Is it safe to use free mac antivirus?

Using a free mac antivirus in theory should be adequate enough but with the rise in popularity of Macs the market for attacks is widening by the day.  The bigger the market, the more chance virus developers will exploit this as an opportunity to make some money.  Windows is also more secure than ever before with it’s Windows 10 release. This could also cause virus writers to move away from Windows and to start focusing their time on attacking Macs much more.

Macs are known to be very secure due to their Unix-based operating system and their integrated Gatekeeper software but they aren’t completely safe. Some of the worst viruses in history have effected Apples operating systems.

It definitely comes down to the consumer’s choice of actions on their Mac, if you are going to be processing images and videos, playing games and tinkering around with iTunes (with minimal internet access) a free mac antivirus could suffice.  However, if you’re accessing the internet frequently every day, processing online payments or logging into your internet banking, a paid version will definitely be necessary. Why? Paid versions don’t just include basic scanning and quarantining but also browser protection, financial security software, advanced firewalls and often anti-spam tools. These all help to prevent hackers from accessing your personal and private data.

We believe malware detection scores from independent test institutes such as; av-test, virus bulletin, and av-comparatives are important when selecting your virus protection. We have collated some scores for you, however we don't display by test scores alone, many factors are used.

Independent Test Labs

Virus BullitinAV ComparativesAV Test
The Top 10 AntiVirus

We do our best to keep all information up to date and accurate but cannot guarantee this due to the constantly changing antivirus landscape. We receive advertising revenue from some antivirus software we feature to showcase their products. This impacts the location and order in which the companies are presented, plus additonal banner advertising and site behavior such as direct download buttons. For more information please see here

Compare Antivirus
How we rank

So you can choose your perfect antivirus use our filters to choose the features you require. As default we list antivirus providers by top affiliated. You can change how we sort this list using the sort by filer and select; Most Popular, Top Featured or Lowest Price. Most popular uses total number of unique clicks sent to each antivirus over the last 7 days. Top Featured positions are chosen by the webmaster, we receive advertising revenue from some antivirus providers and this impacts the order which the webmaster chooses. Lowest price lets you list by lowest price first. We do not include every plan from each antivirus we use the price for the plan which we link to and this may not be the lowest price available.