Bitdefender Free

by Aethyna Dec 28, 2017 | 0 Votes | 0 Downloaded | 0 Reviews

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Features:

Anti Theft , Web Protection , Heuristic Scanning , Boot-time Scan , CloudAV

Platforms:

With over 500 million users as of 2017, Bitdefender Free is quite the popular antivirus of choice when it comes to Windows PCs. The program, particularly the premium version, offers a pretty complete package of digital protection. Download Now Similar Antiviruses

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Introduction Features Cost Conclusion

Introduction

Founded in 2001, Bitdefender is a Romanian digital security and antivirus program company that develops and sells its own antivirus software that’s packed with various proprietary cybersecurity technologies (mostly available in premium). With over 500 million users as of 2017, Bitdefender Free is quite the popular antivirus of choice when it comes to Windows PCs.

Features

Like any self-respecting antivirus software, Bitdefender Free provides the 3 “Holy Grail” of system scanning, namely On-demand, On-access and Boot-time scans, in addition to heuristic scanning, which will help you detect viruses or other malicious codes and programs by examining and comparing their pattern of behavior with known viral families in its database. The program even has a unique Active Virus Control feature which monitors everything an application does while it’s active. This allow Bitdefender to quickly identify suspicious activities and act accordingly, be it deleting the said file or quarantining it.

Bitdefender Free also provides their own brand of CloudAV called B-HAVE, which utilizes the convenience of cloud computing to analyze suspicious activity in your computer, compare it with signatures of known malware in its cloud database, and, if a red flag is raised, subsequently send instructions to your antivirus program to quarantine the said malicious program or file.

This helps tremendously when it comes to drastically reducing the installation size of your Bitdefender software since it doesn’t really need to lug around its database when everything’s available in the cloud. However, B-HAVE works mainly with malware so you’ll still need to update your Bitdefender when it comes to virus detection. The company has also claimed that they use cloud computing tech to help their antivirus program learn to identify new threats by processing and analyzing big data, and then predicting future advanced threats.

However, unlike Avast Free, Bitdefender Free doesn’t provide any form of intrusion detection or prevention systems or even a firewall, at least in the free version of the program. If you don’t want to use a third-party firewall, you might want to consider getting its premium Bitdefender Internet Security.

Although the antivirus does provide web protection which uses the company’s special content filtering technique, Bitdefender Free lacks some of the additional features that Avast Free has, including email security and antispam features, which aren’t that huge of a problem actually since most email services, such as Gmail, do provide their own security, antispam, and scans/filters.

Apparently, the Bitdefender company as a whole doesn’t really believe in the use of Macro protection though. You won’t get this form of protection in any form of Bitdefender’s extensive antivirus suite, be it free or premium.

The free version of Bitdefender for mobiles doesn’t really seem to fair well when compared to others, unfortunately. It not only lacks a firewall; it doesn’t filter your calls or SMSes, which many users would appreciate in a mobile antivirus program; and worst, no support is provided. If your free Bitdefender Mobile Security is acting out, you may not get the help you need, at least not from the company that had made the app.

Cost

Bitdefender Free is completely free to install and use. However, if you like the free version and would like to upgrade your copy, the company does offer several packages you can buy depending on how many devices you’ll need protection for and how much you are willing to pay. The most expensive package, Bitdefender Total Security 2018, can cost up to $100 per annum for 5 devices.

Naturally, the premium versions of Bitdefender will come with additional features that is absent in the free version, including multi-layer ransomware protection, online banking protection, a secure password manager, file shredder, webcam protection. and more.

Conclusion

Although Bitdefender Free lacks many extra features, this program shines not only because it can do its job of protecting your devices, but it is able to do it well. In fact, Bitdefender Free did well above the industry average in terms of its performance, usability, and the protection it provides in the numerous tests conducted by antivirus watchdogs like AV-Test.