Both are great, so I would give them both a try and see which one you like most.
Personally while Avast is pretty good on the protection front, I am not a huge fan of the company anymore. They have been caught numerous times doing questionable things when it comes to data mining and leaving some processes on your system after you uninstall it. While it's free you will be subjected to ad's, but apparently you can stop that by blocking a process within Windows firewall. Performance wise, it seems to be fairly light on the system. Again, this is my opinion, but protection wise it's a fairly capable product.
WD is free, no ad's, not in your face and protection wise has come along ways. There are some additional settings that you can tweak to make it stronger, but it's not very user friendly when it comes to making these changes. You have to make the changes either via Registry, Powershell or Group Policy Editor, which can be a little confusing and time consuming, however, there is a solution, it's called Configure Defender! :emoji_clap: Its a tiny program created by
@Andy Ful , who is a member here and basically he created a GUI to make these changes very quickly with just a few mouse clicks.
On the performance side of things, WD is for the most part not very noticeable, however, if you are installing/uninstalling and or transferring large files very frequently, it tends to have an impact on the system during these tasks, due to the way it scans. Aside from that, you don't even notice it. Furthermore it's built in to W10, never expires, pretty much guaranteed to work with every major release of W10 and usually has the least conflicts with other programs, at least in my experience.
Personally I would suggest WD, I use it on my gaming system and I haven't noticed any impact on gaming performance when using it. I can run all my games maxed out without any issues.
In saying all of this, as I mentioned above, try both of them out for a few weeks each and decide for yourself. You will probably get a lot of opinions one way or another, but keep in mind going with the one with the most "votes" doesn't mean it's the best one for you. Not saying that my fellow members here are wrong, or don't know what they are talking about, but at the end of the day they are all opinions, just like my post is. After all it's your system, so you have to be happy with it.
Keep in mind that no product is perfect and no product can protect you 100% every time. Pick the program you like the most, practice safe habits and chances are you will be fine. Your computing habits are just as important, if not more important than the security program you decide to use.
