I am at wits end with an extremely problematic product!

I'm not sure where even to start. I've been running BitDefender Total Security for 18 months now and it's been an absolute nightmare that makes the shovelware by McAfee and Symantec (now Broadcom) look like world class products by comparison. I get that this is the commercial / home market and it's all about the least common denominator so when I do my comparisons to enterprise platforms like Crowdstrike, Sentinel One, Cyberreason, and Cynet, it's going to be apples to oranges. That being said, as a nearly 30 year veteran of cyber and networking, BitDefender is a trash product.

1) You all hate home developers. This was my first case and you all botched it big time. Your product identified my (then 11 years old) son's Small Basic, javascript, and Python projects as malware. We're talking projects that would create a new window making basic system calls, changing their color (of the window), and or entering text into a text box. You quarantined those projects and when I tried to restore them from quarantine, they were all corrupted. When I put in the USB stick to restore the files, you wiped the files from the USB stick. When I connected his machine to my machine (drive mapping) for our other backup, you then nuked the files from my shared drive. There was no winning.

Your solution was to whitelist but neither javascript nor python run as native executables. Small basic, sure, I could whitelist the compiler but I'm not going to sit there and whitelist every project my son made. That's ridiculous. That literally was your "workaround".

2) I've had a case open for almost 5 months now on your firewall where I have a repeatable issue that impacts a major commercial software package (Minecraft Dungeons). If the BitDefender Firewall is on, Dungeons won't work. It can't connect to XBox Live. If I disable the BitDefender Firewall, it works 100% fine. The issue is neither one of my kids has admin rights to their boxes. So if I'm not home, they can't turn off the firewall. Meaning they can't play.

Twice your support team has told me the issue has been fixed only to twice have been grossly disappointed. I have asked for workarounds or other options and your standard reply is to wait for the next patch...even though the last 2 hasn't fixed the issue. August. That's how long I've been waiting.

3) The nail in the coffin, as far as I'm concerned, was your outage last week on Central that invalidated my subscription. To be 100% clear, I still have 180+ days left on my subscription according to Central. Yet despite uninstalling and reinstalling BitDefender on mine and my daughter's machine (and hers is a basic Win10 Home install with M365, Zoom, XBox App, Roblox and Minecraft - that's literally it) and associating it with my subscription account, I'm still notified that my subscription has ended. And if I look on central, I'm only using 2 of my 5 licenses with my daughter's and my machine showing as "at risk".

Your "support" in this case has been nothing shy of embarrassing. It's clear that despite my putting in all of the steps I've done to troubleshoot and restore functionality of YOUR product on my machines, your support staff doesn't even bother to read that and so I'm now wasting time on entering my subscription details (again) on the machines only for it to again tell me that it's expired. The latest ticket told me to uninstall and reinstall despite the fact that I've done so twice and detailed that to two different support reps.

No matter how you look at it, I have 2 boxes without support that I've paid for. So I just said screw it and put Webroot SecureAnywhere on both until you all can get your proverbial s**t together. Which I doubt will happen. As is, I've now disabled my renewal for July.

Your product is not good and it's clear there were some marketing outlays made to media outlets for favorable reviews.

Comments

  • I have only been on Bitdefender for 3 months of a two year contract for 15 devices. I have seen many of the same types of issues. Despite having 14 devices installed, central only shows 11. Parental controls are hit and miss. Forget filtering I am just talking about time limits. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is fubar. Been told the same thing about waiting for patches. No actual fixes yet.

    I'll be moving to Symantec next and give them a shot.