Your iPhones and iPods aren't nearly as vulnerable to malware as most devices, but they can’t offer any safety guarantees. You'll still face a number of privacy and security risks just about every time you turn your device on. 

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS for iOS has a free edition which offers a handful of tools which can help. There’s a basic VPN, which limits you to 200MB data per day (6GB a month) and doesn’t allow you to change location. A vulnerability scanner checks your device and network for security issues, and a data breach monitor raises the alarm if your email address shows up on the dark web.

The app gets more interesting if you pay to upgrade. The highlight is web protection, which blocks phishing and malicious apps in your browser, other apps, SMS, even calendar invites. And if you agree with us that 200MB a day just isn’t enough, buying the full VPN allows you to use it as much and as often as you like.

We’ve seen more generous free apps. Avast One Free’s VPN, for instance, gives you 5GB a week. But we’ve also seen worse - Avira Free for iOS has a 500MB a month VPN and no web protection at all - and, overall, there’s not a lot between the big providers on the iOS features front.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS: Pricing

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS can be upgraded by adding web protection, blocking access to phishing and other malicious sites. It's a worthwhile feature, and not expensive at $1.25 a month for the first year of the annual plan, rising to $2.09 on renewal.

If the limited VPN doesn't suit your needs, you can upgrade to a Premium Bitdefender VPN account for a low $2.92 a month on the annual plan ($5.84 on renewal.) That’s a decent price by VPN standards, and protects up to ten devices, but the best value comes in Bitdefender's suites.

For example, Bitdefender Total Security doesn't include the VPN, but it has full antivirus and other tools to cover any mix of five iOS, Android, Windows and Mac devices for only $5 a month in year one, $8.33 on renewal. 

Premium Security includes full antivirus, a stack of privacy tools and an unlimited VPN, and covers up to ten devices for $6.67 a month in year one, $13.33 on renewal.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS: Getting started

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS installs easily, then prompts you to sign in with your Bitdefender, Facebook, Twitter, Google or Microsoft accounts.

After signing up, the app recommends running a 'quick scan'. Not for malware, but security vulnerabilities, apparently: an outdated iOS version, device configuration issues (the app doesn't clearly explain what these are) and Wi-Fi or network problems (we're unsure about those, too.) It's a very short list, but that made for a very quick scan (three seconds for us), and Mobile Security successfully identified a missing iOS update on our device.

Scan completed, the app directed us to its Dashboard. This doesn't do very much - in portrait, more than half the dashboard's screen space was taken up with a pulsing shield and a 'Scan device' button - but a simple menu bar does give speedy access to Mobile Security's other features.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS: Bitdefender VPN

Connecting your device to Bitdefender's Hotspot Shield-powered VPN is easy. Tap VPN, then Connect, and in a couple of seconds it's up and running, protecting your web traffic from snoopers. Speeds were reasonable in our tests, and connections proved stable, with no unexpected drops.

As we’ve mentioned already, the free version embedded into Mobile Security is extremely basic. You can’t choose a location,  switch protocols, adjust settings or reconfigure how the VPN works in any useful way. If you only need the core VPN essentials, maybe to access your email via public Wi-Fi a couple of times a week, this might be acceptable. But if you're looking for anything even slightly more advanced, it's likely to leave you disappointed.

You can opt to use the stand-alone free Bitdefender VPN app, instead. That's good news, as it gets you many more VPN features (ad and tracker blocking, choice of protocols, split tunneling, more.) But if the VPN is your priority, it's a reminder that you could simply ignore Mobile Security and just install the Bitdefender VPN for iOS app, instead.

(Thinking of paying for the unlimited Bitdefender VPN? Read our full review here.)

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS: Account Privacy

Bitdefender's Account Privacy feature scans a list of data breaches for as many email addresses as you need, and raises the alarm if your details have been exposed.

We tapped 'Account Privacy' to try it out. The app sent a code to the email address to verify that we owned it, then displayed an alarmingly lengthy list of breaches where our address appeared.

This isn't quite as useful as it sounds. Although our list included 19 breaches, only four were dated 2020 or later, and the most recent of those was from February 2021. If you follow the standard advice to change your passwords occasionally (and we do, of course), this isn't going to tell you much at all.

There is still value here. Maybe your list will be more relevant, and you can sign up to get alerts when new breaches appear. But the reality is you can do this for free anyway at haveibeenpwned.com, no need to install Bitdefender Mobile Security or anything else.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS: Web Protection

Bitdefender's Web Protection is an optional feature which blocks access to phishing and other malicious sites, reducing the chance that you'll be caught out by dangerous links in your inbox or social feeds.

Web protection automatically filters threats in your browser, but Bitdefender can protect you in other ways. A Scam Alert monitors your calendar events and SMS messages for dubious URLs, welcome bonus features which we don’t always see with other iOS security apps.

(If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of third-party apps reading your texts, don’t worry: iOS doesn’t allow anything to do this unless you give an app specific permission in Settings.)

We tested Bitdefender’s web protection by seeing how it performed when faced with 100 brand new malicious URLs from phishing experts OpenPhish [https://openphish.com/]. Bitdefender blocked 96%, which is a great result, but not quite the best we’ve seen. The company was just a touch ahead of Norton’s 95%, for instance, but Avast blocked 100% of our test URLs in its last test, for instance, while Avira blocked a full 100%.

Bitdefender does have an unusual plus, though, in its ability to block malicious URLs in SMS and calendar invites. Overall, if you’re solely looking for iOS anti-phishing, web protection could be worth the upgrade. 

