Methodology
Every score on this site traces back to a repeatable lab procedure.
What we evaluate
01
Malware protection
Detection rate against a live feed of roughly 15,000 daily zero-day samples, cross-checked against AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives datasets, paired with false-positive testing on a 40,000-file clean-file control set.
02
System performance
File-copy, app-launch, and browser-load timing with each suite active versus a clean baseline, measured across three hardware tiers from modern to five-plus years old.
03
Price & value
List price, device count, and renewal-year pricing are checked against the actual license terms — not the year-one promotional rate.
04
Platform coverage
Whether a single license realistically covers a household across Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, and whether feature parity holds across platforms.
05
Support & trust
Response time on support tickets, clarity of the privacy policy, and transparency about what telemetry is collected.
How the /10 score is built
Protection rate and false-positive results make up the largest share of the score, followed by measured performance impact, then price-to-value and platform coverage. A suite that blocks everything but also flags legitimate software constantly does not score well — false positives are penalized directly.
Update policy
We re-run the full test cycle roughly every quarter. Scores move between cycles even without a vendor update, because the live threat feed changes with whatever malware is actually circulating that month.