As of March 2021, Defender has been scoring perfect 6 in AV-Test ratings in all 3 categories for almost a year. The last time it scored a non-perfect score was in April 2020 which was a long time ago.
Antivirus is a specific term referring to well-known and established malware, meaning that you'll still remain vulnerable to new and unique malware if you use an antivirus. Malwarebytes is constantly updated to find newer and rarer malware.
In 2014 AV-TEST tested 7 different cleaning tools (along with 10 antivirus solutions) Malwarebytes was the only tool that was capable of completely removing and restoring the system. It was concluded by AV-TEST to be the best tool for removing malware from infected computers.
Optional installs include VPN, System Speedup, a password manager, browser extensions, and a hardened browser.
In the case that you've downloaded the Free Suite (not recomended), you can uninstall the above mentioned additional downloads with Avira's Connect app or any uninstaller utility software. This flexibility to cherry pick your extra software keeps the bloatware down somewhat.
Avast! is not the sort of antivirus product to give you peace of mind. In practice, it does miss some malware every now and then. You'll need backup virus protection, which raises the question why you should get Avast in the first place.
When running an unknown application, avast will run it wrapped in a sandbox environment first for scanning, then kill the process and re-run it again. A lot of applications do not like this.
Ad Aware Free Antivirus+ has a clean, well designed user interface that's easy to use for anyone. It features a game mode, so that you're not disturbed by any kind of notification or not have your computer's performance weighed down by background scans while gaming.
This is one of the few good free antivirus solutions that offer real-time protection, stopping malicious processes on your computer at any given time. Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ also scans downloads for malware.
Ad-Aware is a well known veteran in battle against adware and spyware and today still counts as a solid piece of security software on that matter. For virus protection, it gets similar scores as the most trusted paid antivirus solutions without having many false positives.
Cloud antivirus means users no longer have to update their system or see dialogue boxes annoying them. Every year or two it prompts you to install major updates to the application, but that's it!
While easy to use and never requiring updates, it does slow down the loading of programs. The rate of slow down ranks it below average performance for launching applications.
If you notice its UI, you will find that it uses Bitdefender engine for scanning local files. Sounds like Tencent is nothing but just a clone of Bitdefender.
Detects phishing easily, local malware blocking test, etc. Fortinet is best known for its FortiGate network security appliance and other enterprise-level network security products. A local client running on the company's desktops communicates with the FortiGate device for fully managed security. It turns out that this client, FortiClient 5.0, can function on its own as an effective and free antivirus with some interesting bonus features.