We’d prefer to see digital identity protection and more VPN bandwidth folded into the Total Security package similar to competing packages. A very good antivirus suite with some very useful features to meet most users’ needs. Should you buy Bitdefender Total Security?īitdefender Total Security is what it’s always been. That’s an outstanding score however, out of 17 suites all but five scored 99.98 or higher, with the other five scoring between 98.61 and 99.97. In AV-Comparatives’ Malware protection test from March 2022, with more than 10,000 test cases, Bitdefender stopped 99.99 percent of threats. That performance puts it a little behind the bulk of the pack including Avira, K7, Norton, Panda, and Trend Micro. In the Real World Protection test from AV-Comparatives carried out in February through May 2022, Bitdefender blocked 99.9 percent of threats, with eight false positives, based on 725 test cases. While there were some areas of concern, overall Bitdefender didn’t have a huge impact on performance, though mid-range and budget PCs may see a small impact with Microsoft Office.Īs for its security result, Bitdefender earned 98.6 and 100 percent in March and April 2022 for AV-Test’s 0-day test, and 100 percent for each month in the widespread and prevalent malware tests.

For the Handbrake test there was no noticeable dip in performance, and for the Excel spreadsheet it took about 12 seconds longer to open after Bitdefender was installed and running. The biggest dips were in Outlook, Word, and Excel in that order, with PowerPoint being the least affected. Procyon was a different situation, with a noticeable dip from a score of 1,643 before Bitdender to a score of 1,408 after. That suggests mid-range PCs and budget PCs may see an impact in those areas. Nevertheless, there were noticeable dips in the App startup score, as well as the video conferencing score. For PCMark 10 there was no significant impact overall between a fresh install of Windows 10 and one running Bitdefender after a full system scan. As usual we also ran the video encoding test using Handbrake and a large video file, and we also tested how long it took for Excel to open an e-sports grade file. For benchmarks we ran UL’s Procyon Office benchmark in addition to PCMark 10. Bitdefender Central, the suite’s online dashboard for managing devices and parental controls.įor this latest round of tests we changed things up a bit from our previous tests.

Bit defender total security