Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2019 is Bitdefender's baseline Windows antivirus package which delivers all the usual malware hunting essentials, and throws in plenty of interesting extras, too - and, right now, it tops our list of the best antivirus software.

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2. Bitdefender For Mac 2019 Review Honda

Bitdefender 2019 Virus Scanner for Mac Reviews. Bitdefender 2019 Virus Scanner for Mac – A straightforward and also simple user interface makes the application exceptionally easy to use.

NOTE: Bitdefender is currently running a massive 60% discount on Antivirus Plus (or click here if you're in Australia). That means the price comes down to just $23.99 (around £18.20/AU$28) for the year for one device – so the equivalent of just shy of $2 (£1.50/AU$2.30) a month!

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus gives you antivirus (unsurprisingly), real-time behavior monitoring and multi-layered ransomware protection, for instance. But there's also malicious website blocking, online banking protection, a password manager and secure file deletion.

• Bitdefender Total Security 2019 is a top-of-the-range security suite which includes just about everything you need to protect Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices.
• This Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac 2018 costs $39.99 for 1 Mac 1 year, $59.99 for up to 3 Macs 1 year. There is $10 off for the Start of the year offer if you choose the pack of up to 3 Macs 1 year and this pack is suitable for users who has more devices to protect.
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• Aug 20, 2018  With everything from file encryption and ransomware protection to a game mode and a hardened browser, Bitdefender's 2019 antivirus products.

The package even includes a Hotspot Shield-powered VPN, although the basic edition doesn't allow you to choose your location and restricts you to a tiny 200MB data transfer allowance per day, barely enough for email and very light browsing (upgrading to its Premium VPN is worth considering - it represents much better value).

• Get Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2019 for 60% off by clicking here if you live in the US or UK or here if you live in Australia!

New features in this release include Ransomware Remediation, an extra layer of protection which looks for ransomware-like behavior and backs up targeted files until the malicious processes can be closed. Even if the regular antivirus engine takes a few seconds to kill the ransomware, it's unlikely to matter, because Bitdefender should be able to restore anything which has been encrypted.

Elsewhere, the new Network Threat Prevention technology tries to prevent malware exploiting vulnerabilities on your device to launch more widespread attacks.

Bitdefender's Autopilot system delivers intelligent recommendations on how to optimize protection to match the way you use your device, and a new-look dashboard for the Windows build makes it even easier to use.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2019 is priced at a fairly average $39 for a one device, one-year license, but adding Windows devices and years can really improve value. A one-year, 10 device license costs only $71.50, for instance, and covering 10 devices for three years only lifts the price to $162.50, just $5.41 per device-year. But, as we've said before, TechRadar readers can get it even cheaper.

If you're looking for something more powerful, Bitdefender Total Security 2019 adds a firewall, spam filter, webcam protection, parental controls and more, and has versions for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. A one-year, five device license costs $45.50 in year one, $91 on renewal.

Better still, there are 30-day no-strings-attached free trial builds for all the major Bitdefender packages, so it's easy to try all their features for yourself.

Setup

You must create a free Bitdefender account before you're able to download the trial of Antivirus Plus 2019, which essentially means handing over your email address. Many companies do something similar, though, and having an account does bring some genuine advantages, including the ability to view your device security status from Bitdefender's web console.

We registered with our email address, downloaded Antivirus Plus and started the installation. The setup process ran smoothly, scanning our computer to confirm it was clean, installing browser extensions and generally sorting itself out with minimal hassle.

On first launch, Antivirus Plus displays a simple tour, walking you through the key areas of the interface. Experienced users won't need this at all, but it's good to have the help available for novices.

Close the tour window and you're able to explore the polished Antivirus Plus console, a nicely designed interface which gives you speedy access to the features you need.

Quick scans are just a click away, while a left-hand sidebar organizes the suite's other tools into Protection, Privacy and Utilities areas. Expanding these displays the various options available within and most users will quickly be able to find their way around.

The main console can be customized to replace its default options with anything you're more likely to use. If you're not interested in the VPN, for instance, in a few clicks you could swap it with a button to launch the system scan, the password manager, file shredder or whatever else you like.

Overall, the Antivirus Plus interface works very well. Beginners get easy access to the most important features, but there are also plenty of configuration options and low-level tweaks for experts to enjoy.

