Trend Micro Vs Kaspersky – By Neil J. Rubenking Neil J. Rubenking Principal Security Analyst My Experience When the IBM PC was new, I served for three years as president of the PC User Group in San Francisco. That’s how I met the 1986 editor. In the years since that fateful meeting, I’ve become an expert in security, privacy, and identity protection, deploying antivirus tools, security suites, and all kinds of security software. Read full bio
Kaspersky Security Cloud Free offers complete malware protection along with some suite-level features. It gets great ratings from independent labs and won’t cost you a cent.
Trend Micro Vs Kaspersky
Editors select and review products independently. When you make a purchase through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.
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Editor’s Note: Reviews and evaluates all products, including Kaspersky’s, based on their merits and effectiveness and not for political or other reasons. However, due to the increasing censorship and criticism of Kaspersky from US government agencies, foreign agencies and informed third parties, we can no longer recommend Kaspersky products. However, since we haven’t found or presented any hard evidence of wrongdoing on Kaspersky’s part, we’ll leave our initial review for those who want to make up their own minds.
To. Fortunately, cash flow doesn’t have to hold you back. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free offers Kaspersky’s core anti-malware technology, without some unnecessary features and bonuses. It costs nothing and independent testing labs give it top marks for protection. It’s our Editors’ Choice for free virus protection. Like most free antivirus software, Kaspersky is free for personal, non-commercial use only.
Since 1982, it has tested and evaluated thousands of products to help you make better purchasing decisions. (See how we test everything we test (opens in new window).)
This product is not based on the commercial Kaspersky Anti-Virus. Instead, it’s a stripped-down version of the premium Kaspersky Security Cloud suite. The main window has eight panels of buttons titled Scan, Database Update, PC Cleaner, Password Manager, Privacy Protection, Safe Money, My Kaspersky and Secure Connection. PC Cleaner and Safe Money have shield-shaped overlay icons that mean they are not available in the free version. There’s no shield in Password Manager, but what you get is the free, limited version.
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This free version comes with the same limited features Kaspersky Secure Connection VPN that Kaspersky distributes with its paid suite and antivirus products. Clicking the More Tools button displays a gallery of five more tool categories. Some or all of the tools in most of these categories are locked, only available if you upgrade to the commercial version. I will cover these tools later in this review.
Try it for free View it on AVAST (opens in a new window) Read our Avast Free Antivirus review
$0.00 View it on Bitdefender (opens in a new window) Read our review of Bitdefender Antivirus Free for Windows
$0.00 View it on ZoneAlarm (opens in new window) Read Check Point ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus NextGen Review
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Kaspersky Free automatically updates its antivirus database signatures in the background, but it couldn’t hurt to manually call for an update right after installation.
If you need help using this free product, you’re on your own. The support page provides links to FAQs and online documentation and to discussion forums, but that’s about it. Those using the paid version can get support via phone or online live chat.
Some security products (I’m looking at your Norton AntiVirus Plus) come with pages and pages of settings. Kaspersky settings are simpler than many.
The Protection tab lists seven types of protection, including scanning for malware in files, on the web, and in email and instant messages. There’s also System Watcher, a behavior-based system that can even detect zero-day malware. And Network Attack Blocker aims to prevent dangerous network activity. New on the list is AMSI protection, which allows third-party applications to send scripts and files to Kaspersky for evaluation.
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All these protections are enabled by default and you should leave them enabled. Previous versions of this product did not even allow them to switch to the off position. Scrolling down reveals nine more permutations. However, all of these relate to items that are not available in the free version.
Other main setting areas include performance, scanning, general and extra. Most of the settings on these pages are self-explanatory and users do not need to change any of them.
A full scan with Kaspersky Free took 90 minutes, which is not bad considering the current average of 79 minutes. Like many antivirus products, Kaspersky can perform optimization during the first scan to speed up subsequent scans. With scanning of only new and changed files enabled, as is the default, a second scan completed in just over eight minutes.
After you run this first full scan, real-time protection and the Watch system should take care of all new malware attacks on your computer. If you want to, you can set a schedule to run a full scan, a quick scan, or a vulnerability scan daily, weekly, or monthly.
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This vulnerability scan is a little different from that of many competing products. In testing, it took more than half an hour to find a vulnerability in Firefox, with Avira’s Software Updater taking just a few minutes to find several programs that needed security patches. When I clicked for details on what Kaspersky found, I just got a placeholder page saying no details are available.
The Idle Scan and Rootkit Scan components do not require any intervention on your part, as they work in the background. Idle Scan uses your computer’s idle time to check sensitive areas such as system memory. Rootkit scanning looks for processes that try to hide their presence from Windows and antivirus tools.
The installer of this product also installs the Kaspersky Protection extension for Chrome and Firefox. It used to support Internet Explorer and some of the documentation still mentions IE, but the online help for installing the extension mentions IE more.
If you are up to date with the new Chromium-based Edge browser, you can also install Kaspersky Protection there, one that allows you to use the Chrome Store in Edge. I couldn’t find the extension by searching, but Kaspersky online help provided a link.
Performance Test (suite Products) October 2014
By installing the extension, you will find that Kaspersky marks dangerous links in the search results. You can also click the toolbar button to access the on-screen keyboard with keylogger foiling. However, the Private Browsing and Anti-Banner features are marked with a shield, which means they need an upgrade.
All over the world, independent antivirus testing laboratories devote enormous resources to evaluating antivirus products. I follow four labs that publish periodic reports on their findings, and Kaspersky has always received perfect or near-perfect scores from all four. It’s true that the labs didn’t specifically test the free version, but since free users now get all the antivirus features, including behavior-based System Watch, the results should be the same.
Experts at the AV-Test Institute (opens in a new window) evaluate antivirus products against three criteria, strong malware protection, low performance and a low number of false positives (valid files or URLs identified as dangerous). A product can earn six points in each category, for a maximum score of 18, and Kaspersky took this award. So did seven others, including McAfee, Norton and Microsoft Windows Defender Security Center.
The testing experts at SE Labs (opens in a new window) have devised a system to simulate the real user experience as closely as possible. They comb the web to record real attacks and use a replay system to hit every product the same way. This laboratory offers certification at five levels: AAA, AA, A, B and C. More than 60 percent of the tested products received AAA certification, including Kaspersky. No one scored lower than an A.
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Of the many tests regularly reported by AV-Comparatives (Opens in a new window), I follow four. Any product that passes testing by this laboratory receives Standard Certification. Those who exceed the minimum definition of success can earn Advanced or Advanced+ certification. Kaspersky did Advanced+ in two tests, but only achieved Advanced in the other two. Bitdefender is the only product with an Advanced + rating in the latest iteration of all four tests.
Where most laboratories offer a range of scores, the MRG-Effitas (Opens in new window) tests use a pass/fail model. Just over half of the products that were tested passed the bank Trojans test of this laboratory, including Kaspersky. Another test aims to measure protection against all types of malware. Level 1 certification means the product prevented all malware attacks immediately, while Level 2 goes to antivirus utilities that repel all attacks within a day. A quarter of the tested products failed this test. The rest, including Kaspersky, achieved level 1 certification.
I created a formula to extract a total lab score, up to a maximum of 10 points. With mostly perfect scores and some near-perfect scores, Kaspersky’s total score is an impressive 9.7 points. Bitdefender fared even better, with 9.9 points, although it only appeared in results from three of the four labs.
Free antivirus tools from Avast and Avira are among the few that are free
