Bitdefender Total Security – 5 Devices, 1 Year

My old sluggy pc dosnt bog down with this even while scanning and the threat protection is amazing

I’ve used McAfee, Symantec and Kaspersky, all for years and I’ve even installed these suites for customers as well. This, by far, is the worst of all antivirus suites I have ever used. Never have I ever been able to so easily bypass security software. Then there’s the scam that they are selling called “parental control.” It doesn’t control anything. It doesn’t report half of what the kids are doing on their computers. Sometimes it doesn’t detect anything at all! The online dashboard doesn’t allow you to drill into their web activity–you only get specific categories and a top few list of web sites visited. If the kid visited an adult site once in the last seven days and then went to their various school sites 1000 times that week–you’d never see the adult site they visited because there is no way to drill into the details of what is presented on the dashboard. The number of false positives is irritating and BitDefender assumes every raw IP you’re visiting is a bad actor. So when I visit a customer site with my laptop and type in an IP address, I need to enter the antivirus password to bypass that warning every single time I do that. The lack of configurability is also irritating. BD only allows you to enable or disable whole categories of functionality. Then there’s adding web site exceptions to the control: you can only add one at a time, instead of cutting and pasting a LIST of sites in. Our school system publishes a list of sites to white list that is more than 300 entries long (we are the 4th largest district in the country) and I have to type them in one at a time for EVERY user? Is BD kidding me!?! Parental Control is the same thing, except it is all or nothing: either block ALL the kid’s activity or don’t block at all. The category controls in parental control are also garbage. This software feels like someone is at some startup selling incomplete garbage to us, while we experience the irritations while paying them to build their software. Then they pay good lip service on their support boards and here with the standard “Oh hey, we’d like to talk about your difficulties please contact us here.” But when you contact them “there,” you just end up getting told by them that nothing else can be done because that is all they CAN do. So, yeah, I’m done. Going back to one of the more mature offerings when this subscription expires.

I took advantage of a special and picked this up. It had all the features I wanted, VPN, multiple device installs.

VPN helps protect your computer from intruders on the internet. It helps you surf undetected, sort of, if that helps explain. The feature is fairly premium and usually you’re paying extra for it. So, I was happy about that.

You get several downloads and also for mobile. I took it off my mobile because I don’t feel that I need antivirus on my phone. I also felt like the app was slowing me down, but it was probably just my paranoia.

The PC app is not intrusive. Unlike many, you don’t get a lot of reminders or notifications. I actually don’t get any. That is probably good! I also don’t think it is slowing down my PC. So not having something to complain about when it comes to antivirus usually means it is good!

Comparing it to other antivirus I have used, the others send you nagging messages to run this, buy that. This does none of that.

I don’t use it’s web browser but I think it adequately stalks my surfing in my preferred browser, Chrome. Many legit web pages are blocked at times, so that frustrates me, but I can get around it by opening the app and whitelisting the pages. Whitelisting means to add the website name once so it is remembered by the app. You just open BitDefender, then look for the trusted websites, and Add a website name to that. Then every time you go to the website in the future, Bit won’t block it.

I am happy with my purchase. I don’t think I would like to pay full price for it. But as far as ones I have used, it is the best. I would get it again on sale and recommend to a friend. It also could be a good gift to someone not so savvy with computers because there’s not really any setup unless you want to micromanage things, so it is easy for non computer geek people.