BitDefender Total Security 2018

Still the best.

For many years, BitDefender has been our pick for advanced users, and even a good pick for beginners as well, thanks to its autopilot mode.

The set of features available is equalled by few suites. It has a firewall, antimalware and anti-spam, but also secure browsing, file locking to prevent ransomware encryption, anti-theft tools, game modes, parental advisors, social network protection, password manager, file shredder, security auditor, system cleanup and more. In this latest version, it’s added webcam access monitoring (which works much better than Windows’ permissions), as well as an improved anti-ransomware file locking tool. File access to selected folders can now be permission-based.

The parental controls are also excellent, second only to those offered by Symantec, with a cloudbased management and policy centre. You can also use the site to monitor devices on the licence and remotely trigger scans.

It achieved perfect scores in AV-Test’s antivirus benchmarks. We’ve had excellent results with its removal engine as well — it does a good job of cleaning infections after detection, and includes a pre-boot mode for ripping problematic elements out. It also has one of the best recovery drive/disc creators going, with a good set of tools available for repairing a system that’s so messed up you can’t even boot into it.

All the tools, options and reports are highly configurable, and you can really drill down into a lot of features if you’ve a mind. You can set multiple location profiles and adjust sensitivity sliders if you want to increase the aggressiveness of its heuristic scans. If you don’t want to do that, you can always switch BitDefender into autopilot mode, which lets it make most of the decisions for you. We’ve never had any real problems with autopilot, and it’s smart enough to make firewall and cleanup decisions without your input.

This suite is everything a security suite should be: full of features but easy to manage, highly configurable yet also capable of autoconfigurations, and designed to not just detect threats but also get them out of your system. It’s still the best suite around, and our top pick amongst all suites.

“The parental controls are also excellent, second only to those offered by Symantec, with a cloudbased management and policy centre. You can also use the portal site to monitor devices attached to the license and even remotely trigger scans.”