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS: Final verdict

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS isn't a bad product - it's easy to use, there's effective anti-phishing if you're willing to pay for it, there’s a simple if limited VPN - but the lack of features makes it difficult to recommend. Bitdefender Total Security is vastly more powerful and can protect iOS and other platforms for only a little more cash.  

We've listed the best iPhone antivirus apps.

Read more Bitdefender reviews:

• Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review
• Bitdefender Internet Security review
• Bitdefender Total Security review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS review

Security vendors often save their best features for Windows, leaving mobile users feeling a little short-changed. Fortunately, that's not the Bitdefender way, and Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android is actually more powerful than some of the desktop competition.

It scans your apps for malware, for instance. Protects you from phishing and other malicious sites. Monitors texts and chat messages for dangerous links. Shields your internet activities with a limited VPN. Locks apps to prevent others viewing sensitive data. Raises the alert if your details appear in a data breach. And tracks or remotely locks your device with Mobile Security's built-in anti-theft tools. 

The app does its best to look cheap at $1.25 a month for year one of the annual plan. But beware: it renews at $2.08 a month, and keep in mind that this only covers a single device.

If you've lots of hardware to protect, you can get Mobile Security bundled with Bitdefender Total Security. This offers full antivirus and many other tools for any mix of five iOS, Android, Windows and Mac devices for only $5 a month in year one, $8.33 on renewal.

The only catch here is the VPN, which limits you to 200MB a day, and doesn't support choosing a location (it automatically selects your nearest server.) But that could be enough for casual use, and it's more generous than some (Panda's free VPN allows 150MB a day, Avira's 100MB.) 

Upgrading to Bitdefender's unlimited Premium VPN costs $6.99 billed monthly, or $2.92 on the annual plan. These are fair prices, but there are faster and more capable Android VPNs around. If web privacy is a priority for you, check our Best Android VPN Apps guide for more. 

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android: Getting started

After a hassle-free install, Mobile Security ran its first scan, checking our system and apps for threats in a speedy 30 seconds.

Mobile Security's dashboard appeared moments later. If you've ever used another security suite or app you'll recognize the layout: the main area of the screen displays your current device status, while a sidebar gives you quick access to Mobile Security's many features.

There's a lot to explore, but work through the various functions individually and you'll find most are straightforward to use.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android: Malware Scanner

Mobile Security doesn't just check your apps for malware when you manually run a scan: it also monitors every app as it's installed, and raises an alert if it spots anything dangerous.

We tried this with a test app, and Mobile Security popped up an immediate warning.

Results from the big independent testing labs suggest these are very accurate recommendations, too. We checked the most recent AV-Test, AV-Comparatives and MRG Effitas Android reports, and they each placed Bitdefender Mobile Security in first or equal first place for malware protection. 

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android: Web Protection

Bitdefender's Web Protection blocks access to phishing and other malicious sites, reducing the chance that you'll be caught out by dangerous links in your inbox or social feeds.

We tested Bitdefender’s web protection by seeing how it performed when faced with 100 brand new malicious URLs from phishing experts OpenPhish [https://openphish.com/]. Bitdefender blocked 96%, which is a great result, but not quite the best we’ve seen. The company was just a touch ahead of Norton’s 95%, for instance, but Avast blocked 100% of our test URLs in its last test, for instance, while Avira blocked a full 100%. 

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android: Bitdefender VPN

Connecting your device to Bitdefender's Hotspot Shield-powered VPN is easy. Tap VPN, then Connect, and in a couple of seconds it's up and running, protecting your web traffic from snoopers. Speeds were reasonable in our tests, and connections proved stable, with no unexpected drops.

The problem? It's extremely basic. As we write, you can't choose a location, switch protocols, adjust settings or reconfigure how the VPN works in any useful way. If you only need the core VPN essentials, this might be acceptable. But if you're looking for anything even slightly more advanced, it's likely to leave you disappointed.

Bitdefender clearly realizes the problem, and Mobile Security for Android will soon be updated to use the regular stand-alone Bitdefender VPN app. That's good news, as it gets you many more VPN features (ad and tracker blocking, choice of protocols, split tunneling, more.) But if the VPN is your priority, it's a reminder that you could simply ignore Mobile Security and just install the Bitdefender VPN for Android app, instead.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android: Account Privacy

Bitdefender's Account Privacy feature scans a list of data breaches for as many email addresses as you need, and raises the alarm if your details have been exposed.

We tapped 'Account Privacy' to try it out. The app sent a code to the email address to verify that we owned it, then displayed an alarmingly lengthy list of breaches where our address appeared.

This isn't quite as useful as it sounds. Although our list included 19 breaches, only four were dated 2020 or later, and the most recent of those was from February 2021. If you follow the standard advice to change your passwords occasionally (and we do, of course), this isn't going to tell you much at all.

There is still value here. Maybe your list will be more relevant, and you can sign up to get alerts when new breaches appear. But the reality is you can do this for free anyway at haveibeenpwned.com, no need to install Bitdefender Mobile Security or anything else.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android: App Locker

Bitdefender's App Locker enables protecting others from launching specific apps and perhaps viewing sensitive details. It's very useful if you'd like to pass your device to a friend or family to use the phone or browser, say, but don't want them to have full access to everything else.

It's an effective system, and far more usable than some lockers. Although by default App Locker prompts you to manually unlock every protected app, every time you launch it, for instance, you can also have unlocking one app automatically unlock all the others until your screen turns off. Far more convenient if you're just worried about someone picking up your device.

