Battle Looking for free, light, good protection antivirus

[topstuff]

Hi,

Been with Avast free for a while, but getting sick of all the telemetry. My needs for antivirus are:
Free
Must be as lightweight as possible on system
As privacy friendly as possible
Good protection for web/email - Not a heavy happy clicker
Non cloud-only protection (if possible)
Locally configurable

I have ruled out:
MS Defender (too heavy)
Russian/Chinese solutions (some might argue it is silly, but there remains question marks here,). This one isn't 100% against, but prefer not to include them unless there is a good argument.
Bitdefender free - was too heavy and barebones for me.
Avira - was too heavy with it's launcher and other stuff

 

[low L!fe]

According to my own experience
The TOP 4 Internet security in the world :
Bitdefender Internet Security , Kaspersky Internet Security , McAfee Internet Security , Norton Internet Security .
But BitDefender and Kaspersky better than McAfee and Norton because of false positive and alarms.
Mcafee Many False alarms.
Norton Big False alarms.

 

[gery79]

mcacrappy ( aka mcafee) stay away from it as far as possible . the rest is good but both kasperspy and bitdefender are no no for me too heavy

 

[alakazam]

Hi,

Been with Avast free for a while, but getting sick of all the telemetry. My needs for antivirus are:
Free
Must be as lightweight as possible on system
As privacy friendly as possible
Good protection for web/email - Not a heavy happy clicker
Non cloud-only protection (if possible)
Locally configurable

I have ruled out:
MS Defender (too heavy)
Russian/Chinese solutions (some might argue it is silly, but there remains question marks here,). This one isn't 100% against, but prefer not to include them unless there is a good argument.
Bitdefender free - was too heavy and barebones for me.
Avira - was too heavy with it's launcher and other stuff

I wonder if such a product exists.

Panda free - it's cloud-only
Comodo free - not lightweight
ZoneAlarm free - based on Kaspersky's signatures
AdAware free - based on BitDefender's signatures
Nano antivirus free - Russian-based company
AhnLab free - it doesn't have web/mail protection
AVG free - same telemetry as avast
Sophos free - not really lightweight, but it's as close to your requirements as it can get.

 

[bribon77]

Hi,

Been with Avast free for a while, but getting sick of all the telemetry. My needs for antivirus are:
Free
Must be as lightweight as possible on system
As privacy friendly as possible
Good protection for web/email - Not a heavy happy clicker
Non cloud-only protection (if possible)
Locally configurable

I have ruled out:
MS Defender (too heavy)
Russian/Chinese solutions (some might argue it is silly, but there remains question marks here,). This one isn't 100% against, but prefer not to include them unless there is a good argument.
Bitdefender free - was too heavy and barebones for me.
Avira - was too heavy with it's launcher and other stuff

It is not easy to advise you why you do not want Chinese / Russian programs. and you tried almost everything. The only suggestion I have left is LINUX.

 

[imuade]

I wonder if such a product exists.

Panda free - it's cloud-only
Comodo free - not lightweight
ZoneAlarm free - based on Kaspersky's signatures
AdAware free - based on BitDefender's signatures
Nano antivirus free - Russian-based company
AhnLab free - it doesn't have web/mail protection
AVG free - same telemetry as avast
Sophos free - not really lightweight, but it's as close to your requirements as it can get.

Fortinet Forticlient 6.0
Free
Good signatures
Top class web filter
Quite light
Anti exploit
Vulnerability scan

 

[ForgottenSeer 67480]

Nano Antivirus is weak for now, so keep waiting on improves in detection ratio.
Panda is very lightweight because of cloud and it has reversed RAM Usage Memory. Than eating RAM, it gives us few % more free RAM to use, but detection ratio needs improves.
Comodo also is light antivirus, but Sometimes can be a trouble for some of our softwares like: Daemon Tools and identical.
Tencent, Qihoo 360 and other china antiviruses: I preffer to stay away from them if you don't want be spyed by leaved clues after uninstallation.
Bitdefender is RAM-eater. If your PC is not good enough, stay away from him, the same goes to Kaspersky, but he at least is not a RAM-eater, he needs only good processor or SSD hardware to don't feel slow performance our PC.
Forticlient also is good what about detection ratio and performance, but some of his functions are available only if we have an internet from them.
Sophos well… Is good antivirus, but his RAM memory usage is almost the same what Bitdefender and needs too much system restarts after downloading some updates what can be annoying for some of users. Also Sophos doesn't have good score in performance.
AVG/Avast i suggest don't use them, because they have too much problems in signatures or in updates and this sometimes can destroy our Windows system by removing some system files or detecting clear windows service as a virus by removing it.
SecureAPlus is good antivirus like on protection from cloud, but watch out and be carefull. Why? Because when i uninstalled him someday, not all things got removed successfully and he limited me from using my PC, using restore point before it caused too much problems and it completely ruined my Windows 10 by displaying BSOD after each launch my PC. Why it happend? He disabled me access to harddrive disks, that's why.
AdAware better stay away because he can be junky and eat our free space on harddrive disk like i read it from some of other users from other website.
Avira is light and good, but for gaming players i suggest be carefull in using this antivirus, because in my times when i updated graphic card drivers, avira blocked installation and it caused too much Blue Screens Of Death with description: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.