Battle Emsisoft vs. Eset Internet Security vs. BitDefender Total Security vs. F-Secure Safe (2020)

[Chausko]

Hello,
help me decide between these AV. I need full protection + friendly for RAM and CPU... Thank you.

 

[Devilboss94]

1 - Emsisoft - the most complete uses two mechanisms and an excellent behavior module
2 - F-Secure
3- BitDefender
4 - Eset

Can I ask you why you place Eset at the bottom of everyone?[/QUOTE]

 

[bayasdev]

• Bitdefender, a resource hog but can protect very well if you configure it properly, you can also use it for free since they're always offering extended trials just create a new throwaway account each time.
• F-Secure, relatively light and good privacy policy, also they have their own BB (DeepGuard) aside from Avira sigs/cloud.
• Emsisoft. heavy and somethings can bug itself, think of it as a custom BD version with special focus on adware.
• ESET, world's lightest AV but very weak protection without interactive HIPS.

Lastly don't forget that the weakest point of every AV is just the user.

 

[DSD27]

None.
Kaspersky Security Cloud Free or Avast Free with Hardened Mode. Save your money and get as good if not better protection.

 

[MacDefender]

Also their removal engine has some issues. Often it can't delete malwares even in a static scan. Sometimes auto skip the files and sometimes can't simply delete it.

They also are no good at disinfection. You can use something like Kaspersky or Norton on an already-infected machine and they have complex disinfection rules that can clean up an existing adware/malware infestation. Kaspersky can roll back some zero-day malware.

F-Secure's best at just blocking executing or terminating a running process. If the infection goes beyond that before F-Secure can stop it, you're going to need a secondary cleanup tool. Also, as mentioned, the static scanner sometimes just refuses to delete or remove files. I suspect it's sometimes based off their confidence (whether it's known bad or just suspicious) but their UI doesn't portray that in a clear way. It's just sometimes there's files that it detected but it didn't remove or clean anyway.

Personally I don't put high value in disinfection and cleaning -- I don't intend on getting my machine infected, and if my AV ever detects something surprising, that is going to draw a lot of extra scrutiny from me (if not just a complete nuke and restore from backup). I'm more than happy to manually do the task of cleanup as long as it can do the task of realtime detection.

 

[The Ordynary]

Also their removal engine has some issues. Often it can't delete malwares even in a static scan. Sometimes auto skip the files and sometimes can't simply delete it.

it was exactly what I spent using it, it gave error when deleting files and put them in exclusions without my permission.

 

[bayasdev]

They also are no good at disinfection. You can use something like Kaspersky or Norton on an already-infected machine and they have complex disinfection rules that can clean up an existing adware/malware infestation. Kaspersky can roll back some zero-day malware.

F-Secure's best at just blocking executing or terminating a running process. If the infection goes beyond that before F-Secure can stop it, you're going to need a secondary cleanup tool. Also, as mentioned, the static scanner sometimes just refuses to delete or remove files. I suspect it's sometimes based off their confidence (whether it's known bad or just suspicious) but their UI doesn't portray that in a clear way. It's just sometimes there's files that it detected but it didn't remove or clean anyway.

Personally I don't put high value in disinfection and cleaning -- I don't intend on getting my machine infected, and if my AV ever detects something surprising, that is going to draw a lot of extra scrutiny from me (if not just a complete nuke and restore from backup). I'm more than happy to manually do the task of cleanup as long as it can do the task of realtime detection.

I remember it being unable to delete an EICAR file I downloaded

 

[The Ordynary]

Can I ask you why you place Eset at the bottom of everyone?

[/QUOTE]

Due to the lack of a good behavior module, if the threat passes through the file module, goodbye to the system, you can't depend on signatures nowadays, in addition to needing complex configurations, however I think ESET is very good.

None.
Kaspersky Security Cloud Free or Avast Free with Hardened Mode. Save your money and get as good if not better protection.

Avast sponsors many download sites in my country, even in Hardened mode, Pups embedded in downloads make the party. I get sad when I see a pc with avast totally infected.

 

[DSD27]

Avast sponsors many download sites in my country, even in Hardened mode, Pups embedded in downloads make the party. I get sad when I see a pc with Avast totally infected.

That's weird... are you saying Avast overlooks malware because it sponsors those websites?
I never use download websites, I always go to the official websites. Like with any Antivirus, you still need adblock and common sense, that doesn't make Avast a interior AV.

 

[Divine_Barakah]

Interesting that's the first report I've heard of BD 2020 slowing browsing, but I have only been testing it out for a month or so. Anyway, ESET is a great solution so no need to look elsewhere.

