We’ve been reviewing Avira Antivirus Pro for a couple of years now and questioning why it was value buying when the free model of Avira supplied a lot. At the time, Avira’s top-level providing, Prime, was simply too costly. Those days are over, nevertheless, and Avira Prime is now accessible at a aggressive worth.
Note: This evaluate is a part of our best antivirus roundup. Go there for particulars about competing merchandise and the way we examined them.
Prime is the corporate’s one-stop store for antivirus, net safety, advert blocking, privateness safety, and system upkeep. It consists of entry to Phantom Pro, the corporate’s VPN, in addition to system tune-up choices, a safe file shredder, and extra.
Avira additionally lately overhauled its interface, providing a a lot nicer look, and an unlimited enchancment over Avira’s earlier design.
Features and companies
Avira Prime begins with a quite simple dashboard with three icons: Security, Privacy, and Performance. There’s additionally a left rail with the identical icons. Alerts present up subsequent to every icon on the dashboard when there are points, equivalent to the necessity to run a safety scan. Instead of clicking on every icon to take care of the issues, nevertheless, you need to click on the button in the direction of the underside.
A Smart Scan in Avira Prime.
That button initiates one other scan known as a Smart Scan, which summarizes the potential points along with your PC, after which permits you to repair the problems with one click on. There’s additionally a full-details choice for those who’d like to manage which actions the software program carries out.
It’d be nicer for those who might take care of every problem in its respective part. It would additionally make extra sense to dump the left rail and solely have the three icons main to every part. Still, it’s fairly simple to make use of and perceive, and the truth that it will possibly take care of a number of points with a couple of clicks is sweet.
Moving previous the dashboard, Security has the meat of the antivirus protections. Here you may have the virus scan choices, together with full scans, fast scans, and the power to schedule scans and create customized scans.
A Protection choices tile results in the varied kinds of protections the suite gives with on/off sliders for every. These embrace real-time safety, net safety, ransomware safety, and e mail safety.
Security additionally homes the quarantine tile, the firewall, and the third-party software program updater.
The firewall part doesn’t do a lot because it depends on Windows Defender for the firewall. It does record the PC’s identified Wi-Fi networks, with a swap to set them as public or non-public (the firewall behaves in another way primarily based on the kind of community). Click the Advanced Settings hyperlink, and the Windows Defender Firewall settings pop up.
The Privacy part gives an excellent variety of protections. The Browser security tile installs Avira’s add-ons for Chrome and Firefox, together with Avira Safe Browsing, which blocks advertisements and trackers. This add-on additionally lets you already know if the web site you’re on is secure or not.
Prime subscribers don’t have any limitations on the quantity of VPN they will use. The VPN is constructed into the desktop software and doesn’t require a separate obtain.
This can also be the place you discover the password supervisor, and the file shredder for deleting delicate recordsdata, moderately than ready for the file system to overwrite them.
Next, is the Privacy settings tile, which gives some very nice objects. You can simply set it and neglect it and do what Avira recommends. Jump into the customized part, nevertheless, and you may see how a lot element this part gives.
Avira Prime’s Windows 10 privateness controls.
You can select to be extremely overzealous by stopping the PC from even syncing the system time with the web, in addition to not sending error experiences, and suspending Windows Updates. And that’s simply the “Sharing data with Microsoft” part. You also can disable all Windows telemetry choices, and a complete lot extra. Privacy aware customers will actually respect this software.
Avira additionally recommends downloading and putting in the Opera browser as a part of Prime. This isn’t a default set up of Opera. Instead the browser consists of Avira’s add-ons by default, equivalent to Avira Browser Safety, Avira Password Manager, and Avira Phantom Pro VPN.
Finally, we get to the Performance part. This homes all of Avira’s numerous system speed-up instruments, together with the optimizer, Startup optimizer, battery saver, driver updater, and duplicate file finder.
Avira Prime’s Startup optimizer.
The final software is sweet since duplicate file finders typically price cash, and the Startup optimizer was a deal with to make use of. It’s far nicer than the Startup tab within the process supervisor. It not solely helps you edit which packages ought to launch, however exhibits your most up-to-date startup time in seconds. There are additionally plenty of computerized options, together with a “Hyper boost” to chop down on boot instances as a lot as doable. Hyper Boost requires about 5 reboots to investigate your system, making it type of a ache, however it labored effectively in our expertise. All of those system instruments open in a separate software known as System Speedup Pro.
Jumping into the applying’s settings cog, there’s completely nothing right here besides the choice to alter show languages. That’s it. Important system controls accessible by the consumer are contained inside the primary portion of the desktop software.
Performance
Avira Prime’s preliminary dashboard after set up.
For AV-Test’s March and April 2020 results, Avira Antivirus Pro (which makes use of the identical safety engine as Prime) scored 99.1 % and 99.5 %, respectively, within the 0-day assaults check. That check used 304 samples; the trade common was 98.4 %. In the widespread and prevalent malware check, Avira scored 100 % primarily based on greater than 20,000 samples.
Moving over to AV-Comparatives, within the Malware Protection check with greater than 10,000 samples for March 2020, Avira Prime blocked 99.97 of threats, with 24 false positives. That efficiency places it on par with Kaspersky and Vipre, with AVG and Avast performing barely above that, and F-Secure, G Data, K7, Panda, and Total AV doing even higher. In AV-Comparatives’ real-world safety check for February and March 2020, Avira scored 100 % primarily based on 372 samples.
SE Labs gave Avira a AAA ranking in its January to March 2020 report. Despite the ranking, Avira wasn’t within the first tier of AAA suites that included AVG, Eset, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Sophos, and Trend Micro. Avira led the following tier (attributable to lacking one public thread, however stopping all others), placing it in the identical class as Microsoft and Norton.
For our in-house efficiency checks there are solely two benchmarks value speaking about. The first is PCMark 10’s Extended check, which had an odd consequence. Before we put in Avira Prime, the PC scored 2,238. That’s an uncommon rating, because the PC often doesn’t do higher than 1,620 or so. With Avira Prime put in the rating went all the way down to 1,581. That’s fairly a drop, however we’re going to disregard the two,238 as an outlier, and examine it to the standard 1,620 rating. Even so, that’s nonetheless fairly a noticeable drop all the way down to 1,581.
The large-file switch time was additionally slower. Without Avira put in the time was 11 minutes, 3 seconds, and with Avira the time went as much as 12 minutes, 45 seconds, a rise of 1 minute and 42 seconds.
The backside line is we’d anticipate to see some efficiency influence on mid- to low-range machines with Prime put in.
Pricing
Avira Prime consists of the Power Cleaner characteristic from Avira’s System Speedup Pro.
Avira Prime has a number of pricing tiers. For 5 units, it prices $80 for one 12 months, $152 for 2, and $225 for 3. There’s additionally a month-to-month choice at $8 per. If 5 units isn’t sufficient, then you’ll be able to select the 25-device tier, which remains to be fairly affordable. For 25 units, one 12 months is $104, two years is $201, three is $289, and the month-to-month choice is $10.
Those costs are near the first-time subscriber prices of the opposite main antivirus suites. The distinction right here is that Avira’s costs are the identical whether or not it’s your first subscription interval, or your fifth.
Conclusion
Avira Prime is an excellent suite. We did see some efficiency influence with it operating, however you get a number of worth with this suite and the general safety is stable. There are higher-scoring choices in third-party checks, however for all the bundle Avira Prime is an excellent alternative.