Here’s the Deal

avast! vs Emsisoft

34 26

13 6

When comparing avast! vs Emsisoft, the Slant community recommends Emsisoft for most people. In the question“What is the best antivirus software for Windows?” Emsisoft is ranked 5th while avast! is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Emsisoft is:

No urls are saved and all urls are scanned locally

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What is the best antivirus software for Windows?

Pros

Pro
Decent anti-virus protection

Pro
Very Good Privacy Policy

No urls are saved and all urls are scanned locally

Pro
Dual-engine scanner

With bitdefender signatures.

Pro
Low impact, good peformance

Does not slow down the computer and the impact is minimal.

Pro
Very good Behavior Blocker

One of the best "BB" protection on the market

Ad
Cons

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.