Avira Internet Security Review

Giving away antivirus or security suite protection for free gains a company mindshare and goodwill, but unless some customers pay for the product, the bills don’t get paid. Some companies take a hardline approach and say that the free product is only for noncommercial use. Others make the paid edition enticing by teasing paid-only features in the free edition. Avira Internet Security is in an awkward spot. It doesn’t bring much more to the table than Avira Free Security, yet it’s significantly lacking compared with the top-tier Avira Prime. If you’re going the paid route, consider Editors’ Choice suite Bitdefender Internet Security. It includes all the expected suite features and more, and the antivirus labs routinely give it top scores.

What’s the Price of Avira Internet Security?

For a single installation of Avira Internet Security, you pay $70.99 per year. When I last reviewed this suite, that price got you three licenses. The current price for a three-license Avira subscription is $83.99 per year, a figure that used to get you five licenses. Three licenses for Bitdefender Internet Security, ESET, or Trend Micro Internet Security run a bit less, just under $80.

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A $96.99 yearly payment gets you five Avira licenses. That’s the highest five-license price for an entry-level security suite, more than $89.99 for Bitdefender Internet Security and more than the $85.99 you’d pay for Panda Dome Advanced. At the low end, you pay just $61 for five licenses of K7 Total Security. A subscription to McAfee+ at the lowest tier goes for $149.99, but for that price, you can protect all the Android, ChromeOS, iOS, macOS, and Windows devices in your household.

Shared With Free Security

This suite’s main window looks almost exactly like that of Avira Free Security. A left-rail menu lets you choose Status, Security, Privacy, or Performance. A banner across the top reflects security status. Big icons for Security, Privacy, and Performance dominate the main portion of the dark-themed window. A large button launches Avira’s Smart scan, which checks for privacy issues, performance issues, malware, and outdated programs.

Three of the four antivirus testing labs that I follow consider Avira important enough to test, and all three gave it excellent scores. Failure is common in the stringent tests from MRG-Effitas, but in the latest report most products passed both tests, among them Avira, Bitdefender, and ESET Home Security Essential.

Along with most antiviruses tested, Avira earned a perfect score in the most recent test from AV-Test Institute. Of the three tests by AV-Comparatives that I follow, Avira earned the maximum rating in two and the second-from-top rating in one.

I use a complex algorithm to map all the lab scores onto a 10-point scale and derive an aggregate score for any with two or more scores. Avira’s aggregate score of 9.7 is quite good, but a few other products tested by the three labs score higher. McAfee achieved 9.8 points, ESET 9.9, and Bitdefender a perfect 10. The best score among the few products tested by all four labs goes to Avast One Silver, with 9.8 points.

In my hands-on malware protection test, Avira detected 97% of the samples but allowed partial installation of several, knocking its score down to 9.3 out of 10 possible points. About half the antivirus apps tested with my current set of malware samples scored better. Avast, AVG Internet Security, and UltraAV top the list, each with 99% detection and 9.9 points.

Avira’s free Browser Safety component installs as an extension in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera, and does its best to steer the browser away from dangerous web pages. In a test using malware-hosting URLs recently discovered by experts at London-based MRG-Effitas, Avira blocked all access to 98% of the dangerous URLs and wiped out the malware payload from the rest, for a perfect 100% protection score. Bitdefender, Guardio, Sophos Home Premium, and Trend Micro also reached 100% in their respective tests.

While the Browser Safety extension comes with Avira’s free suite, paying customers get a separate component called Web protection, which serves much the same purpose. I’ll discuss Web protection below.

Writing a sneaky Trojan that can steal passwords and other sensitive information while dodging detection by security programs is tough. It is much easier to gather a copycat website to fool unobservant web surfers into simply giving away their passwords. Phishing sites, as we call these fakes, exist to capture login credentials for the sensitive sites they imitate.

In my phishing protection test, Avira successfully detected and defeated 100% of real-world phishing frauds. Guardio and McAfee also managed 100% detection, as did VPN-centric Surfshark One and NordVPN. Norton Genie, which has phishing as its main focus, also reached 100%.

As noted, most of this suite’s features are available at no cost in Avira Free Security. On the Security page, access to quarantine and all the variations on malware scanning are free. Free users get simple control over Windows Firewall, while a paid upgrade enabled Avira Firewall, discussed below. Both editions include a software updater that finds apps needing security patches; paying customers can configure Avira to handle the updates automatically. And while Real-time protection is free, upgrading adds Web and Ransomware protection.

