Avira Antivirus Pro review: Reliable Performance, Better Prices

Avira Antivirus Pro is back with an updated version for 2019, which promises to occupy a smaller part of your hard drive and improve the overall performance of the PC, as fewer virus definition files use memory. However, the user interface hasn't really changed, and it's still largely a simple suite with a few extras.

Avira Antivirus Pro costs $36 for a single device for new users; the standard price is $48. For five devices, pay $57, with $72 being the standard price. Okay, but with premium suites like McAfee and Norton that charge around $100 for 100 devices, you can get much more value.

If you are looking for extras in a premium A/V suite, Avira's all-inclusive Avira Prime subscription is the product you are looking for. Includes Antivirus Pro, identity protection, system optimizer, third-party software updates, password manager, and VPN.

There are many things that also increase the price considerably. Avira Prime charges $130 for an unlimited number of devices. In this case, "unlimited" means 25 devices per home, but it's still more than double what Avira's competitors offer, albeit at a higher cost.

Avira Antivirus Pro 2019 was highly rated by the AV-Test house. In July and August, Antivirus Pro performed 100% compared to the web, email, and zero-day threat test with 275 samples. During the same months, Antivirus Pro had a 99.9% gain on nearly 20,000 samples for the AV "Extended and Extended Malware" test.

At AV-Comparatives, Avira blocked 99.5% of threats and obtained a false positive against 197 samples during the actual protection test in September 2018. During the malware protection test, which was also carried out in September 2018, Avira had an online detection rate of 99.9% with two false alarms and an offline detection rate of 96.6%. The online protection rate was 99.98%.

For our internal tests, Avira kept its performance promise and scored 2,441 points in the conventional PCMark 8 work test without Avira installed and 2,501 points after Avira installation and the system performed a full analysis. Bigger is better for PCMark 8 and Avira has seen a pretty good increase, suggesting that users overall shouldn't have a significant impact on Avira's performance.

Our handbrake test showed no significant change. It takes on average an hour and 15 minutes for the PC to convert a 1080p MKV video file with or without Avira to the predefined Android tablet.

Overall, Avira Antivirus Pro works well with excellent protection results. However, the same problems I saw last year are still there. If you just want solid antivirus protection, the free version is enough. With Avira Free, you always take advantage of the most important features: ransomware protection, excellent virus protection, phishing protection and the application itself with little impact on performance. Upgrading to Pro allows you to scan emails and protect USB devices.

If better ransomware and email scanning is a big problem for you, the cost is worth it. If you want to pay, I highly recommend you consider Avira Prime as it easily covers all PCs, phones and tablets, even for the most tech-obsessed families.