Bitdefender 2021 Antivirus
Bitdefender’s popular consumer antivirus range is packed with high-end features in 2021.
Installing Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2021 is quick, simple and largely automatic. We pointed, we clicked, and within a couple of minutes a reassuring ‘Bitdefender is successfully installed’ message told us it was time to get started.
Browsing our system, we found the installer had added Bitdefender’s Anti-Tracker extension to Google Chrome, and Bitdefender Anti-Tracker and Wallet to Firefox. (Anti-Tracker also works in Internet Explorer and Safari, but there’s no support for Opera or Edge).
Bitdefender equipped our test system with 13 new background processes and Windows services, some filter drivers and assorted other low-level clutter. That’s not unusual for an antivirus, but it can be a problem if it’s a drag on your system speed.
AV-Test’s Windows Home User report for August 2020 found no performance problems, rating Bitdefender at its best possible 6/6 for minimal impact on speeds for various tasks.
AV-Comparatives’ more detailed October 2020 Performance Test wasn’t quite as kind, placing Bitdefender in a very mid-range 9th out of 17. The margins are very small, though, and the report didn’t uncover any serious problems.
We ran PCMark Professional on our review system both before and after installing Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2021 and found performance dropped by 0.95%. Some products do fractionally better – Kaspersky Anti-Virus reduced our score by 0.62% – but that’s not a difference you’ll ever notice in real-world use.
Next up, we ran our selfprotection tests, where we check security apps to see if malware can disable them. Steps include attempting to delete or replace files, suspend or close key processes, stop core services, remove or edit scheduled tasks, unload filter drivers, and change key settings. Bitdefender has always been a very well defended product, though, and this time was no different: the package shrugged off our attacks and carried on as normal.
Interface
Launching Bitdefender Antivirus Plus for the first time fires up a simple tour highlighting key areas
of the interface and explaining what they do. Experienced users will probably figure this out on their own, but it’s good to have this guidance available for those who need it.
Bitdefender’s nicely designed dashboard gives you speedy access to the functions you’ll need most often, with Quick Scans and the VPN just one click away.
A left-hand sidebar organises Bitdefender’s other tools into Protection, Privacy and Utilities areas, and tapping any of these lists the various functions they contain. Most of these are sensibly named, and if you’ve ever used another antivirus you’ll quickly find your way around, but tooltips are on hand if you need a hint.
If the standard dashboard layout doesn’t quite suit your needs, you can customise it to remove default features or add new ones. Not interested in the VPN, maybe? In a click or two you could replace it with links to the full system scan, the password manager, disk clean-up module or a host of other tools. If only everyone was this flexible.
Overall, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus offers a polished and professional interface which delivers in just about every area. It’s easy and comfortable to use for beginners, but also offers the configurability and control that experts need.
Antivirus
Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2021 supports several scan modes. Quick Scan checks the most commonly infected areas, and System Scan examines everything. Furthermore, File Explorer integration enables scanning objects from Explorer’s right-click menu, and there’s a bootable rescue environment to assist in cleaning the most stubborn threats.
A Manage Scans tool lets you create new scan types to check specific files and folders, as well as configuring how the scan works, and setting it up to run on a schedule, or on-demand only.
This doesn’t quite provide the expert-level options that we’ve seen from vendors like Avast and Avira (you can’t define specific file types to check or archive types you’d like to handle, for instance), but there’s more than enough power here for most people. Unfortunately, you can’t pin your custom scan type to the main dashboard, so it’s always at least three clicks away.
Default scanning speeds are decent, with Quick Scans taking around 15-30 seconds on our test computer. Regular scans started at 39 minutes to check our target files (209,000 of them, 50GB in total.) That’s a little slow, and for example Kaspersky Anti-Virus took 19 minutes 14 seconds to scan the same data. But smart optimisations meant Bitdefender’s scan time dropped to 27 seconds by the second run (Kaspersky’s was 2 minutes 50 seconds), and future scans only check new or changed files.
The scanning engine is smart enough to handle simultaneous scans without difficulty, too. If you’re running a lengthy full system scan, for instance, you can still run an on-demand scan of a recent download, or anything else
Bitdefender’s nicely designed dashboard gives you speedy access to the functions you’ll need most often, with Quick Scans and the VPN just one click away.
you like. A window pops up to display the results of your second scan, while the first scan continues to run in the background.
Protection
Bitdefender has a great name for protection, and its products have regularly topped the charts with most of the big independent testing labs.
The news hasn’t been quite as positive in recent reports. AVComparatives’ July to October 2020 RealWorld Protection report placed Bitdefender in an unspectacular (though reasonable) 7th out of 17. Its 99.6% protection rate is decent, for instance, and outperformed the likes of NortonLifeLock (99.5%), ESET (99.3%), Avira (99.3%) and McAfee (98.5%), but Panda, F-Secure and Trend Micro all blocked 100% of test threats.