Features

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2019 supports multiple scan modes: Quick Scan checks the most likely infected areas, System Scan examines everything, Explorer integration enables scanning objects from Explorer's right-click menu, and there's a bootable rescue environment to help you remove the most stubborn threats.

A Manage Scans option lets you create new scan types to check specific files and folders. You're able to redefine how the scan works – look for rootkits but don't bother with 'potentially unwanted applications', maybe – and there are options to schedule scans to run automatically. This can't compete with the configurability of Avast, but there's easily enough power here for most users.

Scanning speeds are reasonable. Quick Scans took around 15-30 seconds on our test computer, while full system scans started at 135 minutes to check 335GB of files, but this fell to 43 minutes by the second scan, 30 minutes for the third, and we would expect it to drop further over time.

How to get minecraft for free on windows 10. Bitdefender's password manager, Wallet, is able to store website credentials, credit card details, wireless network passwords, application logins and license keys, email server credentials and details (server names, ports and so on), and personal details for any number of individuals (name, date of birth, address, email, phone number(s), and more besides).

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Antivirus Plus automatically installed the Wallet extension on our Chrome browser (Firefox and IE are also supported.) This just about handled the website login basics for us, but couldn't always fill in more complex forms correctly, or automatically submit forms once they were completed. It's not going to replace big-name competitors like Dashlane, but if you don't have a password manager already, you should find it useful.

Bitdefender's Safepay is a secure browser which protects online banking and other sensitive transactions from snoopers and malware. We tested it with screenshot tools and keyloggers and found they weren't able to record any trace of what we were doing.

The Vulnerability Scanner runs some basic checks for missing application updates and Windows patches, weak passwords and some network issues. It didn't do anything special for us, but again, it could be worth running occasionally.

A bonus File Shredder securely wipes selected files and folders to ensure there's no chance they can be recovered. It works, and may be very handy for wiping sensitive documents, but it doesn't allow you to choose a shredding algorithm or tweak any other settings. That's fine for novice users, but experts will get more control by using best-of-breed file-shredding freeware.

Protection

Bitdefender is loved by the big testing labs, and its products almost always appear around the top of every chart.

AV-Comparatives' February to June 2018 Real-World Protection report summarized the results of five individual tests, and once again, Bitdefender performed very well. The engine blocked 99.8% of threats, putting it third out of 18 for protection, just fractionally behind Trend Micro and F-Secure.

AV-Test's Windows 10 tests for April 2018 went even further, showing Bitdefender blocking 100% of test threats.

We carried out further tests of our own, starting by checking Bitdefender's malicious website filtering against a list of brand new dangerous links. Antivirus Plus blocked 84%, better than most, although this is a difficult area to assess reliably and results can change significantly from day to day.

Finally, as Bitdefender prides itself on anti-ransomware functionality, we put the suite through a couple of strenuous tests.

To begin, we pitted Bitdefender against a real-world ransomware sample. It wasn't a fair fight, with Antivirus Plus killing the infection immediately, before it could touch our system.

We ramped up the difficulty level by creating a custom ransomware simulator of our own, something Bitdefender would never have seen before. Antivirus Plus 2019 allowed it to run for a while as it watched what was happening, but eventually it also killed the process and restored all the files our software had managed to encrypt.

Bitdefender didn't fully clean up the system afterwards, though. The ransomware executable wasn't deleted, for instance, and the encrypted files were left alongside the originals (if you started with Important.PDF, you would be left with Important.PDF and Important.Ext). But Antivirus Plus 2019 had successfully blocked both a known and brand-new threat without us losing a single file, and that's what really matters.

Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition

There is a Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition which is an accurate and reliable 'set and forget' antivirus, perfect for anyone who doesn't want to spend time and effort managing security themselves.

Bitdefender Antivirus Free is designed to be as simple as possible to use, and that's clear from the moment the installer launches. Click Install, the package runs a quick scan and sets everything up in under a minute.

There's just one small hassle: Bitdefender asks you to create an account to activate the program. This is easy and free – just hand over your name and email address – but Avast and Avira's free antivirus make it clear that signing up is entirely optional.

Considering it's trimmed down, Bitdefender Free still manages to grab a fair chunk of your system resources, taking more than 1.2GB of hard drive space and adding four new background processes.

The total lack of settings and configuration options ensures the program is very easy to set up, though, and even a total PC and antivirus novice will have it up and running in no time at all.

