Battle Emsisoft, Kaspersky, Bitdefender, ESET or Malwarebytes 3 and why?

dannylif

Level 1
Thread author
Nov 30, 2015
6
In 2017 there are lots of revolutionary anti-malware products to compare.
In terms of protection I am not sure what to pick for.
With my lifetime license of Malwarebytes, I would like to see how many times it will get picked. As the company presents it as it is 'the future.'

Please pick a product and comment why and your experience with the products.

- Danny
 
F

ForgottenSeer 55778

Malwarebytes 3.0 is heavy and not at all ready to compete with antiviruses yet.

Kaspersky 2017 is lighter than before and has great built in protection and is even better with good tweaking.

Emsisoft is great as well (set and forget). Good firewall, Bitdefender and its own engine, great PUP detection, light.

Bitdefender is buggy and not quite as good as Emsisoft.


I voted Kaspersky, but Emsisoft is number 2.


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Parsh

Level 25
Verified
Honorary Member
Top Poster
Malware Hunter
Well-known
Dec 27, 2016
1,480
Let me make a suggestion. Please enable selection of two products and you'll actually get a more practical cumulative result from all voters!
Eg. I love EIS(EmsiSoft), BTS and KIS almost equally but there are some factors in each that make me give a 5% positive margin to one and the effective negative to the other. Selecting 2 products will provide more priority to protection and remove the least preferred from the results.


Coming to the topic, I'll say
EIS
superb definitions + dual engine + behavior protection (almost flexible/ select if you'd like to make some decisions in advanced cases)

BTS
superb definitions + aggressive threat control + .. (this one is aggressive even in default mode/ quite less direct user decisions possible/ a bit buggy currently)

KIS
next superb definitions + advanced malware removal + application control/system watcher .. (highly customizable/ least FPs/ mostly does a good job on its own/ however, it misses rare malware if it belongs to low restricted list etc./ if automatic is disabled, certain processes generate tremendous amount of popups and becomes a tough job attending each)

I don't want to dispraise any other product, but MalwareBytes is an overhyped product, good for complementation. Some important components like AE, AR etc are included to make prospects feel that they're getting a bigger family of features, while the main protection is not worth keeping as a standalone!

Hence, I would recommend one to try out EIS and KIS both to seek the best guardian.
 
Last edited:

Exterminator

Community Manager
Verified
Staff Member
Well-known
Oct 23, 2012
12,527
I would consider removing Malwarebytes 3 from the poll as you are asking to compare 4 full blown security suites with a new AV only product.
As for the others,the best advice would be to try them out.
I have used Kaspersky,ESET & Emsisoft for many many years,all are good and all will protect you.
Other than that I would be giving you what I personally think is the best but it might not be the best option for you.
I have only tested Bitdefender years back.
 
M

MalwareBlockerYT

Emsisoft will be the winner - no doubt about it. In every single test I've done between Emsisoft & Kaspersky (I'm doing a video on this soon) Emsisoft always wins. Emsisoft is by far the best out of the list for the following reasons:

- It's light
- It's GUI is the best
- It has a decent selection of settings (not as many as Kaspersky but oh well)
- It has the best behaviour blocker
- It has the best signatures pretty much
- It has great URL protection too
- It has the fastest scan speeds

Kaspersky would be in 3rd for me & Bitdefender in 2nd. Kaspersky is too heavy, has too many extra features that won't be used, it doesn't detect malware as quick as Emsisoft from what I've seen & can cause errors whilst gaming - eg. Kaspersky stops Uplay games from updating, prevent Overwatch from connecting, etc. Kaspersky also isn't compatible with Sandboxie.
 
W

Wave

Also why does everyone vote Kaspersky best
In all fairness, they have technology which is superior to many other vendors - they use the hyper-visor which allows them to set MSR hooks and control application execution flow system-wide from kernel-mode without worrying about PatchGuard/Kernel Patch Protection on x64 systems, giving them more possibilities in terms of zero-day protection; this also allows them to have much better self-protection mechanisms since GDI functions such as SetWindowsHookEx will be unable to affect it's GUI process, whereas this won't be the case with some other popular vendors, where this Win32 API function will successfully inject code into the GUI process regardless of the protection mechanisms already put in place for the process protection - only alternate to this would be patching win32k.sys driver.

However, I also believe that Emsisoft is the better choice out of all of them and I personally adore them, my avatar says it all... But this is because they always perform well in my tests, have a hard-working team who are not only dedicated to just making money but spend time working on decryptors (which they really do not have to do but they want to do it to help people), provide amazing support and always fix bugs quickly.

I am personally impressed with Kaspersky with what they did and I wish I could do what they did but using the hyper-visor is way out of my skill set so I can't provide much internals detail right now, but it'll require virtualization to be enabled in the BIOS (meaning you'll need hardware to support it -> Intel VT-x for example).

But at the end of the day, I cannot deny that Kaspersky do have the upper edge because they've done more than some other vendors. That doesn't necessarily mean they are "better", sometimes it's not good to do too much and go over the edge, but they've gone further than some others for sure. :)
 
W

Wave

I would completely agree that they are one of the best but not the best. Emsisoft even has a captcha when you are want to exit the application - barely any other AV or maybe no other AV does that.
Re-read my post please, I was talking about the differences in the levels of where they were at. Kaspersky by far has the most potential out of a hand-full of vendors due to what they've done, but that neither means I am saying they are "the best", I also prefer Emsisoft.

Comodo sandbox is superior because it is done properly via real virtualization and not just API hooks, whereas Sandboxie injects a DLL and sets some hooks -> they are both good, but clearly Comodo would be the winner in terms of how further the technology is.

Whereas some still prefer Sandboxie.

Maybe that explains it better.

Therefore, Kaspersky have done much more than Emsisoft in terms of how far they have pushed, but my personal preference is still Emsisoft. Facts are facts.

The fact is Kaspersky has more capabilities; the opinion is which one is preferred.
 

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