Avast One review: PC security at a good price with excellent protection

Price when reviewed

$29.99 / 5 devices I $48.99 / 30 devices

Best prices today: Avast One

Editor’s Note: This review was updated on 3/3/23 to update pricing and plan details, as well as third-party test results.

There are two things that Avast’s paid security suites are known for besides solid protection: good design and high prices. That’s changing a bit, and for the better, with Avast One, the company’s new top-tier product. Avast still offers a free version, Avast One Essential, as well as a Premium Security product that has fewer features but covers twice as many devices (10 instead of 5), but Avast One is the sweet spot (suite?), with Solid antivirus, some useful extra features, and coverage for multiple devices. Also, the price has improved over the years.

Note: This review is part of our best antivirus roundup. Go there for details on competing products and how we test them.

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Avast One includes a completely new desktop application. Gone are the blue and purple tones, and the orange spot logo. Instead of all that, you get a more subdued aesthetic, with lots of whites and lightly shaded colors, accented by a bolder, more easily-spotted blue for the interface buttons.

The left rail has four simple menu items: Home, Explore, Messagesand Account. This makes Avast One look deceptively simple, but there are plenty of features once you start digging.

The first time you turn on Avast One, it asks you to run an intelligent scan, a common feature in many antivirus suites. Smart Scans combine a security scan with scans for other issues, such as browser trackers and excess temporary files. The basic idea is to clean your PC and keep it running smoothly, instead of just scanning for malware.

This is a good idea since many of the best suites come with PC cleaning and maintenance utilities, but they often require you to activate them. A smart scan allows you to use at least some of these capabilities, which is important considering that some of them used to cost more and are now only included in the suite. The only problem with Avast’s approach is that it performs the scan in three stages: browser threats, viruses and malware, and PC cleaning. That’s fine, but it requires user input to start each phase rather than just going through the entire scan and delivering a report at the end. The constant requirement to continue at the end of each phase gets a bit annoying. Not a deal breaker, but this could be handled better.

While the smart scan is the main scan that Avast asks you to do, scroll down the Avast One home page and you’ll get shortcuts to run a deep scan, a targeted scan on a specific folder or set of folders, launch a VPN scan or use the PC optimization tools.

moving to Explore you get into the meat of Avast One’s features. Explore it’s really more of a launch pad for all the deeper controls in the security suite. For example, under Explore have scan center, which has its own screen and includes controls for all the types of scans you want. This includes the types of scans we’ve already discussed, as well as a boot-time scan. You can also save scans to the custom scans section if there is a type of analysis that you want to run repeatedly. This is also the section where you can schedule scans, such as running a deep scan once a month and running a quick scan every day.

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Other key safety features inside Explore includes file saver to monitor file changes for malicious behavior, ransomware protection, web saver to keep you safe online, a firewall that lets you block Internet access by application, webcam protection, and a host of other features. other functions.

The firewall is particularly good as it offers customizable security in a very simple interface. It’s not the most advanced firewall you can find, but it’s a firewall that even non-techies can use if they need to. For paid users, the firewall hides your PC’s key identifiers from other devices on the same network, such as PC name and device type. If another device starts port scanning your PC, the firewall will notify you and is designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

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Avast’s built-in VPN allows unlimited bandwidth as part of paid packages, with a wide range of country locations to choose from. Free users aren’t left out either, with a solid 5GB per week. This is a big change from previous Avast suites that wanted more money to use the VPN. The paid version supports peer-to-peer transfers as well as streaming servers for viewing geo-restricted content. Avast can also automatically activate the VPN when you do things like go to banking or shopping websites. Those are nice additions, though keep in mind that you really shouldn’t be entering a banking website over Wi-Fi on a network you don’t trust.

The paid version also has what is commonly called dark web monitoring, but what Avast calls password protection. This feature alerts you if any of your passwords for online services are ever revealed in a data breach.

The other two parts of Avast One are for managing your account and receiving notifications from the company. That’s all. The interface is much more simplified than it was before, and it wasn’t very complicated anymore. This is an excellent layout and is easily navigable by anyone from a grizzled PC veteran to a novice user.

Performance

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Test house AV-Test gave the free Avast One Essential, which uses the same detection engines as Avast One, a score of 100 percent for protection against zero-day malware and widespread and prevalent malware, in its evaluation most recent December 2022.

AV-Comparatives’ September 2022 malware protection test found that Avast blocked 100 percent of threats from more than 10,000 samples. You can’t get better than that.

AV-Comparatives’ real-world protection test for July and August found that Avast blocked 100 percent of threats out of 626 samples. Again, the top of the pack.

For our internal hardware performance tests, we found that Avast had no real performance impact on our Large File Transfer test, Archiving test, and Handbrake Encoding test. The only notable change is that the decompression times were actually quite a bit quicker, just under 7 minutes with Avast installed compared to around 8 minutes without it.

For the PC Mark Extended test, the PC performed slightly better, with an average score of 1630.67 after three consecutive runs compared to an average of 1643 without Avast installed. The main performance hit was found in productivity tests dealing with spreadsheets and text documents. Perhaps not surprising given that Avast One is monitoring files for malicious changes. However, the difference is not too big overall; and, unless you’re opening a ton of large data sets in Excel, you shouldn’t see much of a performance hit. Gaming performance was not affected by Avast One.

Prices

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Avast One costs $29.99 for the first year for new customers, with a regular price of $99.99 per year. For that price you get an Avast account that covers five devices. That’s a big change from Avast’s old Premier price that would cover a single PC for $70.

Avast One Family offers six accounts and coverage for up to 30 devices and is priced at $48.99 for the first year for new customers and a regular price of $139.99 per year.

If a paid suite isn’t your bag, there’s also Avast One Essential, which packs plenty of features for free, including 5GB of VPN usage every week. But you miss out on things like the sensitive data shield, webcam protection, and optimization features like disk cleaner and driver updater.

Avast One is available for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.

Conclusion

Avast One is a very good security suite. The price is right, and its protection is excellent. Performance hits are negligible for most users, and it’s also a good value within Avast’s lineup, which isn’t something I would have said about Avast Premier a few years ago. If you’re looking for a new security suite or want to upgrade your current Avast lifestyle, I highly recommend checking out Avast One.

Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative and gain new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to the text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.