Every computer needs antivirus protection, and some security companies support that by providing free antivirus to the masses. But these companies can't survive without a cadre of paying customers. Some companies allow only personal use of their free solutions, while others encourage upgrading by piling on pro-only tools and components. Avira Antivirus Pro adds several components not available to users of Avira Free Security, but they don't really add much value. The biggest reason to pay for it (and it’s not a great reason) is if you want to use Avira in a commercial setting, which isn't allowed with the free version.
Like Avira Free Security, this product will offer to activate the Avira Crypto cryptocurrency mining utility if your hardware meets the stringent requirements. For a full discussion of this component, see my review of Avira Free Security.
What Will You Pay for Avira Pro?
Avira's pricing is a tad on the high side, with a list price of $44.99 per year for one license, $57.99 for three, and $70.99 for five. The sweet spot for one-license antivirus subscriptions is just under $40. Bitdefender, Webroot, and Emsisoft are all in that price range, as are more than a dozen others. F-Secure Anti-Virus gives you three licenses for the same price. You do pay $59.99 for a year of McAfee, but that gets you protection for all the Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household.
If you put Avira Antivirus Pro alongside Avira Free Security, you’ll find them nearly identical, except for the window title. Both have a left-rail menu featuring Status, Security, Privacy, and Performance. Clicking Security, Privacy, or Performance brings up a page of five related components, and those pages look just the same in the two products. The main Status page features oversized icons for Security, Privacy, and Performance, along with a big button to run a Smart scan.
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The most obvious difference appears when you click Protection options on the Security page. This reveals four toggles for essential security components: Real-Time protection, Web protection, Mail protection, and Ransomware protection. In the free product, only Real-Time protection is enabled.
I’ll discuss Web protection and Ransomware protection below. Mail protection sounds like spam filtering, but it isn't. Rather, it scans incoming POP3 and IMAP email for malware. You can optionally set it to scan outgoing SMTP messages, though I can't picture how a malicious file could escape the real-time antivirus and then get caught by Mail protection. Given that an incoming malicious attachment would get scanned by the real-time antivirus before it could launch, I don’t see this feature adding any value.
Features Shared With Avira's Free Security
In the past, Avira made two free products available, a free antivirus and a free security suite. With the current product line, the company has officially dropped the free antivirus, though it hasn’t been wiped from the website. Avira Free Security is a stripped-down version of the top-tier Avira Prime. It includes antivirus protection, naturally, but also integrates a password manager, a feature-limited VPN, and dozens of handy utilities. Many of these features overlap what you get in the Pro antivirus. I’ll summarize my findings about those shared features here—you can read my review of the free suite for full details.
All four of the independent testing labs I follow include Avira in their latest reports, and its scores range from just OK to perfect. Each lab has its own scoring system, so I’ve devised a custom algorithm to map all scores to a 10-point scale and derive an aggregate score. Using my system, Avira scores 9.0, quite a drop from the 9.8 it had when last reviewed. Kaspersky Anti-Virus owns the top score at present, 9.9 points.
In my hands-on malware protection test, Avira detects 87% of the samples and scores 8.2 points, sharing the lowest score among recent products with Heimdal Threat Prevention Home. Tested with this same set of samples, Malwarebytes scores a perfect 10, McAfee reaches 9.9, and Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus comes in third with 9.8 points.
For a different view of protection, I challenge each product with 100 recent malware-hosting URLs, noting whether it keeps the browser from accessing the URL, eliminates the malware payload during download, or totally whiffs detection. Avira's Browser Safety component, which installs in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera (but not Internet Explorer), shows 78% detection, just about evenly split between blocking access to the URL and eliminating the malware payload. Only a few products have scored lower in this test.
At the successful end of the spectrum, McAfee AntiVirus Plus manages 100% protection in its latest test. Bitdefender, G Data, and Sophos come very close, with 99%.
Browser Safety also serves to fend off phishing sites, fraudulent sites that attempt to steal your passwords. Avira earns a decent score in this test, at 91% detection, and Avira Free Antivirus for Mac scored precisely the same. Quite a few products earn even better scores, though, with the 100% scored by F-Secure and McAfee topping the list.
I’ve mentioned that the Protection options features are all enabled, where the free edition had just Real-time protection. That’s the only difference among items on the Security page. Scan choices, Quarantine, and Windows Firewall control are the same. And if you try to apply the security updates found by the Software updater, you’ll find that doing so still requires that you upgrade to Avira Prime.
Items on the Privacy page are likewise unchanged between the Pro edition and Avira Free Security. Browser Safety, Passwords, File shredder, and Privacy settings are just the same. The VPN has its free-mode restrictions in place. Paying for Pro gets you no benefits here.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online
As I noted in my review of the free edition, three of the five features on Avira’s Performance page simply open the corresponding item in Avira System Speedup. This separate utility is positively bursting with settings and components that require an upgrade, either to System Speedup Pro or to Avira Prime. The Optimizer component looks for ways to speed up your PC but won’t fully apply them unless you pay.
That leaves Driver updater. This tool works much like the software updater, but it seeks drivers that can be updated to improve performance. Wonder of wonders, the Update all button actually works! This is something you don’t get in the free edition. On the negative side, the update process replaced a video driver for my virtual machine test system which resulted in shrinking the display—I didn’t ask for that.