No performance impact (when navigating folders or with everyday use of Office and email clients) but the impact on browsing speed is evident at least on my device. Have not experienced that with neither Bullguard, Kaspersky, Eset, Mcafee, Malwarebytes nor Webroot. It is a little bit annoying. Maybe it is related to https scanning?

 

[blackice]

No performance impact (when navigating folders or with everyday use of Office and email clients) but the impact on browsing speed is evident at least on my device. Have not experienced that with neither Bullguard, Kaspersky, Eset, Mcafee, Malwarebytes nor Webroot. It is a little bit annoying. Maybe it is related to https scanning?

It used to have issues slowing down browsing with https scanning. But they exclude a lot of verified certificates. Not just EVs like ESET. I haven’t had any browsing slowdown, but maybe it’s also related to bandwidth. I have a pretty fast pipe.

 

[bayasdev]

Avast sponsors many download sites in my country, even in Hardened mode, Pups embedded in downloads make the party. I get sad when I see a pc with avast totally infected.

ESET has the best signatures against PUP AFAIK

 

[Cortex]

On a personal basis if my AV detected malware (or I suspected some) I wouldn't even think of getting the program to attempt to remove it - I wold image back as I assume most on here would - Of course for a none tech user the ability to remove malware is paramount, but often in this case a reinstall is best done. Detecting malware for me is number one?

 

[MacDefender]

On a personal basis if my AV detected malware (or I suspected some) I wouldn't even think of getting the program to attempt to remove it - I wold image back as I assume most on here would - Of course for a none tech user the ability to remove malware is paramount, but often in this case a reinstall is best done. Detecting malware for me is number one?

Ditto. Maybe 5-10 years ago, it was inevitable that family and friends would want you to "clean" their computers, and using antimalware instead of doing it by hand was a lazy way out to clean up 90% of the purple gorillas

Back then, I believe SEP was one of the first to implement advanced cleanup and it did a fairly acceptable job. Between that, Ad-Aware, and SpyBot, it was generally good enough to replicate hours of doing the same thing by hand.

For my actual machine, if there's any indicator of compromise I simply won't trust anything to clean it.

 

[blackice]

Ditto. Maybe 5-10 years ago, it was inevitable that family and friends would want you to "clean" their computers, and using antimalware instead of doing it by hand was a lazy way out to clean up 90% of the purple gorillas

Back then, I believe SEP was one of the first to implement advanced cleanup and it did a fairly acceptable job. Between that, Ad-Aware, and SpyBot, it was generally good enough to replicate hours of doing the same thing by hand.

For my actual machine, if there's any indicator of compromise I simply won't trust anything to clean it.

If I even am not sure of something strange I just reimage...probably without real need 99% of the time. But it’s easy and I don’t mind replacing the HD down the line if it wears out since I keep the images ready

 

[The Ordynary]

That's weird... are you saying Avast overlooks malware because it sponsors those websites?
I never use download websites, I always go to the official websites. Like with any Antivirus, you still need adblock and common sense, that doesn't make Avast a interior AV.

yes it ignores it, even enabling pup detection, which is already strategically disabled by them. most users are laymen, they still use downlaod sites full of pups, Avast sponsors many.

 

[The Ordynary]

ESET has the best signatures against PUP AFAIK

I totally agree with you, too bad it needs to activate in the settings, it doesn't come in standard.

 

[Wraith2020]

I totally agree with you, too bad it needs to activate in the settings, it doesn't come in standard.

It asks you during install if you want to enable detection of PUPs.

 

[Wraith2020]

ONLY PUPS in the rest is poor.
Kaspersky and Bitdefender are the best signatures to ransomware and dangerous malware.

ESET signatures poor? You're joking right? ESET has one of the best signatures in the market, if not the best. Static detection is one of the strong points of ESET. Their web protection and signatures are top notch. See the results of the hub. But ESET does not have a BB like Bitdefender or Kaspersky. If a sample gets missed by the signatures then the PC gets infected whereas Kaspersky and Bitdefender can stop most of the unknown samples via their BB preventing the PC from getting infected.

 

[The Ordynary]

ESET signatures poor? You're joking right? ESET has one of the best signatures in the market, if not the best. Static detection is one of the strong points of ESET. Their web protection and signatures are top notch. See the results of the hub. But ESET does not have a BB like Bitdefender or Kaspersky. If a sample gets missed by the signatures then the PC gets infected whereas Kaspersky and Bitdefender can stop most of the unknown samples via their BB preventing the PC from getting infected.

You're right ESET has excellent signatures, I don't disagree with that, I just said that these days we can't rely exclusively on signatures

 

[The Ordynary]

It asks you during install if you want to enable detection of PUPs.

Effective puppy detection is done when the option, enable detection of potentially unsafe programs, is enabled. Which is not requested during installation,