About Best PC Protection
Best PC Protection was founded to give people a straight answer to a simple question: which antivirus actually protects you, without slowing your computer to a crawl? Six years and more than 50 products later, that question is still the only thing our scores are built to answer.
Why We Exist
Every antivirus vendor's homepage claims to be "the best," "the fastest," or "trusted by millions." None of those claims are independently checked before they go on a landing page. We started this site because we got tired of choosing security software based on marketing copy instead of evidence, and we suspected a lot of other people were in the same position. So we built a lab, wrote down a fixed set of tests, and started running every product we cover through the exact same process, every time.
Inside the Lab
Our testing setup is deliberately unglamorous: identical physical machines, a controlled network, and a rotating library of real and simulated malware samples, including recently disclosed zero-day packages. Every product is installed fresh, updated to its current release, and left running under normal conditions for the full evaluation window rather than a rushed afternoon.
What a Test Run Actually Looks Like
A single product evaluation involves three separate passes: a detection pass against our malware library, a performance pass measuring boot time and application launch speed before and after installation, and a usability pass where an analyst who has never used that product's interface before tries to complete common tasks — running a scan, checking quarantine, adjusting real-time protection — without external help. If a task requires digging through three menus to find, we note it, because a real user would hit the same wall.
The People Behind the Scores
Our reviews are written and fact-checked by security analysts with hands-on industry experience, not generalist content writers rotating between unrelated review categories. Meet the team on our Authors page — including Jordan Voss, our Editor-in-Chief, who oversees every published score before it goes live, and Elena Cross, our Senior Malware Analyst, who runs the detection-rate testing personally rather than delegating it to an automated pipeline alone.
How We Test
Every product gets scored on protection rate, performance impact, price, and user experience using a consistent, repeatable process. Read the full breakdown, including exactly how each number is weighted, on our Methodology page.
What We Refuse To Do
We don't accept a vendor's own detection-rate claims at face value, we don't let a company preview a review before it publishes, and we don't adjust a score after the fact because a vendor didn't like the result. If a product's engine gets weaker in a later version, its score moves down, regardless of how it scored the first time we tested it.
Who This Site Is For
We built this for the person staring at a wall of antivirus options with no way to tell which claims are real — someone replacing a subscription that's about to expire, a small-business owner outfitting a handful of machines, or a parent trying to figure out whether the free option that came with their new laptop is actually enough. If that's you, start with our full rating and filter by what you actually need.
Where We're Headed
Threats change every year, and so does the software built to catch them. We re-test continuously rather than on a fixed annual cycle specifically so this site doesn't quietly go stale the way a lot of "updated for 2026" pages secretly do. Our goal is for a score you read today to still be accurate the next time you check it.