Let's go over the best antivirus. You see these all over. Let's make an actual tier list.
Now, I'm going to do this a little different because most security channels obsess over, hey, detection rates and this percentage and a lot of marketing materials. I've done IT for about 20 years, about 100 or so different businesses, especially earlier on, past 10 years, not that many different businesses. So I'll kind of touch on what used to be good, what is good now, or what I've had good luck with, and some other little variants of that. There's two themes here that I want to kind of go over.
Actually, let's go ahead and do three themes here. The first one is you should not really trust any tier list or top 10 list you see on the internet. All of its affiliate sales from your favorite YouTuber down to any Google results you get. Affiliate sales is very prominent in this industry.
And anytime you see what's the best antivirus, they're going to try and shill you into it because the rips on these things are huge. We get massive commissions anytime you click a link. Therefore, there will be no links in the description for any of these antiviruses. Go pick out whichever one it is. I don't care.
So don't trust any security channels or this with affiliate sales because it is a dirty industry. So having said that, number two, don't do free. free antivirus.
I kind of touch on that a little bit as we go through some of these, because some of them are free and premium, and I want to kind of showcase the difference there. But for the most part, that's true. A lot of free antivirus going out and downloading that, usually not worth the time. There's a couple things that don't hold true there, but for the most part, downloading free antivirus really shouldn't be done very much today.
And the third final thing that I want to touch on before we jump into each company. Don't ever get an internet security suite. You're a sucker if you do, and if you are paying for one right now, please cancel that subscription.
Just get an antivirus. Internet security suites only slow down your system, really don't offer much in ways of security. So having said that, I'll have a couple final thoughts after we get through the antiviruses here.
Now, we'll start off with, let's go like a Vyra. We'll go down the middle. This used to be pretty good back when free antivirus was kind of needed, but with Windows Defender being in the pretty good category, I would say this is no longer really needed. There's no point in downloading a lot of free antivirus when Windows Defender pretty much takes care of everything for you. So when we look at these, there's a couple different things, and many people don't know this, but AVG used to be good.
Same with Avast. They're actually the same company. They got I think a big conglomerate owns both of them now.
And they've had so many security leaks. They have a huge amount of annoyance when you install these free antiviruses. So there's pop-ups everywhere.
And frankly, their detection rates are really not any different from Windows Defender. So why? Why would you use these anymore? I don't see a point in either one of these.
So that's kind of it. Now, to touch on the worst antiviruses in this list, which I... say, hey, you're better off actually getting infected with a virus than having these installed because I treat them worse than a virus. I think we have to put in McAfee and Norton.
You might be thinking, wait a second, Titus, McAfee and Norton, they're like some of the oldest names in the entire market. They're on all these new computers, but you're paying through the nose. Also, you have a lot of lock-in or vendor lock-in with these guys because they offer a suite of products. Don't ever bundle in a password manager.
with your antivirus. I really, really highly caution against that and these things are just so heavy and they make your computer run a lot slower, slower than any virus would make your computer run. So I treat them almost like a virus these days and they are the by far the worst.
They're honestly the only one that are going to make this tier. Moving on, the rest of these have their time and place so I kind of go over them. Now that we kind of set up the worthless ones, the okay, hey, everyone uses this.
Let's go with like, I think this is F secure here. It's okay, but I wouldn't really buy it kind of thing. I also had some experiences back in 2016. I worked on a big business, actually had a Viper contract, and we had to deal with their business suite. And I think it was just a ton of licensing. I found them to be Okay, I guess, but their detection rates were really poor back then.
And overall, not something I'd recommend. Honestly, I think Windows Defender probably would be even better than them. So that's kind of my thought process there. Going on to Bitdefender, I would put it in the pretty good category.
They have a free model, free antivirus. Again, it's right on par with Defender. I wouldn't call it better or worse.
I kind of like throw it down the middle. And while I like Bitdefender, I don't have anything bad to say about him, but I don't really have a whole lot of great things to say about him either. So I'm just going to put him in the A category.
ESET has been a market leader, otherwise known as NOD32 back in the day. I think they were established in the late 80s. Still a very good antivirus. I don't know. did see them getting a little bit heavier, but I do think their detection rates are a little bit better than Defender, but I don't know.
I kind of go back and forth, like, would I pay money for it over Defender? I don't know. Honestly, for me, Defender's kind of good enough when comparison to ESET.
Kaspersky, their detection rates are actually S tier. They have a great detection, but it's super noisy, and it being a Russian-based company, I don't know. I kind of just leave it in the pretty good category. It does have a good free cloud-based antivirus that actually is a little bit lighter weight than Defender. Most of these other ones I've listed so far have been heavier than Defender, meaning you use more system resources installing them.
Kaspersky Cloud for free, not really one of them. It was actually a little bit lighter than Defender because it disables Defender and you only have Kaspersky Cloud free, so not too bad. Mauerbytes. You know, a lot of people that have removed a lot of viruses in the day have used malware bytes extensively.
I don't recommend you continually run it with a monitoring of malware bytes in the background. I don't find that to be very good. However, malware bytes is still very good at detection.
So when I'm cleaning a system, malware bytes still gets used quite often. Same goes for Sophos. I never really bought Sophos and I really don't like their antivirus. but their scan is probably one of the most in-depth scans on the net. And I really love mixing in them when scanning for viruses.
And they have a great free scanner out on the market. So Sophos really gets a good vote for me. WebRoot, you know, I've talked about it in the past.
I really like WebRoot. Their detection rates are actually less than a lot of these A-tier ones, but their Secure Anywhere Business Suite, I've actually used for probably five or six years in some client sites. Very minimal. very good but I only use the antivirus and I also disable many of its advanced features such as an exploit that came out with web root skier anywhere where I think some people were exploiting the scripting aspect of it so be cautious with this if you go that route but I do love its central management console very lightweight very easy to manage and honestly has really good detection rates in the same realm trend micro used to be really good you know, 10, 15 years ago, I used them all the time, but slowly they kind of just have fallen into, Hey, probably used to be good.
Don't use much now anymore. I used to use like their house call and some other stuff, but these days trend micro just kind of ends in the dumpster bin for me. And that's kind of like the big antiviruses and kind of how I do my tier list over just my experiences. Having said that, I'm going to get skewered.
I already know a lot of these people don't like WebRoot because they have been exploited, like I said, and they have had bad experiences where I have had very good experiences. And I really kind of want to finish this video out with just Windows antivirus. If you're just going to stay with the free model, honestly, just stick with Windows. And if you're a home user, what you get with Windows is pretty darn good.
I say stick with that. If you're a business user, You're going to want a central management console. I really like WebRoot, but honestly, Bitdefender, I think, has a pretty good business plan as well.
But those are just kind of my experiences from this. Having said all of that, I will tell you, no antivirus is going to protect you. The problem is you, the user.
If you're constantly getting infected, yeah, the problem's not in the computer. It's not the fact you don't have the right software. It's a problem between the chair and the keyboard. So that is my honest opinion of antiviruses, the current market state. I don't really recommend buying much these days.
And that's kind of where I leave my tier list. Let me know your thoughts down in the comments.