The Best Antivirus for 2015

In a perfect world, your neighbors would maintain their homes and lawns, drivers would model politeness on the road, and you wouldn't have to worry about malware attacks on your computer. Yeah. But in our world, the guy next door parks rusting autos on his dead lawn, road rage is everywhere, and the Internet just isn't a safe place. Unless you keep your computer in a Faraday cage with no connection to the outside world, you can't reasonably go without antivirus software.

Despite being called "antivirus," these utilities aren't limited to protecting against computer viruses. They actually handle Trojans, rootkits, adware, spyware, ransomware, and all kinds of malicious software, and some of them do a very good job. PCMag has reviewed over 30 different commercial antivirus utilities, and that's not even counting the many free antivirus tools. Out of that extensive field we've named four Editors' Choice products. Six more of the premium editions proved effective enough to earn an excellent four-star rating. More than a dozen others earned at least three stars.

Almost all of these products are traditional, full-scale, antivirus tools, with the ability to scan files for malware on access, on demand, or on schedule. A couple are outliers, tools meant to enhance the protection of traditional antivirus. As for just relying on the antivirus built into Windows 8.x or Windows 10, that may not be the best idea. In the past, Windows Defender has performed poorly both in our tests and independent lab tests, though it did score a recent win.

Most of these products are also suitable for use by small businesses. However, your business might be better off with the full protection of a security suite. If your business has more than a handful of employees and computers, the managed security offered by a SaaS endpoint protection system is probably more appropriate.