See links to all of our antivirus reviews at the bottom of this article. Updated on to include our review of PC Matic 4.0, which takes a holistic approach to the health of your devices by monitoring and optimizing all the component parts, with antivirus protection just one of those. You can read about how we test antivirus suites below. Our recommendations strike a balance between excellent protection, a worthwhile selection of features, and minimal impact on your PC’s performance. Anyone who actively uses email, clicks on links, and downloads programs will benefit from an antivirus suite. But it can detect when the undisclosed vulnerability is used to install other nasty bits, like ransomware, on your machine. Antivirus software often can’t do much to stop zero-day exploits, for example. We’re not suggesting that PC security software is fool-proof. Or get stung by a zero-day threat, where an undisclosed bug in Windows, your browser, or an installed program gives hackers entry to your system. Or accidentally click on a phishing email (it happens!). You could, for example, visit a website that unintentionally displays malicious ads.
Read on to learn why these products rank best. Best free antivirus suite: Trend Micro Maximum Security.Best budget antivirus suite: AVG Internet Security.