See How We Test Security Software
Web Protection Not Effective
As you can see, you don’t get a lot of added features by paying for the Pro antivirus. One of the few bonuses you do get with the upgrade is Web Protection. Where the Browser Safety extension only works in supported browsers, Web Protection acts at the network level, aiming to keep all web-connected programs from hooking up with dangerous URLs. Unfortunately, this feature is simply terrible.
Knowing I’d need to compare Web Protection with Browser Safety, I ran my malicious URL blocking test on the two simultaneously. In one virtual machine, I ran the test on Chrome with Browser Safety installed; in another, I used Internet Explorer with no browser extension, just Web Protection.
Browser Safety doesn’t do an outstanding job, blocking 78% of the malware downloads. But Web Protection fares even worse, scoring 67%. As noted earlier, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, G Data, McAfee, and Sophos all score 99% or better in their latest tests.
As for phishing protection, Web Protection’s score is beyond dismal. Out of many dozens of verified phishing URLs, Web Protection detected exactly one.
Every time I review this product, I comment that I don't understand why Avira doesn't take the clearly superior detection technology in Browser Safety and apply it to Web Protection. As it is, if you use a browser other than Chrome, Edge, Opera, or Firefox, you get no protection in the free edition and painfully limited protection in Pro.
Ransomware Protection
You might get the impression from Avira’s website that even the free edition offers ransomware protection. Digging deeper, you’ll find that ransomware protection in the free edition simply means that it detects ransomware (like other malware) by matching files with known signatures. Ransomware protection at the Pro level is the real thing, using behavioral detection that triggers on activities common to ransomware “such as disabling security controls or encrypting files stored on the device.”
To test this component, I turned off real-time protection, verified that ransomware protection remained enabled, and launched a dozen real-world ransomware samples, one at a time, in a virtual machine cut off from the internet. The results were abysmal. The file encrypting samples encrypted files and demanded ransom, and the one whole-disk encryptor ran unhindered, turning my virtual machine into a virtual brick. After this dismal performance against real ransomware, I didn’t bother testing with the simulated attacks generated by the RanSim ransomware simulator from KnowBe4.
And…I was fooled yet again by Avira’s display. The Protection Options page clearly shows Ransomware protection turned on and Real-time protection turned off, but that proved to be false. When you turn off Real-time protection, you’ve turned off Ransomware protection, even though the display says otherwise. This test didn’t evaluate ransomware protection because, despite what the program displayed, ransomware protection was not enabled.
Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security couples ransomware protection with overall real-time protection in the same way, but it makes the connection clear. As with Trend Micro, I couldn't truly test Avira's ransomware-specific abilities, because Real-time protection wiped out all the samples.
Device Protection
Most malware attacks come over the Internet, but there are a few malware families that spread using infected USB devices. Some high-end security suites include device control, a business-centered feature that lets an administrator ban the use of unknown USB drives but allow specific approved USBs. This feature works well in G Data Total Security and TrustPort Total Protection.
Avira Antivirus Pro offers a similar Device Protection feature, but you’d hardly know it. There’s no button or link for it anywhere in the program’s user interface—or at least none that I can find. The only way I know to access it is convoluted. You click Security, click Protection options, click the settings gear icon next to Real-time protection, and find Device Protection in the settings list. The overall Settings gear at the top of the Avira app won’t help you, as it just opens a page with nothing on it except a choice of language.
The first thing to do is enable the Device Protection feature. Now each time you mount a USB drive, Avira asks whether to allow or block access, with a checkbox to remember the device and whitelist or blacklist it. I allowed one USB drive and blocked another, just to see how things work. Digging back into the settings I could see the two devices, one in the whitelist and one in the blacklist. Buttons let you move an item between lists or delete it, meaning that Device Protection will see it as a new device next time you use it.
The most straightforward use for such a feature is to restrict use of unknown USBs, for example, the one your kid picked up in the school parking lot. However, there’s no option to ban all USB drives that aren’t whitelisted. I tried setting up password protection for product configuration, but I found I didn’t need the password to approve an unknown USB device. The only thing you can really do is block the use of already-known bad USB drives, which is pointless. Perhaps that’s why this feature is so well hidden.
Doesn't Add Enough Value
Avira Antivirus Pro provides decent protection against malware, but all its best features also come in Avira Free Security. Pro-only Web Protection does extend antiphishing and malicious URL blocking to all browsers, but it's vastly less accurate than the free Browser Safety extension. And while Device Control aims to let an administrator prevent unauthorized users from mounting unknown USB drives, there's no way to lock it down so they can't. As for ransomware protection, I couldn't test it, because it's tied to real-time protection, which eliminated all the ransomware samples.
If you like Avira and want to use it in a noncommercial setting, stick with the free suite. If you need antivirus for your business, pay a little less and choose one of our for-pay antivirus Editors' Choice products. Specifically, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Norton AntiVirus Plus, and Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus cost less, while McAfee AntiVirus Plus seems to cost more than Avira, but it allows you unlimited installations.
Avira Antivirus Pro offers the same basic protection as Avira Free Security, plus a few added features that don't all work well. Stick with the free edition or, in a business setting, make a better and less expensive choice.
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