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Going online without antivirus protection isn’t just silly, it’s dangerous. Recognizing this, Microsoft works to ensure you don’t go unprotected. Microsoft Defender Antivirus springs into action if your Windows installation lacks an antivirus tool. When you install a third-party antivirus, Defender goes back to sleep. And you can get better protection than the built-in without fronting any cash. AVG AntiVirus Free has millions of users around the world. In our tests and tests by the independent labs, it earns mostly excellent scores. It beats out Microsoft Defender Antivirus in lab tests, and it also beats many commercial antivirus utilities. While Avast One Essential offers more features, AVG has the same underlying antivirus engine, making both our Editors’ Choice winners for free antivirus.
AVG’s lineage is complicated. In 2016, Avast acquired AVG. In 2020, Norton acquired Avira. In 2022, Norton merged with Avast to form a new company called Gen, managing the brands Norton, LifeLock, Avast, AVG, and Avira, among others. All the security apps continue their separate existences, but AVG and Avast have a special relationship. Under the hood, the antivirus protection engines are the same. Why does the company keep them both? Avira, AVG, and Avast One Essential all have huge followings, but globally each is strong in different areas. The combined company has a worldwide reach.
That global reach gets AVG plenty of mindshare, but mindshare doesn’t pay the bills. AVG only makes money when customers purchase the premium security suite. When you install the free antivirus, there’s minor pressure to upgrade, or at least start a 30-day free trial with all the premium features. Other apps, among them Avira Free Security, lean harder on you to upgrade.
There isn’t a Pro edition of the AVG antivirus anymore, though. If you click one of the pro-only features in the free antivirus, it suggests you upgrade to the full AVG Internet Security suite.
AVG’s main window features green and white text on a slate-gray background. It clearly distinguishes free from premium features. It also marks the panels for Computer and Web & Email protection as basic protection. Full protection includes panels for Hacker Attack defenses and protection for your privacy. Both the full protection panels display a lock icon; clicking them invites you to upgrade to AVG’s security suite.
You might not realize this, but in most cases, antivirus companies pay for the privilege of having their security solutions tested by independent labs. The company does benefit; a high score gives it bragging rights, while if the score is poor, the lab helps the company work through what went wrong. With a free antivirus that doesn’t bring in any income, a company might be tempted to avoid the expense of testing. Not AVG, to its credit. We follow four independent testing labs that regularly release reports on their results. Two of them include AVG in their latest reports, down from three when last reviewed. All four include Avast.
The analysts at AV-Comparatives perform a variety of security tests, of which we follow four. Antivirus apps that achieve the necessary minimum scores receive a Standard rating, while those that show advanced features and capabilities can rate Advanced or Advanced+. AVG and Avast both received Advanced+ ratings in all three tests. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus also took Advanced+ in all three.
AV-Test Institute reports on antivirus capabilities in three areas: protection, performance, and usability. With six points possible in each category, the maximum score is 18 points. AVG took six points for usability, meaning it didn’t erroneously flag valid programs or websites as malicious, and six more points for the all-important malware protection category. It came close in performance, with 5.5 points. Avast scored the same in protection and usability, but managed the full six points for performance, yielding a perfect 18 points. Bitdefender and Avira are among the handful of others to reach 18 points.
A total of 17.5 points or better is enough for AV-Test to award AVG the Top Product designation. In the latest test report, over three-quarters of tested programs earned Top Product.
Trying to come as close as possible to real-world conditions, the experts at SE Labs capture drive-by downloads and other web-based attacks, using a replay system to challenge each tested antivirus with the same attack. The best ones receive AAA certification; others may be certified at the AA, A, B, or C level. Like all the apps in the latest round of testing, Avast received AAA certification. AVG did the same when last reviewed but didn’t participate in this latest test.
MRG-Effitas reports its test results a bit differently from the other labs. Participants that don’t manage perfect or near-perfect protection simply fail. We follow two tests from this lab. Avast passed one of the two; AVG didn’t appear in the latest results.
A third of the current antivirus utilities I track don’t show up in results from any of the labs, and another quarter only have one lab test result. Tested by two labs, AVG is doing better than most. I use a purpose-built algorithm to map all test results onto a 10-point scale and generate an aggregate score for those with at least two lab results. Bitdefender, with a perfect 10 points, is at the top of the heap, but no other contender has a better score than AVG’s 9.8. Avast has better coverage, with results from all four labs, but a miss in one of the tough tests from MRG-Effitas brings its score to 9.6.
