Avast One Essential is the free starter product in its Avast One range, a powerful set of security suites with an excellent antivirus and an array of bonus security layers.

Avast’s strong core protection engines block access to phishing and other malicious websites, for instance. Downloads and incoming emails are scanned for threats, ransomware protection shields files in your most sensitive folders, and a firewall helps to control which processes can access the web and which can’t.

That already beats some of the competition (Avira Free Security doesn’t include full system-wide web protection), but Avast One Essential is just getting started. A free VPN may not allow you to change location, but it includes a very generous 5GB data a week (Avira’s free VPN offers 500MB a month); and there are tools to scan your network, find missing app updates, identify Windows security holes, tweak your privacy settings, and a whole lot more.

Looking for antivirus software only? Avast Free Antivirus has the same leading-edge protection engines, but far fewer extras, and may be a better choice. But if you like the sound of a free antivirus with more features than many paid security suites, Avast One Essential is well worth a closer look.

Avast One Essential: Getting started

Some companies (hi, Bitdefender) offer free security but demand you ‘create an account’ first, which involves handing over your email address and maybe other personal details. Avast and Avira are exceptions; both companies recommend that you register your email address with them, but that isn’t necessary, and you can install and use the software entirely for free.

(That’s not just a theoretical privacy point; it has practical benefits, too. Bitdefender doesn’t allow you to use its free app on more than three devices per account. As Avast doesn’t know who you are, you can install its software on as many Windows, Mac, Android or iOS devices as you need.)

It’s important to pay attention when installing Avast One on Windows. If you accept all the defaults, it also installs Avast’s secure browser and makes it your system default. That’s such a major change that we would prefer Avast to use an opt-in system, where the browser isn’t installed unless you specifically ask for it. Still, it’s clearly highlighted during setup, and as long as you read each installation screen, you’ll be able to turn down the browser with a single click.

Avast One’s installer does have one very unusual plus: you can set Avast to Passive Mode, which installs the scanner but not real-time protection. The advantage of that approach is you can run Avast One alongside another antivirus without conflicts, use the other antivirus to detect threats in real-time, but run Avast One’s scanner on a schedule or on demand for extra safety. That’s not necessary for most users, but could be a welcome extra touch if you’re looking for the maximum antivirus protection.

Avast One Essential: Interface

Once the Avast One App launched, it displayed six tiles covering its various functions. We could run a Smart antivirus scan or connect to the VPN with a click, clean our browsing history or our full hard drive, update drivers or optimize system performance. It’s a little cluttered, but we quickly found our way around.

Avast One mostly does its antivirus work in the background, without you noticing, but there’s one exception. If you run a file it’s not seen before, Avast stops it and spends up to 60 seconds scanning the file for threats. If you regularly download open source or other small tools, then this might happen a lot, and it can become very annoying. But it is good for security, and if it gets too much, you can always turn the feature off.

An Explore menu has individual options covering Avast’s various antivirus, privacy and performance features. It’s good to see these clearly highlight features which aren’t available in the free edition; there’s nothing more annoying than repeatedly choosing some exciting-looking option, only to get the same old screen saying ‘nope, sorry, can’t have that unless you pay.’

Overall, Avast One Essential looks good and is reasonably easy to use for simple tasks, but poor organization of features caught us out occasionally. Avast One has the ability to exclude items from scans, for instance, but instead of making this available from the Scan Center, Avast hides it away in a Settings menu in the Account area. If you like Avast but don’t need Avast One’s lengthy feature list, Avast Free Antivirus gives you the same protection engines in a modern, simpler and more straightforward interface.

Avast One Essential: Protection

We track the performance of all the top antivirus apps as reported by independent testing labs including AV-Comparatives, AV-Test, MRG Effitas and SE Labs. Most providers submit their full-featured paid versions for testing, but Avast sends its free edition, which shows a lot of confidence in its power.

That confidence seems fully justified, too. We keep an aggregate score of antivirus performance across nine major tests, and currently Avast is equal first with Bitdefender and McAfee. (ESET, F-Secure and Norton are equal fourth, and Avira follows in seventh place.)

Lab results are important, but we’re always keen to run further tests of our own. We began by attempting to access 50 of the latest phishing URLs, as collected by experts OpenPhish. Avast did a good job, blocking 86% immediately. Avira Security Free scored a little better in recent tests with a 90% protection rate, but that was with a browser extension only. Avast One is better overall because it has system-wide browsing protection which covers every browser and app on your device. (And even if you prefer Avira’s browser extension, there’s nothing to stop you using it alongside Avast One.)

