Anti-Virus software for home users

Here is a list of some well-known Anti-Virus software for home users. We will list here only some popular Anti-Virus products for home users, not Anti-Trojan or Anti-Spyware products, not HIPS/BB/Virtualization software and also not firewalls, etc.

The ~25 products on this list are potential candidates for the tests of AV-Comparatives.

We test only about 16-18 of the most well-known, high-quality anti-virus products which fulfill our minimum requirements* for inclusion and which vendors agree to participate in our tests. This year, the various services we provide are carried out for a fee (like all professional independent testers do), which has to be paid the vendors or third-parties (of course the fee has no influence at all on the results). Please note that products which are tested by us and are able to get the STANDARD certification are in fact already good products, as they showed to provide good protection against a wide range of malware. Getting ADVANCED and ADVANCED+ is of course a bit even more difficult.

*: e.g. not too many false alarms or crashes, etc.

1

ArcaVir

scored under 85% (02/2007) - may get included in future

2

Avast (Alwil)

is included in the tests of 2008

3

AVG (Grisoft)

is included in the tests of 2008

4

AVIRA (AntiVir)

is included in the tests of 2008

5

BitDefender

is included in the tests of 2008

6

CA (VET)

scored under 85% (03/2007) - may get included in future

7

CounterSpy (Sunbelt)

will be tested separatly and may get included in future

8

eScan

is included in the tests of 2008

9

ESET (NOD32)

is included in the tests of 2008

10

F-Prot

may be reincluded (or tested separatly) in future

11

F-Secure

is included in the tests of 2008

12

GDATA (AVK)

is included in the tests of 2008

13

Kaspersky

is included in the tests of 2008

14

McAfee

is included in the tests of 2008

15

Microsoft

is included in the tests of 2008

16

Norman

is included in the tests of 2008

17

Panda

may be tested separatly/internally and may get included in future

18

PC Tools

will be tested separatly in 03/2008 and may get included in future

19

Rising

scored under 85% (02/2007) – may get included in future

20

Sophos

is included in the tests of 2008

21

Symantec (Norton)

is included in the tests of 2008

22

TrendMicro

may be tested separatly in 2008 and will be included in future

23

TrustPort

is included in the tests of 2008

24

VBA32

is included in the tests of 2008

25

VirusBuster

scored about 87% (02/2008) – may get included in future

There are also some other anti-virus products available, but many of them are mainly just using the (actual or old) engine of other vendors which are already included in the list above, e.g. Authentium (using F-Prot etc.), Bullguard (using BitDefender), VirusChaser (using Dr.Web), AOL (using McAfee), ZoneAlarm (using Kaspersky), eEye (using Norman), AntiCyberCrime (using Panda), Webroot (using Sophos), etc. We are not interested in testing such products, also not for money.

Some other products are not listed here because they are almost unknown to the majority of the international audience (but known in their local region) and score too low based on our tests (and can therefore not be included in our main regular tests), e.g. IMEN, VirIT, etc.

The following products may in our opinion currently score too low (or may cause too many false alarms) and are therefore currently not included in the main regular tests (but single product tests may already exist on our website or may get (re)tested separatly again in future): Ahnlab, ClamWin, Comodo, eSafe, Hauri, QuickHeal, Kingsoft, etc.
A single product test for IKARUS is available here (PDF). Dr.Web and Fortinet were included in the tests of 2007