Any kind of internet-based malware must get past numerous defenses before it can infect your PC. For example, an antivirus could block all access to the malware-hosting URL, or it could wipe out the malware payload before the download finishes. I’ll discuss those malware protection layers shortly.
If a file is already present on your computer, AVG assumes it must have gotten past the earlier layers of protection. Like Avast, Emsisoft Anti-Malware, McAfee, and a few others, its real-time protection doesn’t scan such files on simple access. Rather, it gives those files a final examination before they execute.
To test AVG’s malware-blocking abilities, I opened a folder containing my current collection of malware samples and tried to execute each one. AVG blocked seven-eighths of them immediately on launch, wiping them out so fast it left Windows displaying an error message stating that the file could not be found. In a few cases, it reported detecting a PUP (potentially unwanted program) and asked permission to send the file to quarantine, permission that I always granted. It eliminated more samples before they could fully install.
AVG’s results tracked Avast’s very closely in this test, though it did slightly better, probably because Avast’s test happened several months ago. With 88% detection and 8.6 of 10 possible points, AVG has the third-best score among antivirus tools tested with my current malware collection. It edged out Norton AntiVirus Plus by a tenth of a point and beat Avast by another tenth. Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus, with 9.4 points, currently has the top score, while McAfee is next with 9.2.
This may be an extra-tough set of samples. Several products scored even higher when tested against my previous collection. G Data and ZoneAlarm top that group, with 9.8 of 10 possible points.
When AVG detects a completely unfamiliar file, the app prevents that file from launching and sends it to AVG headquarters for analysis. AVG displays a message stating that it has found a suspicious file and promises an evaluation within a few seconds. All my hand-coded testing utilities triggered this warning; all correctly got a clean bill of health. Only one malware sample triggered this warning, but in the end, AVG marked it, too, as safe.
The sample collection we use for the malware blocking test remains the same for months. To evaluate the ability of each antivirus to deal with the very latest malware, we start with a feed of malware-hosting URLs supplied by MRG-Effitas. We try to launch each URL, recording whether the antivirus blocked access to the URL, quarantined the malware download, or missed the boat.
We test using URLs from the last few days, continuing until we have a large enough sample set. Then we tally the results. AVG blocked access to 45% of the URLs and eliminated another 34% at the download stage, for a total of 79% protection. That’s way down from its score of 94% when last tested. McAfee AntiVirus Plus, Norton, Sophos, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus all reached a perfect 100% in their latest tests.
Phishing websites don’t need fancy coding tricks to victimize innocent netizens. Rather than try to evade protection by the operating system and antivirus, they hoodwink the user into giving away secrets. Fraudsters simply create a convincing imitation of a sensitive site, perhaps a bank, or PayPal, and strew links to that fake site around the Web. Any user who logs in, not realizing it’s a fraud, has just given away a secure account to the fraudsters. If a thousand smart web surfers spot the fraud and just one schlemiel unknowingly logs in, that’s a win for the bad guys. And when the authorities put the kibosh on the fraudulent site, the fraudsters just pop up another one.
We test antiphishing using the very newest phishing sites, making sure to include some that haven’t yet been fully analyzed and blacklisted. We launch each probable phishing URL in four browsers. The antivirus under test protects one of the browsers, naturally. The other three rely on protection built into Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.
Any code monkey can write a phishing protection module that blocks sites found on official blacklists. The best phishing detection systems use real-time analysis to identify frauds that are too new for blacklisting. AVG clearly has this capability; the company touts its enhanced machine learning technologies. In testing, it proved quite effective, and its notifications distinguished between actual phishing detection and blacklisting.
With an impressive 99% detection of phishing frauds, AVG matches the latest scores from Bitdefender and Kaspersky. Only Avast, Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security, and ZoneAlarm beat that score, all attaining 100% detection.
Tested simultaneously, AVG AntiVirus for Mac scored the same, matching the Windows edition’s stats precisely. While phishing is completely platform-agnostic, phishing protection can vary between Windows and macOS versions of the same antivirus. In this case, they matched perfectly.