We switched to our malware test, and tried to download a series of very dangerous files from 50 brand new links. Avira Free scored a 90% protection rate in its last test, but this time Avast One won out by blocking 94% of threats either at the URL level, or when the files hit our hard drive. (We didn’t test further but Avast’s full protection rate will be even higher because even if malware isn’t detected on download, Avast’s behavior monitoring detects most new threats by their actions.)

Avast One Essential: VPN

Avast One Essential includes a free edition of Avast’s free VPN. This automatically connects you to the nearest server and doesn’t allow you to change location, which means you can’t use it to unblock streaming content in other countries. It has a data limit, too, but that’s exceptionally generous at 5GB a week; for comparison, Avira’s free VPN gives you only 500MB a month.

There is one particularly disappointing restriction: Avast’s free VPN doesn’t give you access to any settings, including its kill switch. If the VPN drops while you’re using it, that means your identity and traffic may be exposed to snoopers.

Although this makes the app a poor privacy choice for really sensitive situations, it still has some value for the most basic tasks. If you just want to spend five minutes on not-especially-sensitive private browsing via public Wi-Fi, for instance, you’re safer using Avast One Essentials than no VPN at all.

Avast Free VPN speeds were a little below par at a peak of 190Mbps and average of 92Mbps (NordVPN and Surfshark typically reach 900Mbps and more.) That’s better than many free VPN’s we’ve tried, though, and more than enough for browsing, streaming and other basic tasks.

Avast One Essential: Other features

Avast One Essential has many extra features, and we’ll quickly run through those here. But if you’re looking for more detail, or you’d like to know what extra features are available in the paid products, our Avast One Gold review has an in-depth look.

Avast One Essential includes a simple firewall to control which apps can go online, but the free edition doesn’t do much more than the standard Windows firewall (there’s more power available with the paid products.)

Avast One’s Network Inspector is more interesting, with options to check your network for vulnerabilities, and run a full network scan. This can identify the devices connected to your home network, for instance, and raise an alert if a new device connects that it hasn’t seen before.

Avast’s Ransomware Protection adds an extra layer of security which prevents files in key folders from being modified by untrusted apps. This might be useful, but it’s not exactly original, and Windows Controlled Folder Access allows you to do something similar without installing any extra apps.

A clever PC Speedup tool aims to speed up your PC by ensuring background processes use less resources. This looks good in theory, but might target important apps which really do need those resources (Avast wanted to access OneDrive and our BackBlaze backup app, for instance.) We wouldn’t recommend using this unless you’ve the expertise to monitor the results and fine-tune any settings, if necessary.

The Software Updater highlights missing updates for 50 popular applications. That might be handy, but the free version only warns you about updates: it can’t install them for you. As most of these apps automatically update themselves anyway, there may not be much value here.

A Clear Browsing Data tool frees up space by wiping away your Chrome or Edge browsing history. It’s a little better than doing this from the browser because you can opt to delete only tracking cookies, while keeping the browsing cookies, ensuring you’re more likely to stay logged in when returning to your favorite sites.

Dark Web Monitoring raises the alert if your email address appears in a data breach, and the Privacy Advisor has simple guides to improving your privacy settings in top apps and social media websites. These do make it easier for beginners to enhance their online privacy, but if you’ve more web and security experience, you could find much more information with just one or two web searches.

Avast One Essential: What’s not included?

There’s a lot to like about Avast One Essential, but also plenty of reasons to upgrade.

Avast One Silver enhances many free features, giving you an unlimited VPN, scanning of web email as well as local email messages, a full-featured firewall and automatic installation of missing software updates.

New features include anti-tracking, a secure bank mode, extra protection against webcam hijacking, secure DNS to keep you safe from fake websites, automatic driver updates and assorted other speed-boosting tools.

These extras aren’t always as useful as they sound, but if you need the VPN in particular, Avast One could be very useful. Read our Avast One Gold review to find out more.

Avast One Essential: Final verdict

Avast One Essential delivers better antivirus protection than most paid products at zero cost. If you’re looking for an accurate and configurable antivirus, and can use the VPN and its many other tools, then this is a great free pick. But if you’re not interested in the extras then Avast Free Antivirus might be better. It’s less configurable but has exactly the same protection and is easier to use.

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