Adaware

Value

Adaware comes with a choice of packages – free, pro and total. We don’t recommend going for the free solution as antivirus protection alone isn’t good enough in this day and age. Pro and Total have a great feature list and are reasonably priced if you only want to secure one device and the cost soon rockets if you’re looking to add more devices for protection. The standard 1 year 1 device license comes in at $27 (Pro) and $36 (Total) but is Total protection worth the extra cash?

Reliability and Security

Adaware scores pretty well in the limited reviews it has online. PC Mag give them a respectful 3.5/5 but there are a lot of improvements that could be made. It also seems that their previous build actually performed better in online malware tests, so something has gone wrong. Their new suite has had a massive UI upgrade so it might be that they have concentrated too much on the looks of the product and haven’t upgraded the functionality/performance to match.

Support and Customer Service

Windows is the only operating system supported by Adaware, so if you’re looking for Mac protection you need to look elsewhere, not a great start for overall support. They also don’t seem to offer livechat and a phone number is pretty hard to come by. They offer the standard forum support centre and also a ticketing system where you can interact with someone and get tech help, which is available 24/7.

Features

Pro and Total both come rammed with features which is good to hear, these aren’t useless, gimmicky features either they are proper tools that we enjoyed using. The only difference between Pro and Total is that the latter also includes a file shredder, file encryption tool and parental controls, which aren’t necessarily required for ultimate protection.