Norton vs McAfee
Which of these security titans has the edge in 2021?
ONCE UPON A TIME, this head-to-head would have been billed a clash of the titans. Nowadays, however, both McAfee and Norton find themselves squeezed by an increasingly crowded market. Nevertheless, both continue to hold their own, so for this match-up we’ve paired their premium products—McAfee Total Protection and Norton 360 Deluxe— against each other. We’ll see how their core protection matches up, plus which one delivers the best range of features.
Let’s begin where it matters most, with a close look at each product’s ability to detect, block, and remove malware in all its forms. As always, you’ll find most of what you need with the independent lab reports. Here, the omens are good for both products, with both sweeping the board with top marks from AV-TEST labs. Both also secured the highest triple-A rating from SE Labs, although McAfee came out top here on account of its perfect rating in the false-positive tests (100 percent to Norton’s 96 percent). Both products achieved an “approved” certification from AV-Comparatives, but it’s here you realize that while both perform superbly, they’re no longer best in class (that accolade goes to either Kaspersky or Bitdefender). Only Norton passed the notoriously tricky MRG-Effitas tests with flying colors (McAfee didn’t submit itself for evaluation). It translates into both products catching virtually everything the labs threw at them, including zero-day malware attacks.
When it came to system performance, McAfee proved marginally quicker than Norton in key areas, particularly when run on more powerful PCs. This saw it gain its sole award—Silver in Overall Performance —from AV-Comparatives.
We also put both products through their paces with some real-world malware on an isolated Windows 10 VM running on macOS. Everything we tried was caught with ease, but it gave us an insight into how each product handled threats as they were detected—whether via the real-time protection component or a system scan. Here, McAfee’s slick new user interface impressed us more, with its visible notifications reassuring us each time it blocked some malware in its tracks.
Ultimately, both products provide excellent core protection, while McAfee enjoys an edge in the overall performance stakes. So next we took a deep dive into the additional protections offered. Both offer a lot for your money: there’s unlimited VPN as standard, along with a password manager and web plugins that scan websites as you load them for potential malicious activity. Both offer parental control tools, although McAfee’s Safe Family is only offered with a 10-device subscription. Neither holds a candle to Kaspersky’s offering.
The tools then diverge. McAfee offers a handy tool for creating encrypted vaults to store sensitive files in, which enables you to store files in any cloud provider without worrying about hackers getting their hands on them. There’s also a file shredder, although it’s very basic.
Norton offers Cloud Backup, which lets you store personal files on the company’s secure servers for both backup and security purposes. How much you get depends on your flavor of Norton 360—a miserly 50GB with a Deluxe subscription. It’s very simple to set up but doesn’t make it clear how your data is encrypted, or who holds the encryption keys. Given how ubiquitous cloud storage is these days, we think McAfee’s encryption option is more flexible, given you can combine it with existing cloud accounts.
However, Norton does score bonus points for its Dark Web Monitoring tool, which tracks your personal data—including email, bank account, mother’s maiden name, and driver license number—and alerts you should any breaches occur. It’s also added a School Time component to its parental control to help keep kids focused while learning from home.
Both apps also differ when it comes to performance optimization options. Norton offers basic disk optimization and file cleanup tools, along with a handy startup manager, while McAfee goes with an app booster that works proactively to hand additional system resources to apps running in the foreground. There’s also the McAfee Web Boost extension, which promises to boost Google Chrome’s performance by stopping videos from automatically playing.
USABILITY
A security product’s user interface is important in guiding the user to setting both appropriate levels of protection and helping them deal with a malware attack. McAfee’s 2021 product line catches the eye for all the right reasons thanks to a slick, modern new UI. Crucially, it’s more than just eye candy, having been streamlined, reorganized, and made simpler to navigate. That’s evident from the moment you first install the product. The app provides plenty of steering, and its alerts are large, prominent, and reassuring when they do pop up. The main window is a textbook example in restraint. All four sections—PC Security, PC Performance, My Privacy, and My Info—comprise a headline carousel of key recommendations, beneath which are a handpicked selection of icons highlighting the suite’s key features.
If you’re worried that McAfee is skimping on protection, click the settings button in the top right corner to reveal additional options for each component missing from the main interface, from firewall and vulnerability scanner to anti-spam tool.
At first glance, Norton 360 seems to be following similar lines, but dig deeper and you’ll realize it’s a clumsy amalgamation of two principal UIs. Front and center is the My Norton view, which is a slick, welldesigned portal providing a quick summary of—and shortcuts to—the available protections, with a handy search tool that puts the entire suite at your fingertips.
At this point we encountered our first major irritation: despite already being activated, we were forced to log in to our Norton account again within the program to unlock several components. That’s bad enough without having to jump through several CAPTCHA challenges. We then discovered our second disappointment: Norton’s underlying protection still uses the “classic” interface, which is where most of your configuration time will be spent. It splits Norton 360’s major components into four sections, but the somewhat dated user interface, pop-up notifications and warnings feel less intuitive and harder to navigate than McAfee’s offering.
Ultimately, you’ll be putting your PC’s security in safe hands with either product, with Norton just edging things, but not enough in our view to sway things decisively in either app’s favor (if locking down your PC as tight as possible is your sole motivation, look at Bitdefender or Kaspersky). It comes down to what additional protections you want. Norton’s Dark Web Monitoring tool is a winner, but we think an encrypted file vault is more valuable than another cloud backup add-on, which tilts the pendulum back toward McAfee.
What settles things for us is McAfee’s reduced demands on your system, along with its redesigned interface. McAfee Total Protection has been laid out logically to put you within easy reach of all the tools, while providing useful hints and tips. Its notifications and warnings are also more visible, which could be crucial if you find yourself under attack. –NICK PEERS