Full Antivirus Rating

Reading This Table Correctly

Every score here comes from the same four-part process described on our Methodology page: protection rate, performance impact, pricing and value, and platform coverage plus user experience. Protection rate carries the most weight, because a product that lets malware through has failed at its one job regardless of how well it scores elsewhere.

Why the Highest Price Isn't Automatically the Highest Score

A product doesn't climb this table by costing more or bundling more extras. If a cheaper suite catches malware just as reliably and runs lighter on your machine, it will outrank a pricier one padded with a VPN and identity monitoring nobody asked for. We'd rather point you to whatever actually does the core job best.

Why Rankings Move Between Visits

Scores shift because the products shift — an engine update, a pricing change, a newly disclosed vulnerability — not on a fixed schedule. If the order looks different from the last time you checked, something about one of the products genuinely changed in between.

Using the Filters

Filter by platform first if you're locked into one operating system, since a product's Windows performance and its Mac performance can differ meaningfully even under one plan. Filter by price next if budget is the deciding factor, and by free-plan availability if you want to try before you commit to a subscription.

What a Close Score Actually Means

A 9.2 next to an 8.9 is a real gap, but a small one in practical terms — either product will keep a typical home computer well protected. The number matters more at the extremes: anything above 9 has been consistently strong across every test we ran, and anything below 7 usually has one specific, named weakness worth reading about before you commit.

What a Number Can't Tell You

A ranking can't tell you whether a product's interface will frustrate you personally, whether its customer support actually answers quickly when you need it, or whether a specific feature you rely on — parental controls, a particular VPN region — works well in daily use. That's what the individual reviews are for.

If Another Site's Ranking Disagrees

Not every review site discloses how it's funded, and not every site tests hands-on rather than relying on vendor-supplied numbers. If a ranking elsewhere looks very different from ours, check what it's actually measuring, and whether it says anything about how it makes money, before assuming either list is wrong.

Sorting a Column Doesn't Change the Underlying Score

Reordering this table by price or by a single criterion changes what you see first, not what any product is actually worth overall. A product sorted toward the bottom by price can still be the top overall scorer — sorting is a convenience for scanning, and the weighted formula behind every number stays exactly the same regardless of how the rows happen to be arranged on screen.

Products Not Yet Listed

A product's absence from this table doesn't mean we've judged it unworthy — it usually means it hasn't finished our multi-week testing cycle yet. New releases and lesser-known products get added on a rolling basis as testing wraps, not on a fixed publishing calendar.

When Two Products Score Nearly Identically

Occasionally two products land within a tenth of a point of each other, and there's no shame in that outcome — it usually means both genuinely cleared our bar for strong, reliable protection with only minor differences separating them. Rather than manufacturing an artificial tiebreaker, we let the individual criterion breakdown do the deciding for you: check which single factor, whether that's raw detection rate or a lighter system footprint, matters most for your own situation before choosing between two products this close together.

How Often We Actually Revisit the Full Table

The table itself isn't rebuilt from scratch on a fixed schedule, but every individual score feeding into it is re-verified at least twice a year, and sooner whenever a vendor ships something that would plausibly move the needle. That means the table you're looking at right now reflects testing that's, at most, a few months old for any given product — not a yearly snapshot quietly going stale in the background.