Bullguard, founded in 2001 is a privately held software company who concentrate on internet and mobile security. They’ve developed award-winning antivirus tools, parental controls and also mobile backup software. They are a widespread company with offices spread over 8 countries; UK, Denmark, Romania, Sweden, Germany, Australia and the US! The company has managed to grasp 6 prestigious national awards over the years for it’s market-leading protection.
Features
Just like nearly all security suites, you’ll get a choice of basic, standard and premium (terminology may differ) but essentially you usually get 3 levels of protection. In BullGuard’s case it doesn’t differ from the typical layout, you get Antivirus, Internet Security and Premium Protection, Antivirus being the Renault Clio and Premium being the Lamborghini so to speak. So as you’d expect features will be limited on the basic Antivirus suite, but we are quite disappointed especially when considering the price. You get 3 main features which are as follows; Real-time protection, Safe browsing and a Spam filter. We understand that this is the standard feature set for a basic suite but at least reduce the price tag!
On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got Premium protection. A product bursting with features which also includes BullGuard’s online backup software, with 25 gigs worth of storage! Not bad considering BullGuard backup is being sold at almost $35 per year.
Security
When put up against AVG, Avast, Eset and Microsoft’s in an AVTest Bullguard came out on top, scoring an overall score of 17.5/18.0 and also achieving a maximum of 6 out of 6 points in protection against malware infections and PC performance! So naturally you’d assume that BullGuard is a top quality product and of course it is!
Amazon reviews coming in at 4.5/5 also supports the fact that BullGuard is a quality product with customer’s saying things like this - “I love Bullguard, it does exactly what it should but is not intrusive. I also think the live chat support feature is brilliant & I would recommend this above all other security suites.” We would definitely say something along these lines too! Great work BullGuard.
Support
Support, is one of the main factors that can sway someone to change their mind over a competing product. Bullguard do the fundamentals well - they’ve produced an easy to navigate support site, with great search and FAG sections and that’s without mentioning their live chat which supports 6 different languages! English support is open 24/7!
Does it cost? No, if you’ve purchased any of their products you get free support, even if you’re only within a ‘free-trial’ period you still get treated like a paying customer, which is awesome!
A slight pitfall is the lack of phone support, but with the internet getting bigger by the second this isn’t such an issue. Live chat is the quickest and easiest way of contacting a customer advisor anyway!
Affordability
Value for money probably isn’t BullGuard’s strongest point - the feature set you get for the price isn’t the best when compared to market competition. Even without looking at the feature set of other suites on the market it’s easy to see that BullGuard is at the top of the scale.
Most companies will give you the choice of Multi-device support which then brings down the cost per device down significantly and then you don’t mind paying a little extra per year, but we feel BullGuard are quite harsh when it comes to adding more devices. To extend the license by 2 computers you’ll have to pay around $35 per year, which we feel is definitely over priced!
Even though BullGuard is a little on the expensive side, will it still be your choice or a deal-breaker? Will the feature set and support point you towards them or not?