There are stacks of surprising bonus features, too. It can use a random numeric keyboard, reducing the chance others can read your pin by watching your finger movements. It'll snap a photo of the user after three failed PIN entries, and can then upload the pics to your Bitdefender account so you can view them from other devices. It's all very well put together, and adds real value to the app.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android: Anti-Theft

Bitdefender Mobile Security also includes some Anti-Theft features, which cover most of the ground you'd expect.

Remote Location support may allow you to track your device from Bitdefender's website or other apps, for instance. And if it doesn't, the app can snap a photo of the thief after three failed attempts to unlock the device, perhaps giving you more clues.

If your device really has been stolen, you can remotely lock it or even wipe its contents and reset to a factory state. Or if you've just mislaid it somewhere, a 'Scream' command plays an audio alert to help you track it down.

There's nothing new here, and if you've a number of Android devices, you could get very similar features and more convenient reporting with Google's Find My Device for free.

We found Bitdefender's Anti-Theft tools worked as advertised, though, and if you're planning to install and manage Bitdefender on a number of devices, it could be more convenient to have Anti-Theft available for all your hardware from the same dashboard.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android:

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android is a powerful security tool which gives you rock-solid protection from a host of security threats. Okay, the VPN is very basic, but we wouldn’t expect any better price, and overall Bitdefender Mobile Security is a great Android choice. 

We've listed the best internet security suites.

Read more Bitdefender reviews:

• Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review
• Bitdefender Internet Security review
• Bitdefender Total Security review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS review

Bitdefender Total Security is ‘only’ Bitdefender’s mid-range antivirus software suite, but it still includes more features than many top competitors: real-time malware protection, anti-phishing, tracker blocking, cryptominer detection, secure browser, webcam and microphone monitoring, a spam filter, parental controls, and apps for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS: it’s all here.

That’s a lot to explore, but we’ve dug into every area, poked, prodded and tested every feature to get an in-depth look at Bitdefender Total Security and find out if it’s the ideal security suite for you.

Bitdefender Total Security: Pricing

Bitdefender Total Security is priced from $59.99 to protect up to five Windows, Mac, Android or iOS devices for a year ($99.99 on renewal.)

You can protect more devices for only a very small premium. Upgrade to a ten device license and you’ll still only pay $65.99 in year one, $109.99 on renewal.

The key issue with Bitdefender Total Security is that it doesn’t include a full VPN. If that’s an issue, consider Bitdefender Premium Security. It adds an unlimited VPN to the feature mix, and is extremely cheap at only $79.99 in year one for a ten device license (that’s the full VPN for only an extra $1.25 a month), although the price does renew at a less impressive $159.99 a year on renewal.

These are fair prices, and compete well with most of the big security names. Norton 360 Deluxe has a similar feature set, for instance, and although it’s a little cheaper at $49.99 to protect 5 devices in year one, it’s a more expensive $119.99 on renewal.

Bitdefender Total Security: Ease of use

If you’re looking for an antivirus you can install and forget, Bitdefender Total Security has a lot of appeal. The app installed easily for us, then moved to the background and made most of its decisions entirely automatically, keeping any technical hassles to a minimum.

Other providers often have a very different user experience. Present Avast One with an app it doesn’t recognize, for instance, and it’ll launch a scan and leave you waiting for up to 15-20 seconds before you can continue. By comparison, Bitdefender might ask if you trust the app, but mostly it sorts out the issue for itself.

Try Avira antivirus and you’ll get notified with pop-up alerts for every threat, which can become annoying (a malicious web page opens lots of dangerous links, for instance.) Bitdefender displays the first alert, but doesn’t bother you with the rest. The information is still available in a Notifications page, but you don’t have to look at it unless you’re interested.

Bitdefender Total Security: Interface

Bitdefender Total Security opens with a simple dashboard offering one-click access to its most useful features: quick scan, system scan, the VPN and the secure browser, Safepay.

In theory you can customize the dashboard with your own shortcuts. But in practice, there are only two other items you can add, in the Password Manager (only a trial) and the Data Shredder. The dashboard would benefit from more flexibility, such as the ability to pin your own custom scans (more on those below.)

There are plenty of other tools and options available, and Bitdefender organizes those with icons in a left-hand sidebar: Protection, Privacy, Utilities, Notifications, Settings. If you need to control the Anti-Tracker, for instance, click Privacy, and you can edit its settings, or turn it on and off with a click.

Bitdefender hasn’t changed the core of its interface for a very long time. That’s a pity, because there is room for improvement. But at its heart the interface is generally easy to use, and it’s likely you’ll find the functions and features you need without any difficulty.

Bitdefender Total Security: Antivirus scanning

Bitdefender offers a strong range of scan types covering all kinds of situations.

Quick Scan runs a brief check which inspects the most commonly-infected areas only. This took a reasonably short 8:14 on our test system, falling just a little to 7:36 on the second scan.

System Scan is a deeper analysis which crawls your entire storage device and explores everything it finds. That takes much longer for the first scan, but drops hugely afterwards as Bitdefender only scans new or changed files.

To test this, we scanned 50GB of application files. The first run took 37:44, a little behind Avast (35:40) and Norton (32:01.) The story changes on subsequent scans, though, with Avast taking 34:53, Norton falling to 3:48, but Bitdefender completing in just 90 seconds.

