Norton 360 Advanced
A powerful suite with a generous amount of cloud backup, but McAfee’s equivalent wins out
PRICE (10 devices) First year, £33 (£40 inc VAT), renewal £125 (£150 inc VAT)
from uk.norton.com
Like McAfee and Microsoft, Norton 360 is a market-dominating behemoth of the security world. Its top-tier Advanced subscription comes with a wealth of extra features, including online backups, credit rating monitoring and an identity theft remediation helpline.
You also get a generous 200GB of cloud backup capacity that doubles as your anti-ransomware backup target, a capable parental control suite, an unlimited version of Norton Secure VPN and a password manager. While none of Norton’s solutions is the best in class, they’re all effective, which is handy if you want to get multiple tools wrapped up in a single subscription.
You’ll also find browser protection plugins, the SafeCam webcam defence module that controls which apps have access to the device, a smart firewall, a software updater and email scanning.
Norton 360’s recent performance in both AV Comparatives and SE Labs tests has thrown up more false positives than most rivals. It got a perfect sweep in AV-Test’s latest trials, but although AV Comparatives found it blocked 99.9% of malware, it
also misidentified 27 benign programs or websites as malicious and required the user to weigh in on a further five. SE Labs found Norton to be perfect at identifying threats, but misidentified 2% of legitimate programs as malicious.
Norton 360 Plus has an RRP of £35 and covers a single device. Standard is still a single-device subscription but throws in a VPN service, increasing the price to £65. If you need parental controls, Deluxe has your back, and will cover five devices. Finally, at £150, Norton 360 Advanced protects ten devices, with access to the identity restoration service. Norton offers a sizeable first-year discount, but beware the auto renewal.
On prices and features Norton 360 Advanced is in direct competition with McAfee+ Advanced, which also includes a helpline for handling lost personal documents and identity theft, but has the added bonus of an unlimited number of installations and, at its very top tier, the ability to remove your personal information from online data brokerage sites.
While Norton 360 Advanced will keep you and your computers safe – and includes a very generous 200GB online backup service – it currently loses out to McAfee on accurate detection of legitimate software and identity-protection features.