In the Privacy section, I’ve already mentioned the shared Browser Safety extension. Both free and paid suites include a file shredder for secure deletion, a secure browser, and an automated scan that configures your system’s privacy settings. Both incorporate a bandwidth-limited version of Avira Phantom VPN, though the commercial edition doubles the monthly data limit to 1GB.

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Paying customers do get access to premium features in the password manager component. I’ll discuss those below. As for Performance features, upgrading to the paid suite doesn’t get you any benefits there. The free and paid editions have the same limited performance-enhancing features. To get the full glory of Avira’s System Speedup tool, you must purchase it separately or upgrade to Avira Prime.

Web Protection Adds Little

One perk of paying for Avira is that you get Web protection. Browser Safety, available for free, is a browser extension and hence works only in supported browsers. Web protection steers any application away from dangerous URLs, which is a plus. However, in testing, it wasn’t as effective as Browser Safety.

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To evaluate this feature, I repeated my malicious URL blocking test using the very newest malware-hosting URLs. I tried to open the dangerous URLs both in Chrome without Browser Safety and in a supremely off-brand browser that I wrote myself.

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Web protection replaced dangerous URLs with a warning page in Chrome and the off-brand browser. In some cases, it supplemented that warning with a popup notification. Out of the 100-odd samples, it caught 75% at the URL level.

When Avira didn’t prevent all access to the dangerous URL, it sometimes actively blocked the download of the dangerous file. For others, the regular antivirus quarantined the download. Occasionally, both components kicked into protective action. Protection at the file level accounted for another 22% of the rest.

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If you’re keeping score, you’ll see that Web protection achieved 97% protection while Browser Safety managed 100%. It certainly won’t hurt to have two components watching out for dangerous downloads, and Web protection does work in browsers that Browser Safety doesn’t. But free-level users still have very good protection.

Ransomware Protection Probably Works

Upgrading from free protection to a paid Avira product expands your protection options to an extent. Where free users just get real-time protection, paying customers are rewarded with Web protection (discussed above) and Ransomware protection. My favorite method for testing ransomware-specific antivirus features is to turn off other protection layers, but turning off Avira’s real-time protection also turns off the ransomware feature.

It’s Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online

As soon as I opened the folder containing my ransomware samples, Avira eliminated all but one. I tried a second folder containing hand-modified versions of the same samples. Avira wiped out all but two on sight. Just to cover all bases, I created a new set of hand-modified ransomware files, different from any ever seen. Avira still wiped out all but two. That left me with just a few ransomware samples to test.

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When I launched the original and modified samples that Avira didn’t instantly delete, the regular antivirus detected and quarantined them based on their behavior. The regular real-time antivirus did identify one as ransomware, but the ransomware-specific protection layer didn’t get a chance to do anything. Ransomware protection probably works just fine. I simply couldn’t find a way to prove it.

Skipping the Pro Antivirus

In my review of Avira Free Security, I mention that Avira Free Antivirus is also available. But given that both are free, there’s no reason to choose the less feature-rich standalone antivirus.

By the same token, you can purchase a Pro edition of the free standalone antivirus. That gets you most of the minimal upgrades that I’ve described above. Among these are Ransomware protection, whose effectiveness I can’t measure, and Web protection, which doesn’t add much beyond the free Browser Safety. There’s so little reason to pay for those upgrades that I no longer cover Avira Antivirus Pro.

Software Updater Pro

Avira’s website points out that this suite comprises Antivirus Pro, Software Updater Pro, and Password Manager Pro. A yearly subscription for these three purchased separately would cost $64.99, $32.99, and $31.99, respectively, for a total of $129.97. The suite’s $70.99 price is just a bit over half that. However, this equation only defines a bargain if all the components are worth their standalone list prices.

The free suite and the paid antivirus both include a software updater component that does almost everything that this suite does. It scans your system and reports on applications lacking important security patches. However, if you want to update those apps, you’ll have to do it manually.

In the free suite and paid antivirus, clicking Update All just takes you to an upsell page inviting you to subscribe to one of the commercial suite products, as does trying to enable Auto-update. Clicking the Update button for an individual app likewise triggers an upsell attempt, though in some cases, it includes a link to help you update manually.

