Top 5 Antivirus Software

On the market there is a wide range of vendors supplying and developing anti-virus products. The suppliers are located globally, and therefore some have come under scrutiny in recent years due to the countries that they reside within, and for political reasons. A great example of this is how the American government put pressure on Kaspersky and is trying to block it’s usage in the USA. More information on this can be found here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

It is for this reason that independent testing, becomes a key source when deciding what is the best anti-virus software at present, so in this article the plan is to analyse the results of the independent testing published publicly by AV-Comparatives.org.

Protection Rate: The top five anti-virus suppliers for protecting computers in the first part of 2019, are listed as Kaspersky, BitDefender, VIPRE, Microsoft and Sophos. Between them the difference is 00.03%, so it’s clear that there’s not much difference. Kaspersky and BitDefender did come top with 100% protection against everything that AV-Comparatives tested against.

False Alarms: It’s important to recognise that false positives/false alarms are an important measurement because the result of them appearing, will often mean an investment of time by skilled IT colleagues trying to resolve these problems. Within the top 5 anti-virus products for protection, Microsoft came out the worst for generating false alarms and Kaspersky came out on top. Second to Kaspersky was VIPRE. Microsoft had 24 false alarms, whereas Kaspersky had none, and VIPRE had 2.

The latest report for 2019 is available here: https://www.av-comparatives.or...

Overall when reviewing the results and taking into account the following criteria when testing: User Dependency, Compromised, Protection Rate, & False Alarms. The top 3 are Kaspersky, BitDefender & VIPRE.

It is however worth acknowledging, that across the top 20 anti-virus developers, they are in constant competition with each other, so over time the top 5 will change. Having a constant awareness of how they’re performing may be of serious benefit to any business utilising such technology. If on the other hand, you are looking for Next Generation Antivirus in particular you can consult our page Next Gen Antivirus