When comparing McAfee vs avast!, the Slant community recommends McAfee for most people. In the question“What is the best antivirus software for Windows?” McAfee is ranked 13th while avast! is ranked 14th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Decent anti-virus protection
Cons
Con Lives off its name, not its worth
McAfee was founded in 1987, and became famous for being the first antivirus software. John McAfee, the original creator, resigned from McAfee in 1994. The company was purchased by Intel in 2011 and renamed Intel Security. TPG Capital bought a majority share of the company in 2017. Long story short, all of this passing around has made the program much, much different than its former glory, yet it remains popular because of its origin.
McAfee has made multiple errors in recent years causing major, sometimes fatal problems in its users' computers. In 2006, McAfee settled out of a fraud lawsuit. In 2010, millions of computers entered a bootloop because of a failure in McAfee. In 2012, users of McAfee were unable to connect to the Internet.
Con Tries too hard to sell you the paid version
Con Too noisy
Avast! has sounds turned on by default. It also has a lot of blinky features of questionable use.
Con Makes your system slower than usual
Even though scans are not being run in background, it will slow your system.
Con Opt-out installation of Google Chrome
These advertising tactics are simply unacceptable.
Con Selling potentially identifying user data
Con Detection rate isn't too solid
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.
Con Expires after a year leaving computer exposed to new viruses
Expires and stops updating after a year after which the user's computer may become infected by new viruses not covered by existing patterns.
Con May interfere with hyper-V
Since avast has its own virtualization engine, it will cause issues with hyper-V.
Con Unable to detect some adware such as FADE adware
Con Blocks or causes issues on apps or games
Con "Smart Screen" feature
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.