KSC in a runaway with a nod to FortiClient for its web filtering. Takes some serious tweaks to get good protection from F-C, however, because it's designed to work with the Fortinet hardware. Very standard but outstanding if adding to Comodo or another firewalling, etc. application. Also great with OSArmor. Avast still deserves consideration. Personally, I just wish the removal tool was 100% a guarantee. I think it's the one thing avast should spend some time perfecting at this point. Sometimes it makes sense to unistall/reinstall security software during troubleshooting, and it's traditionally been too difficult with avast, especially if the program has been on the system for a long time and over many versions.
To be fair, for this year I would rank (in a 10 point split between top 3):
1. KSC-not even close. 6.5 points
2. Avast-good practical choice (privacy concerns hurt bad with Avast): 2 points
3. FortiClient-hard to configure (edit html file) but excellent web filtering

: 1 point
4. Panda/Tencent-OK for free and getting better but privacy concerns still: .5 points each for continuing to move forward
Bitdefender, AVG, and the other free versions are kind of standing still. Good programs for some, but not sure I would give them consideration for making strides in 2018 per se. I REALLY hope that ESET will step up with a killer A-V/system watcher free program to compete with KSC. They must be making very good progress internally since partnering with Gryphon. Don't even need firewall control from ESET if there is super-duper cloud monitoring/filtering of connections and downloads and then, natively, the basic best of Gryphon network security built into the local client

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