Good reasons to use Bitdefender Free

I know you being an old member of the bitdefender community, at least I can recall by the name.

Diving directly into the answer, both avast free and bitdefender free offer basic protection that a normal home user needs like malicious website blocking and malware detection.

While it may seem that avast free does offer a little bit additional features as compared to bitdefender free but ultimately it comes down to the malware detection, because our main moto of installing an antivirus is to be protected from malware and malicious websites.

While we know not every vendor can detect each and every piece of malware, but if we will go with the statistics of test performed by AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives, MRG Effitas etc Bitdefender has constantly outlasted majority of the antivirus software available in the market.

Also, have a look at this below stated image offered by AV-Comparatives. It shows which antivirus vendors use bitdefender detection engine as a third party engine with their own in house engine.

FOR CONSUMER PRODUCTS:

FOR ENTERPRISE PRODUCTS:

Avast & AVG both are same company now but marketed as different brands, so they both utilize avast detection engine only.

From the image you can conclude that majority of consumer & enterprise antimalware companies are using bitdefender detection engine as their third party engine with their own in house engine.

At the end it comes down to a user, whatever they feel like is best for them, they can go with it.

Regards

Behaviour based testing will be hard to find, but you can check results by MRG Effitas, they have exploit / fileless test results with respect to signature based test.

Below is the latest report

https://www.mrg-effitas.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/MRG_Effitas_360_Q1_2022.pdf

It seems like both bitdefender and avast lie on same plane but bitdefender lacks in pup/ pua detection, which I with my personal knowledge also agree that there is a little poor detection by bitdefender when it comes to detection of pup or pua.

Every vendor have their own way of classifying a software as pup or pua. And pup & pua are generally not malicious, hence it is totally dependent on user whether they want to install them or not.

Additionally, I know this PC Security Channel on youtube which I guess is created by ex employee of Emsisosft AntiMalware. He kinds of tests every antimalware with different detection methods.

You can have a look at his youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/c/thepcsecuritychannel/videos

Regards

Yes, both quick and full scan do make use of cloud engine since I have tested many samples against bitdefender free while running a full system scan and cloud detection do pop up for some samples.

As far as signature based updates goes, it is updated every one hour, or time between two successful update is one hour, provided if there are detection signatures released by malware researchers.

Regards

No problem mate, I understand !

Cleaning/ Elimination in terms of cloud will take longer as compared to signature based, since signatures are stored on your system and file detections are matched up with signatures whereas for cloud you need to have a good internet connection in order to get the files scanned. The files get uploaded to bitdefender cloud engine in order to get scanned.

That is why whenever a very first scan is run on a system, it takes longer duration to complete as compared to the second scan, since after first scan a cache copy is created on system which helps future scans to run at faster pace.

Regards

This is the most frequent question asked on the forum and mostly related to paid version of the bitdefender consumer products. But to be very frank, currently there is no proper resolution for this.

I would see if the admins have something to say on this @Mike_BD, @Alexandru_BD

Regards

It's known that not every anti malware can detect each and every bit of malware.

Free version lacks certain detection security technologies that is only available in paid version.

Additionally, if you need to run a test comparing bitdefender with any other anti malware, you can PM me and I can share you links from where you can download millions of malware samples and test them against anti malware softwares.

Regards

Perfect catch !

Regards

This test is of no use, there is nothing like online and offline test. The only thing is that if you will disconnect from the internet, the bitdefender will not be able to run the cloud scanning on a file.

From the video it clearly seems that all the samples were detected by signature based detection.

The person doing the test is not capable of performing a proper test on antimalware products.

The test of antimalware are based on 2 things.

One is when the real time protection is enabled which triggers signatures based detection and behavior blocking (known as advanced threat defense in bitdefender) and the other is when you disable the real time protection and only rely on behavior blocking (known as advanced threat defense in bitdefender)

If you want to see proper testing of antimalware software, have a look at the below stated youtube channel created by ex employee of emsisosft antimalware.

Regards

I think going through the internet there will be millions of websites that will say for and against a particular product. You should take these advices with a grain of salt.

Bitdefender free till date has only featured malware (including ransomware) and malicious/ phishing website blocking. I guess there is nothing new on the plate for the free version and developers hardly pay any interest in improving the free version until a bug or a vulnerability is found and their main focus is on their flagship line of products.

Whether you like it or not, to be frank, at the end, it's all about the revenue that a company product is generating and the revenue comes from the flagship line of products and not from the free products. And that is why you see bitdefender flagship line of products being upgraded to new version on constant basis whereas free version hardly gets upgraded in time interval of 2-3 years.

Regards

It will only check for the phishing / malicious links in the email when you try to open it and for the attachment file if you download and if it is malicious it will be detected by real time protection.

Regards

Malware researchers are already aware of all the testing companies result that happen. Not only AV-TEST but MRG-Effitas, AV-Comparatives, Virus Bulletin etc.

Regards

@Nunzio d'Abbruzzo

Dude, you already asked the same question:

Regards.