It's a good package but at the meagre additional cost, we'd heartily recommend opting for the full version which will offer you more protection and more features.

Bitdefender Box 2

If you're looking for even more protection from Bitdefender, the company has also released a smart firewall for the connected home called the Bitdefender Box 2. The device is essentially a supercharged router which can either replace or run alongside your existing networking kit.

Wi-Fi duties are handled by an 802.11a/b/g/n/ac AC1900 setup. You get just two ports – one LAN, one WAN – both supporting Gigabit Ethernet. F-Secure's SENSE router goes further with three LAN ports and even Bluetooth support, but there's enough power here for most users, especially if you'll just be plugging Box into an existing ISP router.

Bitdefender Box costs $199)for year one, which gets you the router and a subscription to Bitdefender Total Security, or the equivalent for your device (Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac, Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS or Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android).

After the first year, an annual $99 gets you all the core Box features, but still includes Bitdefender Total Security for an unlimited number of devices, worth at least $104 all on its own.

Final verdict

A superb all-round antivirus tool which does a great job of keeping even brand new, undiscovered threats at bay. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2019 is an absolute must for your PC security shortlist.

• Still want to compare it to the competition - check out our best antivirus guide

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• Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac (version 6.2)

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If you look at the lab ratings for Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac, you could easily assume that the software package nails its focus on malware protection. It received the highest possible detection scores from AV-TEST and AV Comparatives: 100 percent from AV-TEST for detection of macOS potentially unwanted applications (PUA), and above 99 percent for identifying Windows malware.

But those scores don’t tell the whole story. When I tested version 6.1 of this software, Bitdefender fared poorly against downloaded and decompressed macOS malware. However, after that review, Bitdefender released version 6.2, which adds 200MB of free VPN service as part of the subscription price. An update fixes one of the bugs we found, the company says, and I confirmed that. Accordingly, we’ve opted to review this updated version due to timing and the fix for a bug we found significant.

Bitdefender also provided more detail and a testing script for two file-protection features which are poorly explained within the app, and which were disabled by default at installation. While the app’s main screen warns about some security features being turned off, it still doesn’t for these.

Update 01/18/2019: The current “2019” version of Bitdefender adds support for macOS Mojave, but does not otherwise make significant changes that would affect this review or score.

Immediate improvements

In our previous review of version 6.1, Bitdefender’s anti-malware monitoring didn’t stop me when I decompressed macOS malware from the Objective See archive, nor when I tried to launch it. A manual “Custom Scan” operation had to be performed to recognize the malware.

With version 6.2, however, as soon as I expanded the encrypted archive, Bitdefender instantly recognized the malware, moved it into quarantine, and displayed a notification about what had happened. Disabling its protection, expanding the archive, and then re-enabling it also resulted in an immediate quarantine of malware files. This behavior is what I’d expect and marks a substantial improvement.

In both versions 6.1 and 6.2, the default setup doesn’t activate the Safe Files feature, which provides passive ransomware protection. You must dig into the software’s preferences and turn it on manually. The company says an installation wizard should offer both Safe Files and the Time Machine protection option (which we’ll discuss next) as optional features a user can enable.

When Safe Files is turned on, it prevents apps from creating, modifying, or deleting anything within protected folders; the starting set encompasses Desktop, Documents, Downloads, and Pictures. You can add others, but ransomware typically targets only files created by users, as those require fewer permissions to modify.

Apple’s apps are all exempted from Safe Files automatic blocking, and there’s no way (or, really, reason) to block them. I tested an Apple-signed third-party app, Bare Bones’s BBEdit, and it was automatically approved and shown in the Safe Files apps list. That approval behavior also can’t be modified, but you can set Bitdefender to block third-party signed apps after their first attempt to access a protected folder. You can also manually add and remove apps from the list and set them to approved or blocked. All unsigned third-party apps are blocked by default.

To test this feature, I ran a piece of known ransomware from the Objective See archive with Bitdefender’s real-time scanning feature disabled (as that would prevent its expansion and launch) but Safe Files turned on. Safe Files correctly blocked the app. However, I also tested a simple Terminal-based “bash” shell script, which uses a command-line ZIP compression tool, and the script and the ZIP compression and encryption weren’t stopped: macOS’s Unix tools are signed by Apple. Because the script wasn’t known malware, it also wasn’t blocked by the anti-virus database in Bitdefender.