AVG is modest about its ransomware protection. You may never realize you have it unless you dig into settings…or suffer a ransomware attack.
This ransomware protection system simply bans all modification of protected files by untrusted programs. Out of the box, it runs in Smart mode, meaning that it ignores known and trusted programs. You can set it to Strict mode, meaning every modification of a protected file will require your permission, but why would you? By default, it protects archive, audio, database, disk, document, picture, and video files. You can add other file types or set it to protect every file in any protected folder.
The ransomware system defaults to protecting the Documents, Pictures, Desktop, Videos, and Music folders for each user account. If those choices don’t match the way you use your computer, you can remove or add folders at will. I tried to edit a file from the Documents folder using a one-off editor that I wrote myself. Initially, AVG flagged it as suspicious and put it through an initial scan, eventually deeming it harmless. When I tried to save a file, AVG prevented the change, asking me whether to allow or block access.
When I last tested AVG, I found a window of vulnerability in this feature. I created a simple fake encrypting ransomware program that runs at startup and reversibly encrypts all text files in the Documents folder. AVG did not prevent this activity; it seems it wasn’t ready. That window is still open. As before, when I ran the same program after verifying AVG was fully loaded, ransomware protection detected and prevented the file modifications, but at boot time, the fake ransomware seized the day. Do remember, though, that in testing, AVG blocked every actual ransomware sample before it could even launch. And yes, it did that job at boot time, too.
If you see a suspicious activity warning when you’re trying out a new document or photo editor, go ahead and allow it. But if it comes as a surprise, smack the button to block access, and then investigate the perpetrating program.
AVG’s main window features a big Smart Scan button, with a floating tip that nags you until you run your first scan. Clicking the button checks for problems in security settings, runs a fast look for active malware, and scans for what it calls advanced issues. On my standard clean test system, the scan finished in less than two minutes, even though I had to click Next between each phase. It reported no settings or browser problems, but it did find some advanced issues.
Specifically, AVG reported that the test system only has a basic firewall and that it doesn’t have active protection against DNS hijacking. I found that clicking to resolve these issues simply brings up a page inviting you to pay for AVG’s premium suite. When I rejected the upsell, AVG proved bulldog-tenacious. Rather than let me go, it switched to offering a 60-day free trial. This third part of Smart Scan isn’t a scan at all, but simply an annoying upsell opportunity.
For a full scan of the entire computer, I launched what AVG calls a Deep Scan. It must have been very deep; the scan went on for two hours and 14 minutes. To be fair, the average time for a full scan has been going steadily up. At present, it’s just five minutes short of a full two hours. A second scan cut that time roughly in half. Regardless of the time required, you should run a full scan soon after installation, to rid your system of any lurking infestations. Note, though, that many antivirus tools finish their full scan faster than AVG. Webroot and Malwarebytes Premium, for example, did the job in less than five minutes.
Performance isn’t a security issue—unless the consumer blames security software for slow performance and turns it off. Like other security companies, AVG tries to head off that unfortunate event by making performance enhancement part of its app collection. When you select Performance Scan, it looks for four types of problems: System junk, Broken registry items, Programs slowing down your PC, and PC health issues. On my test virtual machine, this scan was quick and found almost a gig of system junk. 163 broken Registry items, and 8 programs slowing the PC. Clicking one of the three categories opened a detail page, but most users won’t learn anything by reviewing the details.
When I clicked Resolve All I got a slap in the face. AVG refused to do anything about them unless I paid cash for the separate AVG TuneUp program. As with the antivirus upsell, when I rejected the invitation to buy it switched to suggesting I take a two-month free trial. In my opinion, that’s not a good upsell strategy.
The Boot-Time Scan aims to wipe out pernicious malware that doesn’t yield to the regular antivirus. It does so by launching before Windows does, which also means it launches before any Windows-based malware can defend itself. You simply select Boot-Time Scan and reboot, optionally loading a special set of antivirus definitions. Avast offers a similar feature.
Testing Boot-Time Scan proved a bit rocky. On my first attempt, it simply didn’t launch at reboots. The second time, it stuck loading the antivirus; when I came back in the morning it was still stuck. The third time’s the charm, they say. My third attempt succeeded, and it did so more quickly than in past years. At an hour and 20 minutes, it came in faster than the regular deep scan.
