#WEBROOT ANTIVIRUS REVIEW SOFTWARE#

Having a paid antivirus software plan in place reduces your risk online. Canadian company OpenText develops and sells enterprise information management software, and in 2014 it was Canada’s largest software company and one of the country’s top 100 employers. Webroot and its parent company, Carbonite, were acquired by OpenText in 2019. McAfee became a major player by creating a plethora of products designed to fight cybercrime.įounded in 1997, Webroot provides antivirus protection for both businesses and consumers around the globe. The company protects an estimated 525 million consumer devices. It is one of the largest providers of antivirus software in the world. For the last 30 years, it has grown exponentially to a global entity of 7,000 employees based in 189 countries. Nevertheless, if Webroot sorts out its malware-disinfection issues, SecureAnywhere might just turn into a real contender.McAfee was established in the US in 1987. For users of other products, we can’t give Webroot SecureAnywhere a recommendation just yet. But should you buy it right now? If you’re an existing Webroot user, Secure Anywhere Essentials 2012 is a definite improvement. The advanced settings screens can be a little technical in spots, but they too are well organized.ĭespite its low ranking, Webroot’s new product line offers a lot to like, and we look forward to seeing it develop over time. The main interface is nicely laid out: Five tabs along the left side of the main window let you access the suite’s main features.

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Once installed, the software will check your PC for malware.

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Installation is a breeze–open the installer, enter your license key, and then click ‘Agree and Install’. We like Webroot’s revised interface, too. To put that latter test into context, the average completion time for the suites we evaluated was 4 minutes, 48 seconds. The on-access scanner–which kicks off when you open or save files to disk–tore through 4.5GB of data in 2 minutes, 4 seconds, finishing 30 seconds faster than its nearest competitor.

#WEBROOT ANTIVIRUS REVIEW FULL#

That was easily the fastest time we saw in this particular test, and it was a full minute better than the average for the suites we looked at. Webroot’s suite completed our on-demand scan test–which shows how long a suite takes to check 4.5GB of files in a manually initiated scan–in a scant 59 seconds. Its impact on PC performance was minimal: It added less than half a second to PC startup time (as compared to our test PC with no antivirus installed), and it barely slowed file-download and file-copy operations. For the most part, that claim held true in our testing, as SecureAnywhere was the overall winner in our system-speed tests. Webroot says that its new cloud-based SecureAnywhere suite is lightweight, and won’t hog system resources. It also detected 99.49 percent of known malware samples–that’s a better-than-average outcome, though a little short of the best performers, some of which detected over 99.99 percent of samples. That result pegs it right around average in this year’s tightly bunched field.

Webroot’s new offering is effective at stopping brand-new malware, as it blocked 96.2 percent of attacks in our real-world malware detection tests.

The package is fast, and it’s good at catching malware before the invader reaches your PC, but a higher-than-average false-positive rate and disappointing system-cleanup results keep it from ranking any higher. SecureAnywhere represents a complete overhaul of Webroot’s product line, with a brand-new interface and new internals to go along with it. Although Webroot Secure Anywhere Essentials 2012 ($60 for one year, three PCs as of January 29, 2012) finished toward the back of the highly competitive pack in our 2012 roundup of security suites, Webroot’s newest offering shows lots of promise.

Webroot antivirus review