Rescue Environment is a bootable scanner which lives on your hard drive and removes even the most stubborn of threats. It’s a great tool and the ability to launch it from your Bitdefender app is a major usability plus (Avira and many other vendors expect you to download, set up and run their boot scanners separately.)

This is all very configurable, too, with options including the ability to build your own custom scans and schedule them to run automatically, perhaps overnight or whenever you’re not around.

Bitdefender Total Security: Antivirus lab results

Although we put every antivirus app we review through our own series of tests, we also pay close attention to results from the big antivirus testing labs.

We follow nine tests from labs including AV-Comparatives (Real-World Protection, Malware Protection, Android, Anti-Phishing, Performance), AV-Test (Windows, Android), MRG Effitas (360° Protection Testing) and SE Labs (Endpoint Security Home).

Bitdefender appears in the latest reports for eight out of our nine tests, making this a strong all-round test of its abilities. But Bitdefender’s combined score was a little disappointing at 9.92 out of 10, earning the company seventh place in our charts behind the likes of Avast (9.97), ESET (9.95) and F-Secure (9.95.)

Looking at the individual tests, Bitdefender was a little below par in both the AV-Comparatives and AV-Test’s Windows reports. The differences are small, though, and not always about protection; AV-Test found Bitdefender blocked 100% of test threats, for instance, but marked the company down for reducing device speeds a little and falsely flagging 5 legitimate apps. 

Bitdefender isn’t leading the way with the independent labs right at this moment, but the margins between providers are tiny, and it’s not far behind. Where Bitdefender has scored in the past is for its consistency over the long term - it won 2023’s ‘Outstanding Product’ at AV-Comparatives but the sheer number of awards won across all its tests - and we’ll be watching to see if its normal market-leading performance returns soon.

Bitdefender Total Security: Anti-ransomware

Defeating ransomware isn’t just about spotting known threats as they’re downloaded. A good antivirus needs multiple other layers of protection, such as using behavior monitoring to detect even brand new threats before they can do any harm.

We tested Bitdefender by running our own custom ransomware simulator. This defeated Avira, but Bitdefender killed our simulator before it could damage a single file.

The latest MRG Effitas Ransomware tests also brought positive news. Bitdefender, ESET, Microsoft and ThreatDown all blocked 100% of test threats, earning them an equal first place. That’s another great result, and more confirmation that Bitdefender is one of the best vendors around for battling ransomware.

Bitdefender Total Security: Anti-phishing

The best security tools don’t just detect and block web threats as they appear: they prevent you ever reaching them in the first place. That’s why we’re always very interested in an app’s ability to keep you safe from phishing and other malicious websites.

Bitdefender led the way in AV-Comparatives’ last antiphishing test with an excellent 96% protection rate, just ahead of Avast (94%), AVG (94%), ESET (92%) and Avira (88%.)

We tested Bitdefender’s web protection by seeing how it performed when faced with 100 brand new malicious URLs from phishing experts OpenPhish. Bitdefender blocked 96%, which is a great result, but not quite the best we’ve seen. The company was just a touch ahead of Norton’s 95%, for instance, but Avast blocked 100% of our test URLs in its last test, for instance, while Avira blocked a full 100%.

Bitdefender Total Security: Performance impact

We expect a quality antivirus to offer reliable and accurate malware protection, but that’s not all. The best apps deliver their protection without slowing down your device, raising endless false alarms or otherwise causing daily hassles.

AV-Comparatives’ Performance Test found Bitdefender had some impact on application launch times, but didn’t significantly affect other tasks, and Bitdefender received AV-Comparatives top Advanced+ award.

Our own tests with the excellent PCMark 10 benchmark found barely any performance impact from Bitdefender beyond a nineteen second increase in the time it took to fully load Windows and our startup apps, but that’s quicker than many (Avast added 21 seconds.)

Overall, our tests suggest that although Bitdefender isn’t quite the most lightweight of antivirus apps, it has less performance impact than most, and didn’t cause us any significant speed issues.

Bitdefender Total Security: Safepay

Bitdefender Safepay is a secure web browser which is isolated from other processes in your system. Even if your device is infected by malware, it can’t capture your keystrokes or record screenshots of what you’re doing (we tried with commercial and custom tools of our own), and the virtual keyboard prevents even hardware keyloggers from recording your activities.

Bitdefender looks out for you accessing a banking or other sensitive site, and prompts you to open the website in Safepay (it can automatically connect to the VPN, too.) Sounds like a small point, but that one idea reduces the chance that you’ll forget to turn Safepay on.

Put it all together and Safepay offers way more protection than other privacy browsers, making it one of the highlights of Bitdefender’s range.

Bitdefender Total Security: Limited VPN

Bitdefender Total Security includes the free version of Bitdefender VPN. The paid edition is an excellent service with quality apps using the Hotspot Shield network, but, unfortunately, the freebie is so restricted that many will find it unusable.

You only get 200MB of data a day, for instance. We opened desktop Outlook and a few other applications on a Windows laptop, but just left them running without doing anything ourselves on the device, and the background traffic alone used 70MB of data over the next hour. The free Bitdefender VPN is only suitable for light use.

The other big issue is you can’t choose your location. Hit Connect and Bitdefender VPN automatically selects whatever it thinks is the best server for you (the closest or the fastest, most likely.). That means there’s little hope of unblocking anything, and, if the VPN chooses a location in a neighboring country to you, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Still, if you only need a VPN very occasionally, perhaps to securely access your email on public Wi-Fi, the free Bitdefender VPN just might be enough. And, if you can live with the data and location limits, there’s a lot to like here.

