Compare 360 Total Security vs. Avast It’s a good idea to use our scoring system to provide you with a general idea which IT Management Software product is will work better for your company. For overall product quality, 360 Total Security earned 9.8 points, while Avast earned 8.8 points. Best Mac Antivirus Software. You need an antivirus program on your Mac. That statement may cause some Apple users to argue or walk away, but 2017 has so far seen more Mac malware and adware than.

Avast Free Antivirus for Mac is Avast's answer to concerns about how to browse safely. The application is packaged with a brand-new, easy-to-understand graphical user interface, with access to all features available at single click.

The application's onscreen tools are well-organized, and its live graphics enhance the feeling of safety -- you can see that the antivirus software doesn't sleep and is always working to protect you from any viruses circulating on the Web. Avast's free software provides three shields to protect your computer: a file system shield, an e-mail shield, and a Web shield. With all three representing a door to your computer, Avast does a great job of watching these entrances.

However, this comes at a cost, and we don't mean money: as soon as you launch the app, you'll notice a slight drop in your computer's performance, which is due to Avast being at work scanning your entire computer for infected files. Secondly, it affects your browser's performance, as it also scans the pages you attempt to navigate to for viruses through the extensions it installs in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome browsers. We did find its notification feature handy, as it informs the user about its actions, so you'll always know what the software is up to.

Overall, Avast Antivirus for Mac is a nice addition to your Mac toolbox. It's free and very easy to use.

What do you need to know about free software?

Total Av Vs Avast For Mac

$99.95

Pros
Decent phishing protection. Includes tune-up, disk cleanup. Well-designed user interface. Speedy scan.
Cons
Poor scores in our malware protection test and malicious URL blocking test. No results from test labs we follow. Marked many dangerous downloads as safe. Expensive.
Bottom Line
TotalAV Essential Antivirus includes the real-time protection component missing from its free edition, but even with that feature restored it doesn't score well in testing.

There's no doubt that antivirus protection is essential to the security of your devices and data. But if antivirus is all you have, some bonus security features start to seem essential as well. With TotalAV Essential Antivirus, you get a collection of tune-up features, along with extra-cost options to add VPN protection, identity monitoring, ad blocking, and password management. Unfortunately, even the presence of real-time antivirus protection isn't enough to make this product a really good choice.

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With a list price of $99.95 for one license, TotalAV looks quite expensive. More than a dozen popular antivirus utilities, among them ZoneAlarm and ESET NOD32 Antivirus, go for just under $40 per year. Yes, on TotalAV's pricing page it says you pay just $19.95, but the footnote explains that's a new-customer promotional price. If you keep using it after the initial year, the $99.95 price takes effect.

TotalAV's dark-themed main window features a phalanx of four button panels dedicated to Antivirus, System Boost, Disk Cleaner, and Web Security. A simple menu down the left side of TotalAV's dark main window lets you choose those same four feature areas, or return to the status dashboard. Selecting one of feature areas both opens its subitems within the menu and puts them foursquare in the area occupied by the original four button panels. The design hangs together; I had no trouble navigating this utility's collection of features.

Version Confusion

At the start of this review, my company contact remotely upgraded the installation of the free product to TotalAV Essential Antivirus. Or so I thought. When I looked closely, the installation proved to be TotalAV Pro Antivirus. Checking the company's pricing page, I found that the Pro edition comes with three licenses and costs $119.95 per year, discounted to $39.95 for the first year. According to the feature comparison on that page, the Pro edition adds password management, and something described as 'Antivirus eBook.' Given those minor differences I chose to review the Essential Antivirus; my contact fixed the license to cover that product.

In the course of the review, I noticed a few odd things. The first time I rebooted, TotalAV displayed a tour of new features, listing Safe Browsing VPN, Identity Protection, Password Vault, and Ad Block Pro. Indeed, I found all of these except Identity Protection available. Going back and forth with my company contact (residing in another time zone) I determined that the test subscription they supplied included components that don't come with the basic installation. After nearly a week, I managed to get an installation of TotalAV Essential Antivirus, as it comes out of the box.

Avast For Mac 10.7.5

With this installation, trying to use any of the four new features brought up a screen asking for an additional payment. My company contact noted that 'On the stripped back, very basic essential version (costing only $19.95) VPN and AdBlock are not included.' That description contradicts the pricing page, which states that the $19.95 price is a promotional price 'available to new customers for the initial term only.'

If the product did better in our testing, cutting through the version confusion would be more important. As you'll see below, it's not a product you'd likely want for your antivirus protection, so the presence or absence of bonus features is less relevant.

Shared With the Free Edition

Many antivirus companies pack full protection into their free product, relying on added features or a personal-use-only clause to drive sales of the paid version. In a very unusual move, TotalAV strips essential real-time protection from the free TotalAV Free Essential Antivirus. As you can see from my review, I'm not impressed with that move.

Lab Test Results Chart
Phishing Protection Results Chart

Free or paid, TotalAV doesn't show up in the test results from AV-Test, AV-Comparatives, MRG-Effitas, or SE Labs, the four labs whose regular reports I follow. That's rough, because these labs can devote significantly more resources than I can to torture-testing antivirus products. When a product takes near-perfect results from all the labs, the way Kaspersky and Bitdefender do, you know that it's effective. With no lab results, I can only rely on my own hands-on tests.

As mentioned, the paid TotalAV includes real-time protection not found in the free edition. However, protection against phishing sites comes from the separate TotalAV Safe Site browser extension, available for Chrome and Edge. Phishing sites try to steal your login credentials by mimicking bank sites or other secure sites; when you log in to the fraudulent page, you've given away your account to the malefactors. Since that protection is the same, free or paid, I didn't have to run my lengthy antiphishing test over again.

TotalAV detected 89 percent of the verified phishing sites, which is pretty good. It outperformed the phishing protection built into Chrome and Internet Explorer (but not Firefox). However, competing products have done much, much better. Both Kaspersky Anti-Virus and McAfee foiled 100 percent of the fraudulent sites, and Bitdefender managed 99 percent. After that, it's a traffic jam, with four products scoring 98 percent. Among those four were Avast Free Antivirus and AVG AntiVirus Free.

Malware Protection Somewhat Improved

I start my own hands-on malware protection test by opening a folder full of samples that I have collected and analyzed myself. For many products, the tiny file access that occurs when Windows Explorer gets each file's name and size is enough to trigger a real-time scan. Others wait until just before the sample executes to ac