and this rating omits any such products from evaluation.
In addition to the 'composite average scores' (shown below) which represent our tally results, we have also noted a (QB) designation for those products that are on Intuit's list of antivirus software compatibility. Because a majority of our readership is associated in some manner with QuickBooks products, we felt it was important to include this designation for your review; however, we made no attempt to 'weight' or otherwise 'factor in' Intuit's review into these otherwise numeric product comparisons.
There are several overall changes between this year's list and our prior annual listings.
So, here is our Top 10 (from 1 to 10). Be aware, there maybe multiple products that tied in the scoring, therefore they are ranked together:
# 1 Ranking
- TotalAV - - composite average score = 94
# 2 Ranking
- PCProtect - - composite average score = 90
- Norton by Symantec - - composite average score = 90 (QB)
# 3 Ranking
- Avira - - composite average score = 88 (QB)
- Bitdefender - - composite average score = 88 (QB)
#4 Ranking
- Kaspersky - - composite average score = 87 (QB)
- McAfee - - composite average score = 87 (QB)
#5 Ranking
- WebRoot - - composite average score = 86
#6 Ranking
- F-Secure - - composite average score = 84
- ScanGuard - - composite average score = 84
# 7 Ranking
- ESET - - composite average score = 83 (QB)
- Avast - - composite average score = 83 (QB)
# 8 Ranking
- BullGuard - - composite average score = 82
- Trend Micro - - composite average score = 82
# 9 Ranking
- AVG - - - composite average score = 78 (QB)
- Vipre - - composite average score = 78
#10 Ranking
- Malwarebytes - - composite average score = 77 (QB)
- Sophos - - composite average score = 77
Because of significant pricing variations based upon source of purchase, we chose to exclude all pricing references as part of this year's comparison. Price was one component of the criteria included by many of the source rankings we used in compilation of this list.