The app supports the best protocols, including WireGuard, OpenVPN and Hotspot Shield’s Hydra. Quality ad and tracker blocking enhances your privacy online, and we found the effective kill switch immediately blocks your internet access if the VPN drops.

Split tunneling support allows you to select apps which bypass the VPN and use the internet directly. That could help cut your VPN data usage and stretch that 200MB a day just a little further.

A very clever Auto-Connect option can automatically connect to the VPN when your device connects to unsecured Wi-Fi, when you access specific domains (your business network, say), even if you visit a particular category of website: banking, online payments, health, and more.

Bitdefender Total Security: Webcam and microphone protection

Bitdefender Total Security for Windows includes video and audio protection, a feature which can prevent apps accessing your webcam or microphone without your permission.

Bitdefender says the suite blocks untrusted apps by default. We tested this by running our own custom webcam hijacker app, and Bitdefender realised there was a problem, displayed a notification, and our app couldn’t access the webcam until we clicked ‘Allow.’ 

We ran a safe but little-known command line tool to record microphone audio. Once again, Bitdefender handled the situation well, allowing the app to access our microphone but using a notification to keep us informed.

Although most top suites have similar tools, they don’t always work as well. If Avast One asks permission for an app to access your webcam, for instance, and you close that dialog box without giving an answer, Avast allows access anyway. Bitdefender is more secure because it blocks dubious apps until you specifically hit the Allow button.

If you don’t like the default settings, Bitdefender provides various ways to customise your protection. You can turn notifications on or off, for instance; block browsers from accessing your webcam, or even block webcam access entirely if you’re sure you’ll never need it.

Bitdefender Total Security: Firewall

Bitdefender’s firewall watches the network connections made by your apps, decides which apps can get online and which can’t, and works to protect you from network scans and attacks.

If you’re a networking novice and that’s already more than you want to know, that’s fine: the firewall makes all its decisions automatically, so you can safely leave it alone (or forget it even exists.) 

But if you’re the more technical type, you can view details such as processes which have accessed the internet recently, or add custom rules to block specific apps from connecting to the web, or allow others. There’s far more configurability here than we see with Norton or Avast, good news if you’d like to fine-tune your security setup.

Bitdefender Total Security: Antispam

Bitdefender’s Antispam tool is a simple spam filter that works for local email clients only. Forget Gmail or Outlook on the web; this is just for local email apps and accounts which handle email via SMTP and POP3.

Setup was a hassle for us. Antispam should have added a toolbar to our Outlook, but we didn’t see it. Investigating, we found Outlook had disabled Antispam because it was taking too long to load. 

Fortunately, the filter was easy to re-enable. We found it then worked as advertised, scanning  incoming emails,moving anything sufficiently spam-like into the Junk folder. You can customise the results by building block and allow lists, or enabling one or two generic junk-blocking tricks (stop all emails encoded with Asian characters, for instance.)

Overall, Bitdefender Antispam could be handy for some users. If you really need a local spam filter, though, MailWasher gives you more features with even its free version. 

Bitdefender Total Security: Parental controls

Bitdefender Total Security comes with a built-in parental control system to keep your kids safe from the worst of the web.

A decent feature set includes content filtering, screen time limits, device usage scheduling, location monitoring and more.

The service is managed from the company’s Bitdefender Central web dashboard, where you’re able to set up protection and monitor what’s happening on each of your kid’s devices (Windows, Mac, Android and iOS are supported.)

Installation varies depending on the device. Desktops are relatively simple, mobile devices more complex, as you have to set up various permissions.

Apps installed, the next step is to create a profile for each child. This is quick and easy - enter your child’s name and birth date, and choose an icon - and Bitdefender then saves more time by using your child’s age to automatically configure which web content they’re allowed to view. You can fine-tune these default settings to best suit your own children, though, and there are plenty of interesting options to choose from.

Content filtering

Bitdefender’s Content Filtering allows you to block web content by an impressive 43 categories, covering inappropriate topics (porn, drugs, guns), social media, online shopping and more. We tested this and it worked correctly, blocking the specified types in all browsers. (We also noticed a way to bypass content filtering on Windows, but it’s not straightforward, and young kids won’t find it by accident.)

This approach often blocks at least some sites you’ll feel are safe, but it’s easy to add exceptions so you can block YouTube and TikTok, say, but allow your child to watch their favorite Netflix kids shows.

Bonus features include the ability to enforce safe search at search engines and YouTube, reducing the chance that your child can find inappropriate content. Visit the Bitdefender Central web dashboard and you can browse detailed reports to see if any when your kids have tried to break the rules, and the sites they wanted to access.

Screen time limits

Bitdefender’s Parental Control provides several ways to define just how long your kids can use your devices.

You can set times when a device can’t be used, such as at bedtime. You’re able to set a total device usage time for each day of the week, and set a homework-oriented Focus Time where your kids are only able to use their devices for web search or educational apps.

This isn’t as configurable as we’d like. For instance, you can only set one Focus Time and two ‘no device usage allowed’ blocks per day, and time limits must be set in 30 minute increments. But there’s real flexibility in an option for your kids to request extra time from their device if they need it, and overall the system works well.

Location monitoring

The Parental Control system allows you to view the current location of your child’s mobile device (there’s no location support on Windows or Mac.) Just open the Bitdefender Central web dashboard, choose your child’s profile and click Locate to see the device location on a map.