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With Avira Internet Security, reviewed here, the Update All feature becomes available. Just click it and let it work in the background. In testing, it found two Windows updates needed, as well as an update to VMware Tools. It quickly installed one Windows update and spun endlessly without completing the other Windows update. After a reboot, it tried again but reported it failed to update VMware Tools.

You can click to see the apps that didn’t need any updates. And you might as well turn on Auto-update. Now, Avira will check for needed updates and apply them when found, all without your intervention. It’s a nice service, but I can’t wrap my head around the idea of paying $32.99 per year for it as a standalone, especially given that it couldn’t install all the updates it found.

Password Manager Pro

Several password manager utilities offer a free edition but with significant limitations. For example, you can use RoboForm, Keeper, or NordPass for free, but only if you stick to a single device, with no cross-device syncing. Others limit the number of passwords you can manage, often to a very small number.

That’s not how things work with Avira Password Manager. Free users can sync any number of passwords across all their Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. At the free level, Avira handles all the basics of password management and even offers two-factor authentication. Advanced features like secure sharing and digital inheritance are conspicuously absent. Read our review of the standalone password manager for full details.

The big enhancement you get in the Pro edition is a full-powered password security status report. Yes, it’s important to update your weak and duplicate passwords. But is it worth $31.99 per year? You could save your money and just go through the list manually and update any weak or reused passwords.

Simple Firewall

New since my last review, Avira Internet Security now offers a simple firewall. Just as the built-in Windows Firewall does, it allows all outgoing network connections and blocks unsolicited incoming connections. It also manages network access by the programs running on your device.

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Avira calls the network-level firewall component Intruder Protection. Where many competing products offer details on exactly what the firewall does, enough to confuse some users, Avira keeps it simple. The default rules aren’t listed. If the firewall interferes with connections from an IP address you’re sure is legitimate, you can create a rule to allow that connection. You can also block an IP address you know is bad. I confirmed that it works by temporarily blocking access to the network access gateway. Even though configuring firewall rules is simple, I doubt many users will do it.

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Avira automatically configures its App Rules feature to allow all access for known and trusted programs. On my test system, it configured permissions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera, along with a host of essential Windows processes. When it detects an attempt at internet or network access by an unknown program, it asks you, the user, just what it should do.

Some competing firewalls go wild with choices in their popup queries. Allow or block? Once or always? Incoming or outgoing? Just on this port, or on all ports? And so on ad nauseam. Avira avoids confusing the user. You have just one choice: allow the connection or block it. Either way, your response creates a rule, so you don’t have to answer again. If your finger slips and you make the wrong choice, you can dig into the App rules list and fix it.

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The firewall protection you get from Avira totally handles the basics. It protects against attacks across the network or internet and manages which programs can access the network. It’s simple, but simple is good.

Verdict: Stick With the Free Suite

With the addition of a built-in firewall, Avira Internet Security comes closer to the expected features of a full-fledged suite. It still doesn’t offer common features such as spam filtering, parental control, or backup, and its system speedup features remain behind a paywall. Upgrading from free security gets you the somewhat redundant Web protection and a Ransomware protection feature that we couldn’t test. The Pro editions of the software updater and password manager don’t do much beyond their free equivalents. Most of the best features come to you at no charge in the free edition. For a powerful entry-level security suite, look instead to our Editors’ Choice winner, Bitdefender Internet Security, which earns perfect scores in lab tests, includes all expected suite features, and packs in a wealth of bonuses beyond the expected.

About Neil J. Rubenking

Lead Analyst for Security

When the IBM PC was new, I served as the president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years. That’s how I met PCMag’s editorial team, who brought me on board in 1986. In the years since that fateful meeting, I’ve become PCMag’s expert on security, privacy, and identity protection, putting antivirus tools, security suites, and all kinds of security software through their paces.

Before my current security gig, I supplied PCMag readers with tips and solutions on using popular applications, operating systems, and programming languages in my “User to User” and “Ask Neil” columns, which began in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. Along the way I wrote more than 40 utility articles, as well as Delphi Programming for Dummies and six other books covering DOS, Windows, and programming. I also reviewed thousands of products of all kinds, ranging from early Sierra Online adventure games to AOL’s precursor Q-Link.

In the early 2000s I turned my focus to security and the growing antivirus industry. After years working with antivirus, I’m known throughout the security industry as an expert on evaluating antivirus tools. I serve as an advisory board member for the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), an international nonprofit group dedicated to coordinating and improving testing of anti-malware solutions.

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