Along with the security suite, AVG installs the AVG Secure Browser and encourages you to make it your default browser. If you’re a Chrome user, you’ll find it familiar, as it’s visibly Chromium-based. It’s hardly different from Chrome except that it puts existing privacy settings front and center. A simple onboarding tour points out that you can personalize the browser with Dark Mode, recommends engaging the VPN for private communications, points out the Privacy Guard extension’s toolbar button, and winds up with the button that launches the Security & Privacy Center.
Security & Privacy Center is the heart of the secure browser’s special functions. It boasts nine buttons for nine security features: AVG AntiVirus, Secure Browser VPN, Privacy Guard, Web Shield, Private Mode, Password Managers, Extension Guard, Privacy Cleaner, and Hack Check. A banner above the buttons invites you to a free trial of the secure browser’s Pro edition.
The button collection looks impressive, but when you go down the line you find a good bit of fluff. AVG AntiVirus simply launches the main antivirus, something you could do from the system tray. If you happen to have AVG Secure VPN, installed, clicking Secure Browser VPN launches it; if not, it sets up you up for a free trial. Private Mode is no different from Chrome’s Incognito Mode, Edge’s InPrivate Mode, and so on. You can even launch it with the standard Ctrl+Shift+Del key combo. Password Managers might better be called Password Manager, as the only selection it offers is the browser’s built-in feature.
Extension Guard blocks untrusted browser extensions. But stop and think a minute. Why allow any extensions in a secure browser? Bitdefender’s SafePay and Kaspersky’s Safe Money isolate sensitive browsing from all other processes and ban extensions.
Web Shield is a component of AVG AntiVirus Free, designed to block access to dangerous websites, malicious downloads, botnets, and threats delivered as scripts. It’s not immediately obvious how if at all, this feature differs from the Web Shield feature in AVG Secure Browser. My AVG contact explained, “AVG Secure Browser and AVG AntiVirus use different mixes of scanning, filtering (including blacklisting and whitelisting), and page metadata to find the threats in order to achieve the same, high quality of detection.” You do get additional insight into web protection activity in the browser, with a clear report on what AVG checked and what threats it found.
You can use the Hack Check feature to determine whether your email address has been exposed. However, the information won’t do you much good. AVG doesn’t report any detail at all, not which breach exposed the data, nor which websites are involved. It simply advises changing your password on every site where you used that email (a tough slog) and installing a password manager. You’d get a lot more information by plugging your email into the free HaveIBeenPwned website.
The description of Privacy Guard reads a lot like that of the AVG Online Security browser extension, installed from the antivirus tool. At its default Basic Blocking level, it blocks known trackers and ads, both popup and banner types, including videos. Raising the level to Balanced Blocking adds social media ad blocking and stepping up to Strict Blocking cuts off browser notifications and browser fingerprinting (more about fingerprinting shortly).
Both Privacy Guard and Online Security put a number on the toolbar button indicating how many trackers they found on the current site. Click the Privacy Guard button and you get no additional details, just the ability to turn off blocking for the site along with links to settings. Online Security, by contrast, gives you a full list of trackers found, organized into categories. From the list, you can turn blocking on or off for any tracker or an entire category. Did I mention that Online Security marks up search results to indicate safe, dangerous, or unknown? Privacy Guard doesn’t.
One thing Privacy Guard offers that Online Security doesn’t is the ability to foil browser fingerprinting. What’s that? Well, your browser offers a huge amount of information to websites, because sites can use that information to tune the pages they serve up. They can also process this information into a browser fingerprint that uniquely identifies you, for tracking purposes. Like Avast AntiTrack and a few others, AVG can randomize what the browser reports, just enough to prevent fingerprinting.
AVG Secure Browser puts on an impressive show of security features, and it does come configured for the best security, but you can configure most of the same settings right in Chrome. It’s not hardened against attack the way some other secure browsers are. And where it overlaps features of the main antivirus, the antivirus is better. Use it if you like but be sure to install the AVG Online Security extension as well.
Somewhere during the installation process, I encountered a prompt to enable enhanced firewall protection. I didn’t think a lot about it thereafter, and unlike many security tools, AVG doesn’t put firewall protection front and center. To see it, you must find the Enhanced Firewall page in Settings. If you dig a bit further into Firewall Rules, you may find yourself baffled. AVG makes the details of its firewall rules clearer than most, but you still need serious expertise to understand them. Most users should leave these settings strictly alone.