This kind of passive ransomware protection differs from that provided by our top paid pick, Sophos Home Premium, which actively looks for patterns of encryption that ransomware apps follow. Still, even passive protection is better than none, since most ransomware threats involve downloaded apps, not freestanding scripts. The company could improve this passive feature by blacklisting all Apple-signed Unix apps from acting on the Safe Files folders, too.

Bitdefender separately hides a powerful feature for preventing files from being modified in Time Machine backups. (You can turn it on by clicking a checkbox in the program’s Protection preferences.) If and when effective ransomware spreads among macOS users, Time Machine backups will be prime targets: the malware would want to encrypt not just active files in a user’s home directory, but also any backups of those files that are on connected volumes.

With this protection option turned on, Time Machine backups can only be modified by Apple’s backup software. No other apps can modify the volume. In testing, this proved out. Trying to remove and modify files from the Finder, Terminal, and other apps was consistently blocked by Bitdefender, while Time Machine operations worked as expected.

A few downsides

The app’s main interface is minimal with a refreshingly crisp appearance, but that’s because Bitdefender stashed almost every function and view in the preferences dialog. That makes sense for tweaky settings about scanning, technical logs, and interface controls—but preferences also includes the quarantine area, which isn’t a preference and should be easier for a user to access, as well as the Safe Files interface, which may need to be consulted frequently when using new apps in a protected folder.

Also, files held in quarantine show just a malware ID, file path, and buttons for Restore and Delete. You get nothing to click for more information, no repair option, and no other detail. It doesn’t note, for instance, that selecting a quarantined file and clicking Restore returns a defanged piece of malware to a location you select—the nasty guts are removed, which would be helpful information for a user clicking on it.

Bitdefender doesn’t install its native web browser plug-ins automatically. Instead, you have to click a link in the app, then click on another link on a webpage, and install it. (The company says it’s working to streamline this in future versions.) The plug-ins adds friendly green checkmarks to links that aren’t in databases of malicious pages, and affirm the links are safe when you hover over the marks. Trying to visit pages laden with malware (in our test, via the WICAR archive) blocked the page loading with a message and displayed a notification. All of this functions just as it did in version 6.1.

Bitdefender does offers cloud support for certain remote-access operations but it’s a relatively small set compared to what you can do in the app. You can see the status of protected computers and their most recent scans, but you can’t perform remote configuration changes. You can trigger an abbreviated scan or a full scan, though.

I also tested the included parental controls in passing. The web filtering worked so well that it couldn’t be turned off. After using the cloud-based interface to configure a profile and enable it on the test Mac, I then disabled it—but despite reboots and other attempts, and contacting the company’s representative, it didn’t actually disengage. Before attempting an uninstall and reinstall, I tried re-enabling parental controls again on the Mac with a new child’s profile and then disabling it again. That process did the trick.

An included VPN service installed easily and protected a connection with a single click, but only includes 200MB of VPN usage per day. With such a low cap, the feature doesn’t do much to bolster Bitdefender’s appeal against cheaper (and higher rated) competitors—you’ll pay $60 a year for protection on up to 3 Macs, whereas our top pick is $50 per year for up to 10 computers (Mac or PC). You can opt to upgrade to a paid annual subscription with unlimited bandwidth usage, but that is an additional cost.

The bottom line

Bitdefender’s sterling marks from security labs for malware detection is now matched by its performance—this new release properly detects and quarantines downloaded macOS malware instantly. However, the software needs a better-organized app interface, as well as improvements in browser-extension installation and its parental-controls feature. Bitdefender also remains expensive compared to our top pick and other competitors with a similar set of features.

Version tested: 6.2

Bitdefender For Mac 2019 Review Honda

• Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac (version 6.2)

  See it

  Version 6.2 of Bitdefender now performs as well as you'd expect, given its high marks from security labs, but the software still needs a better-organized app interface and improvements to its parental-controls feature. Its ransomware detection also has room to grow.

  Pros

  • Scored nearly perfectly in lab testing
  • Passive ransomware monitoring of selected folders
  • Native browser extensions for link checking and malware blocking
  • Time Machine volume protection

  Cons

  • No active ransomware detection
  • Couldn’t initially disable parental control mode after enabling
  • Doesn’t automatically install browser extension
  • Expensive for features relative to top pick and other competitors