What you don’t get is even the most limited form of geofencing (the ability to raise an alert if your child leaves or arrives at a particular area.) Some security suites deliver far more. Norton 360 Deluxe, for instance, can create multiple Favorite Locations - home, school, grandma, the local park - and display notifications as your kids move from one to the other.

Will parental control work for you?

Bitdefender Parental Control has a lot of features, but these aren’t always available on every platform. Sometimes this is understandable (location monitoring is on mobile devices only), but others are a surprise: kids can only request more time on Android and iOS, for some reason. 

The system isn’t as powerful as the top specialist parental controls applications, either, which are typically more configurable, with better content filtering tools and the ability to raise location alerts when your child arrives at (or leaves) key places.

If your needs are relatively simple then Parental Control could still be useful. That’s especially true if you’ve devices on several platforms, as you can manage them all from the Bitdefender Central web dashboard.

If your devices are all on a single platform, though, especially iOS, we would recommend checking out the built-in parental controls options first. Or if you need lots of functionality, browse our Best Parental Control guide to the top competition.  

Bitdefender Total Security: More features

We’ll complete this review by running through some additional features that Bitdefender Total Security shares with Bitdefender’s starter product, Antivirus Plus. We’ve only space for a summary here, but check the full Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review for more details. 

Vulnerability Scan

Bitdefender’s Vulnerability Scan checks your device for various issues which might make it open to attack: missing updates, weak passwords, dubious Windows and browser security settings, and more.

Sounds good, but this didn’t help us much, incorrectly reporting that our Wi-Fi network had no password and highlighting a couple of very minor technical issues. Avast and Avira did a better job of identifying issues on our review system.

Trial Password Manager

Bitdefender includes a password manager on its feature list, but this turns out to be only a three-month trial. That still beats Avast, who dropped its own password manager a few years ago, but it can’t match Norton, who still includes a password manager with even its starter Antivirus Plus package.

We signed up for the trial, and were happy to see Password Manager was available on desktops via Chrome, Edge and Firefox extensions, with mobile apps for Android and iOS.

We noticed some issues in real-world testing, including problems importing all of our Dashlane logins, and occasional difficulties automatically entering our email address on login pages or capturing our credentials from complex forms. 

But there are plus points, including a secure password generator, highlighting of weak or reused passwords, and a check to see if your email address appears in any data breaches.

Bitdefender Password Manager might be suitable if you only need the password basics, especially if you get the full version for free as a part of Bitdefender Ultimate Security or Bitdefender Premium Security. But we wouldn’t pay for it, and if you’re looking for a powerhouse password manager with every possible feature, check our Best Password Manager guide for better ideas.

Anti-Tracker

Bitdefender’s Anti-tracker is a Chrome, Edge and Firefox extension which prevents intrusive trackers from collecting data on your online activities.

The technology blocked an impressive 93% of sample trackers, but it also broke some websites, preventing key features from working. You can tell Anti-tracker not to block anything on these troublesome sites, but you’ll have to realise that the problems are caused by Anti-tracker, first, and that could be more hassle than it’s worth.

Still, Anti-tracker is free, and well worth a try. If it doesn’t work out, no problem, you can disable it with a click.

Bitdefender Total Security: Mac

After exploring the array of features offered by Bitdefender on Windows, Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac seems a little basic, at least initially. There’s no firewall, no Safepay secure browsing, no crypto mining detection, no webcam or microphone monitoring, no file shredder or vulnerability assessment.

As the name suggests, Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac is mostly about antivirus, and it does that very well. The latest Mac reports by AV-Comparatives and AV-Test show Bitdefender blocking 100% of native Mac threats, as well as 100% of Windows malware samples (these can’t infect your Mac, but it’s important they’re detected to ensure you can’t accidentally share them with someone else.)

Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac has the same capable anti-phishing technology as its Windows cousin, which beat Avast, ESET and Avira in AV-Comparatives’ last anti-phishing test. The app also includes an extra layer of protection in its Traffic Light browser extension, which highlights dangerous links in search results to help you avoid clicking them in the first place.

There are a couple of small ransomware-blocking touches. Safe Files prevents unauthorized apps accessing files in the folders you specify, and Time Machine protection looks out for attacks on your Mac backups. You’re unlikely to need either feature as, in our experience, Bitdefender kills ransomware before it can do anything at all, but extra layers of protection are always welcome.

Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac includes the same 200MB a day limited VPN as the other platforms. It’s missing one or two of the more advanced Windows tools - there’s no option to auto-connect if you access a banking site, for instance - but otherwise there’s a strong set of core features: WireGuard and Hydra protocol support, kill switch, ad and tracker blocking, and split tunneling to decide which apps use the tunnel, and which don’t. 

It’s good to see Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac includes Bitdefender’s better-than-some parental controls. Some security vendors have poor Mac support; if your child has a Macbook Pro, for instance, Norton 360 won’t allow you to monitor it. But Bitdefender is different, and you can both control your kids’ Mac usage, and use your own Mac to monitor what the family is doing online.

It can’t match the Windows apps for sheer weight of features, then, but Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac still has plenty of malware-beating technology on offer, and it’s more effective than most in keeping you safe from harm.

Bitdefender Total Security: Android

Mobile antivirus apps almost never match their desktop cousins for features, but Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android gets closer than most. Accurate anti-malware, effective anti-phishing, data breach monitoring, an app locker, even a free VPN (though with the same 200MB a day limit as Windows.)

