Detection
Most of the free products we tested put up identical or nearly identical malware detection scores to the paid varietals put out by the same company. But we did see some subtle differences. One notable example is Panda Cloud Antivirus: The free Cloud Antivirus and Panda's for-pay Antivirus Pro 2011 performed about the same on the signature-based malware detection tests, but Antivirus Pro did a better job in "real world" malware detection tests that help determine how well a product can block brand-new threats.
(Note: Panda recently released version 1.3 of Panda Cloud Antivirus. The company says that version 1.3 should improve its detection of new malware, but the new release didn't come in time for us to test for our roundup. Check back here for future updates.)
We found that, on the whole, paid antivirus products did a slightly better job at detecting malware than their freebie counterparts. In traditional signature-based detection tests, paid antivirus software that we tested found 96.2 percent of the malware samples overall. By comparison, free products' scores were ever-so-slightly worse, detecting 95.7 percent of samples.
In real-world detection tests, free products missed 15.2 percent of samples, while paid products missed 10.2 percent of samples. When it came time to remove malware infections, again, the results were close, but paid antivirus software held a slight advantage.
All the products we tested--both paid and free--detected all the test infections we threw their way, but paid products did a slightly better job overall at removing the active components of an infection, scoring a 74 percent success rate on average. The same held true when we tested how well the products removed all active and inactive components of an infection: Paid products achieved a 44 percent removal rate in this test, while free products averaged a full removal rate of 34 percent
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Free vs. Fee: Free and Paid Antivirus Programs Compared
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