


For the most part, the service cannot identify whether some of the unknown devices on the network are malicious or not. You can perform various scans, but they rarely tell you anything useful. My impression is that Avast spent too much time to make their Network protection interface to look pretty and forgot about its functionality. With Bitdefender, some system reserves are left, so it's possible to browse the news or write an email without crashing your system.īoth providers have network security toolkits. Though, a downside is that when you're scanning with Avast, you pretty much can't do anything else with your device. The difference isn't as huge with quick scans, but Avast just performs a little better. My test unit has a relatively uncluttered 256 GB SSD drive, and it still took almost two hours. It takes about twice as long to complete a full system scan with Bitdefender as it would be with Avast. Where Bitdefender lags behind is in background scans. That saves not only your device's resources but your time as well. There are several tools that should help you avoid frequent scans. So, you won't be left with only the antivirus scanner and real-time protection. To some extent, the same applies to Bitdefender, however, the service has much better network safety tools even on its most basic version.

So, potentially the amount of malware that you have to deal with will be significantly lower because most of the junk won't end up on your device. With the paid version, there is a much bigger focus on network protection. This is because Avast heavily focuses on frequent background rescans for threats that already are on the inside. With that said, Bitdefender offers a more comprehensive defensive feature list, which puts it over the edge.Īvast's capabilities to protect you against malware will heavily depend on your subscription version. So, it's fair to say that you should expect a fairly similar degree of performance, whichever you pick. That is why you also have to factor in false-positives.Īccording to AV-TEST Institute's data, when it comes to protection, both Avast and Bitdefender score 6 points on Windows and 5.5 points on Mac. You want to make sure that your service is removing only the harmful files and not deleting important system data. The quality of the antivirus depends not only on the ability to detect and remove malware. One of the hardest things to compare between two antiviruses is their protection capabilities.