The app has a different interface to the desktop editions, but it’s relatively easy to use. A left-hand sidebar lists various key features (Malware Scanner, Web Protection, VPN, more.) There’s a lot of information on some of the screens, but support for landscape and portrait modes helps you make best use of your device screen space. It’s well-organized, too, and most common functions are just a couple of taps away.

Independent testing shows most of Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android’s features do a great job of keeping you safe. Bitdefender beat all the competition to score first place in AV-Comparatives’ last anti-phishing test, for instance, and AV-Test’s most recent Android report found Bitdefender’s app blocked 100% of test threats.

Unusual extras include decent anti-theft features. You can view your device on a map, lock or wipe it remotely, play a ‘Scream’ alarm, even snap a photo after three failed unlock attempts. These are less useful than they were, as Android has basic anti-theft features for free and Google is busy adding more, but there’s no harm in having both options and we’re happy anti-theft is included with the app.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android is a strong security tool with plenty of effective ways to protect you and your device. If you only need to protect an Android device or two, there are better deals around: Avast One Free for Android is just as good at stopping malware and costs nothing at all. But if you’re after security for a number of platforms, or maybe you can make use of Bitdefender’s parental controls, Bitdefender Mobile Security makes a worthwhile addition to your threat protection setup.

Bitdefender Total Security: iOS

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS is available for free, but this starter version doesn’t do very much. The basic 200MB a day free VPN is included, for instance. A simple scanner looks for device vulnerabilities such as missing iOS updates (and, to be fair, it found one for us), and the Account Privacy feature raises the alert if your email address appears in a data breach.

Buy Bitdefender Total Protection, though, and you also get the option to use Bitdefender’s full web protection feature. As we’ve seen above, this did a good job of blocking malicious and phishing sites during our Windows tests, but the Mobile Security version also has two bonus iOS-specific features. Turn them on and the app uses the same link-blocking technology to scan your calendar events and SMS messages, highlighting potential threats before they even reach the browser.

While there’s not exactly much functionality here, Bitdefender’s iOS offering is similar to apps from many other providers. Norton 360 for iOS also has vulnerability scanning, a limited free VPN, and link scanning for calendar events and SMS, for instance.

Overall, if you’re looking for a security suite mostly to protect several iOS devices, then we wouldn’t recommend Bitdefender Total Security. The mobile security app doesn’t have enough features to justify the price.

If you need something to protect a desktop or two, though, maybe with one or two iDevices as a bonus, it’s a slightly different story. Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS isn’t exactly powerful, but it has a scattering of useful tools, and the web protection feature alone does a good job of blocking online dangers.

Bitdefender Total Security: Final verdict

Bitdefender Total Security is an easy-to-use mid-range security suite with lots of effective threat-blocking features for Windows, Mac and Android devices, and a more basic but still useful iOS app. 

Bitdefender has a lot of suites, and this won’t necessarily be the right one for everyone. If you only need to protect Windows devices, for instance, downgrading to Bitdefender Internet Security gets you most of the key Total Security features for a lower price. But if Bitdefender’s limited 200MB a day VPN isn’t enough for you, consider upgrading to Bitdefender Premium Security, which throws in an unlimited VPN for a relatively low price.

We feature the best internet security suites.

Read more Bitdefender reviews:

• Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review
• Bitdefender Internet Security review
• Bitdefender Total Security review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS review

Bitdefender Internet Security may be Bitdefender’s entry-level Windows internet security suite, but it’s absolutely stuffed with features: real-time malware protection, anti-phishing, parental controls for desktops and mobiles, a secure browser, tracker-blocking, a limited 200Mb a day VPN, anti-spam, it’s all here. Factor in Bitdefender’s consistently excellent protection rates and Bitdefender Internet Security could be the ideal security suite for your PC; keep reading and we’ll take an in-depth look at everything it has to offer. 

Bitdefender Internet Security: Pricing

Bitdefender Internet Security is priced from $39.99 to protect a single Windows device for a year ($59.99 on renewal.) Many entry-level suites are priced around $30-$40 for year one, but they typically cover far more hardware. Avast One Silver and Norton 360 Standard both support three devices, for instance, and they can be Mac, Android or iOS, as well as Windows.

Value improves hugely if you’ve a lot of PCs to protect. Bitdefender Internet Security’s 10 device license costs only $94.99 a year, and if you’ll use all 10, that’s only $0.79 to protect each device for a month: a real bargain. 

If you need a full VPN, don’t rule out Bitdefender Premium Security. It adds Mac and mobile device support, an unlimited VPN and a password manager, yet is cheaper initially than Bitdefender Internet Security at $79.99 in year one, and still reasonably priced at $159.99 on renewal.

Bitdefender Internet Security isn’t the cheapest product around, then, especially if you only need to protect a single PC. But the features you get are top quality, and if you can use a 10 device license, the suite looks like a much better deal.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Ease of use

If you’re looking for antivirus software you can install and forget, Bitdefender Internet Security has a lot of appeal. The app installed easily for us, then moved to the background and made most of its decisions entirely automatically, keeping any technical hassles to a minimum.

Other providers often have a very different user experience. Present Avast One with an app it doesn’t recognize, for instance, and it’ll launch a scan and leave you waiting for up to 15-20 seconds before you can continue. By comparison, Bitdefender might ask if you trust the app, but mostly it sorts out the issue for itself.

