#AVIRA FREE SECURITY UPGRADE#
#AVIRA FREE SECURITY FULL#

To be fair, it’s easy to ignore Avira’s upsell attempts. It’s effectively another limited demo: unlocking its features requires a separate SpeedUp Pro licence, which starts at £4 a year, then rockets up to £22. The component we’re most uneasy about is Avira System SpeedUp – a completely separate app which installs without asking for permission, and pops up when you click various buttons on the Performance page, including Battery saver and Advanced tools. The optional Avira Safe Shopping browser extension warns you away from fake sites and blocks trackers – though it also inserts coupon deals into web pages, which feels a little sleazy for a security product. There’s a link to the web-based Avira password manager service too, which can store and auto-fill any number of passwords for free.

Like Avast’s VPN, this allows limited use for free, but it’s much more restrictive, allowing just 500MB of protected traffic per month. That’s better than any other free security solution we’ve tried.Īlongside the main application, the Avira installer sets up the company’s Phantom VPN service. In the latest tests by independent security lab it managed a 99.96% malware protection rate while connected to the internet – matching Microsoft Defender – with an impressive false positive rate of just one wrong detection in over 10,000 items.

#AVIRA FREE SECURITY FULL#

It doesn’t help that the full suite is pretty pricey, costing £52 for five devices in the first year, rising to £86 after that.Īlthough it’s disappointingly light on features, Avira Free Security delivers quite creditable virus protection. It’s not unreasonable to ask people to pay for security services, but this isn’t a respectful way to do it. For example, the software updater scans your system and warns you about apps that might be obsolete, but when you click “Update” it reveals that automatic updates require – you guessed it – an Avira Prime subscription. Other buttons do half a job, then invite you to pay for the rest of it.

#AVIRA FREE SECURITY UPGRADE#

Try to enable web, email or ransomware protection and you’re merely greeted with an advert inviting you to upgrade to the commercial Avira Prime suite. Unfortunately, once you start clicking around, you discover that many of the apparent features are dummies.

Avira free security