The firewall built into Windows handles network traffic in much the same way, but it doesn’t have the program control facet found in most third-party firewalls. Early firewalls bombarded users with incomprehensible queries about programs attempting network access. GodzillAI.exe is attempting to contact 87.242.66.56 on port 8080. Allow or Deny? Putting this security decision in the hands of untrained users is a big mistake. Some will always click Allow. Others will click Deny until they break something, then switch to Allow.
The best firewalls make those security decisions internally. Norton operates that way, and so does AVG. Out of the box, the firewall does its own analysis of new programs and decides whether to allow network access. To see its program control in action, I switched its mode to ask for instructions upon encountering a new program.
When I launched a seriously off-brand browser, one that I wrote myself, the firewall popped up a big notification, with several options. I could choose to Block or Allow the connection, of course. By default, that choice applies to all connections, but AVG would let me limit control to outgoing connections or connections on the specific port in use. And I could make the decision stick permanently, limit it to a one-time choice, or leave it in place until reboot.
For most users, the enhanced firewall component remains invisible. It works in the background, doing its job without any user interaction. And that’s just fine.
The AVG SafePrice browser extension (for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and AVG Secure Browser) keeps an eye on your online shopping. If it finds a better deal than the items you’ve selected, it shows what it found. For some sites it also offers coupons. It is functionally identical to Avast SafePrice. In testing, I didn’t manage to trigger a better-price offer, though it did shower me with coupons on some sites.
The AVG Online Security browser extension, mentioned above, enhances your browsing safety and privacy. If it doesn’t appear automatically, you can install it from AVG’s menu. The extension supplements existing protection against phishing and dangerous sites, including sites with a bad reputation. For any site, you can click the icon to get information about the current site, including any ad trackers or other trackers. There’s also an option to block all trackers on all sites. It gives you much finer control over what gets blocked than the Privacy Guard built into AVG Secure Browser. In addition, it marks up search results with colored icons, green for safe, yellow for iffy, red for dangerous, and gray for not checked yet.
Both Avast and AVG offer a Do Not Disturb mode, which postpones scheduled scans and suppresses notifications when you’re running any program in full-screen mode. You can fine-tune this feature by choosing Do Not Disturb Mode from the Tools submenu in Settings.
Controlled from the Basic Protection submenu in Settings, the Network Inspector automatically checks each network you connect with for security problems. It didn’t find any with my home network, naturally—this feature is more useful when you’re using public networks. It can also notify you when a new device connects to the network, though it won’t do so for networks it considers public. Note that the similar feature in Avast goes much further, listing all connected devices and reporting on any that exhibit security problems.
The final bonus feature is a little hard to spot. Buried in the right-click menu for files and folders is a new item titled Shred using AVG. If you choose this item, AVG overwrites the file’s data before deleting it, thereby foiling any attempt to recover the deleted file’s data. By default, the shredder just overwrites data once before deletion, which is enough to prevent forensic software from recovering the data. If you worry that forensic hardware might be brought to bear on your secrets, you can dig into settings and choose the three-pass DOD shred algorithm or the total-overkill Gutmann method. Avast offers a similar feature, but only at the for-pay suite level.
The core antivirus engine in AVG AntiVirus Free is the same as what powers Avast One Essential. Some bonus features overlap as well, though Avast offers a variety of suite-level features including a full network security analyzer and a software updater to ensure you don’t miss security patches. You’ll find plenty of features in Avast that require a premium upgrade, though, while AVG is lighter on the upsell invitations. Each provides excellent protection, with differing sets of bonus features. AVG Antivirus Free and Avast One Essential share the Editors’ Choice honor for free antivirus protection.
When the IBM PC was new, I served as the president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years. That’s how I met PCMag’s editorial team, who brought me on board in 1986. In the years since that fateful meeting, I’ve become PCMag’s expert on security, privacy, and identity protection, putting antivirus tools, security suites, and all kinds of security software through their paces.
Before my current security gig, I supplied PCMag readers with tips and solutions on using popular applications, operating systems, and programming languages in my “User to User” and “Ask Neil” columns, which began in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. Along the way I …
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