Our Methodology
Every score out of 10 is built from five weighted criteria: protection rate at 35%, performance impact at 25%, features at 20%, pricing at 15%, and support at 5%. We install and run each product ourselves, and cross-check our hands-on impressions with published AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives results rather than relying on either source alone, since no single lab or reviewer catches everything.
How We Test Protection
We track each product's results across multiple AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives rounds rather than a single test cycle, since one round can be an outlier for any vendor, including the ones that usually score well. Real-time protection, ransomware defense, and phishing detection are weighted most heavily within this criterion, because they represent the threats an average user is actually likely to encounter, as opposed to rare, highly targeted attacks that most consumer antivirus software was never designed to stop. A product that catches close to 100% of common malware but misses a widely reported ransomware strain loses points here, even if its overall lab average looks strong.
How We Test Performance
We measure everyday tasks, boot time, file copy speed, and application launch time, on comparable hardware, before and after installation, alongside the independent performance benchmarks each lab publishes. A product that scores well on protection but adds several seconds to every application launch or noticeably drains laptop battery during a background scan is penalized here, since performance impact is one of the most common reasons people abandon a security product entirely and either downgrade to something lighter or, worse, run nothing at all.
How We Evaluate Features
Feature scoring rewards depth and reliability over a long checklist. A firewall that is actually configurable and a ransomware rollback tool that has been independently tested to work count for more than a bundled VPN with no published no-logs audit or a password manager that is really just a thin wrapper around browser autofill. We look at whether advertised features are meaningfully implemented, not just present, and we deduct points when a headline feature exists mostly for the marketing page.
How We Evaluate Pricing
Pricing looks at both the entry cost and, more importantly, the renewal price, since almost every vendor in this space discounts the first year and increases it substantially afterward. We also weigh device-count limits and whether multi-platform coverage is included by default or sold as a separate tier, because a suite that looks cheap for one Windows PC can become the most expensive option once you actually cover a household's phones, tablets, and laptops.
How We Evaluate Support
Support scoring is based on the channels a vendor actually offers, how quickly we get a response when we test them, and whether help documentation is detailed enough to resolve common problems without contacting anyone. This is the lowest-weighted criterion because most users never need to contact support, but it matters disproportionately when something goes wrong, like a false positive blocking a legitimate program or a licensing issue after a device upgrade.
Review Update Policy
Reviews are revisited whenever a vendor changes pricing or features, or after each new round of independent lab results, whichever comes first. The date shown at checkout on a vendor's site always reflects their current offer, not necessarily what we saw at review time, so we recommend confirming the final price before completing a purchase even when our review is recent.
Why Independent Testing Matters
Antivirus marketing pages are optimized to sell, not to inform, which is not unique to this industry but is worth stating plainly. A vendor's own claims about detection rate or performance impact are rarely dishonest in a technical sense, but they are almost always the best possible framing of their own results under conditions they chose. Independent, repeatable testing from labs with published methodologies, combined with our own hands-on time with each product, is the only way we know of to compare products fairly against each other rather than against each company's own marketing copy.