Try Avira antivirus and you’ll get notified with pop-up alerts for every threat, which can become annoying (a malicious web page opens lots of dangerous links, for instance.) Bitdefender displays the first alert, but doesn’t bother you with the rest. The information is still available in a Notifications page, but you don’t have to look at it unless you’re interested.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Interface & use

Bitdefender Internet Security opens with a simple dashboard offering one-click access to its most useful features: quick scan, system scan, the VPN and the secure browser, Safepay.

In theory you can customize the dashboard with your own shortcuts. But in practice, there are only two other items you can add, in the Password Manager (only a trial) and the Data Shredder. The dashboard would benefit from more flexibility, such as the ability to pin your own custom scans (more on those below.)

There are plenty of other tools and options available, and Bitdefender organizes those with icons in a left-hand sidebar: Protection, Privacy, Utilities, Notifications, Settings. If you need to control the Anti-Tracker, for instance, click Privacy, and you can edit its settings, or turn it on and off with a click.

Bitdefender hasn’t changed the core of its interface for a very long time. That’s a pity, because as we’ve discussed, there is room for improvement. But at its heart the interface is generally easy to use, and it’s likely you’ll find the functions and features you need without any difficulty.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Antivirus scanning

Bitdefender offers a strong range of scan types covering all kinds of situations.

Quick Scan runs a brief check which inspects the most commonly-infected areas only. This took a reasonably short 8:14 on our test system, falling just a little to 7:36 on the second scan.

System Scan is a deeper analysis which crawls your entire storage device and explores everything it finds. That takes much longer for the first scan, but drops hugely afterwards as Bitdefender only scans new or changed files.

To test this, we scanned 50GB of application files. The first run took 37:44, a little behind Avast (35:40) and Norton (32:01.) The story changes on subsequent scans, though, with Avast taking 34:53, Norton falling to 3:48, but Bitdefender completing in just 90 seconds.

Rescue Environment is a bootable scanner which lives on your hard drive and removes even the most stubborn of threats. It’s a great tool and the ability to launch it from your Bitdefender app is a major usability plus (Avira and many other vendors expect you to download, set up and run their boot scanners separately.)

This is all very configurable, too, with options including the ability to build your own custom scans and schedule them to run automatically, perhaps overnight or whenever you’re not around.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Antivirus lab test results

Although we put every antivirus app we review through our own series of tests, we also pay close attention to results from the big antivirus testing labs.

We follow nine tests from labs including AV-Comparatives (Real-World Protection, Malware Protection, Android, Anti-Phishing, Performance), AV-Test (Windows, Android), MRG Effitas (360° Protection Testing) and SE Labs (Endpoint Security Home).

As each site has its own scoring system, we use a special algorithm which converts the various figures into an overall score from zero to 10.

Bitdefender score appears in the latest reports for eight out of our nine core tests, making this a strong all-round test of its abilities. But Bitdefender’s combined score was a little disappointing at 9.92, earning the company seventh place in our charts behind the likes of Avast (9.97), ESET (9.94) and Avira.

Looking at the individual tests, Bitdefender was a little below par in both the AV-Comparatives and AV-Test’s Windows reports. The differences are small, though, and not always about protection; AV-Test found Bitdefender blocked 100% of test threats, for instance, but marked the company down for reducing device speeds a little and falsely flagging 5 legitimate apps. 

Bitdefender isn’t leading the way with the independent labs right at this moment, but the margins between providers are tiny, and it’s not far behind. Where Bitdefender has scored in the past is for its consistency over the long term - it won 2023’s ‘Outstanding Product’ at AV-Comparatives but the sheer number of awards won across all its tests - and we’ll be watching to see if its normal market-leading performance returns soon.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Anti-ransomware

Defeating ransomware isn’t just about spotting known threats as they’re downloaded. A good antivirus needs multiple other layers of protection, such as using behavior monitoring to detect even brand new threats before they can do any harm.

We tested Bitdefender by running our own custom ransomware simulator. This defeated Avira, but Bitdefender killed our simulator before it could damage a single file.

That’s not the end of the story. Bitdefender’s Ransomware Remediation can automatically protect ransomware-encrypted files, recovering them once the infection was removed. The technology has worked faultlessly in previous reviews, giving Bitdefender a major advantage over other security vendors.

The latest MRG Effitas Ransomware tests also brought positive news. Bitdefender, ESET, Microsoft and ThreatDown all blocked 100% of test threats, earning them an equal first place. That’s another great result, and more confirmation that Bitdefender is one of the best vendors around for battling ransomware.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Anti-phishing

The best security tools don’t just detect and block web threats as they appear: they prevent you ever reaching them in the first place. That’s why we’re always very interested in an app’s ability to keep you safe from phishing and other malicious websites.

Antiphishing doesn’t get much attention from the labs, but AV-Comparatives did run a small test on the feature last year. Bitdefender led the pack with an excellent 96% protection rate, just ahead of Avast (94%), AVG (94%), ESET (92%) and Avira (88%.)

We ran a test of our own, and attempted to access 100 brand new phishing URLs on a Bitdefender-protected system. The protection rate was identical at 96%, but Bitdefender didn’t lead the way this time. Avira topped our anti-phishing chart with 100% protection, while Avast managed 99%, and Norton scored 95%.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Performance impact

We expect a quality antivirus to offer reliable and accurate malware protection, but that’s not all. The best apps deliver their protection without slowing down your device, raising endless false alarms or otherwise causing daily hassles.

AV-Comparatives’ Performance Test measures the performance impact of 16 antivirus apps when browsing websites, downloading files, installing and launching applications, and more. Bitdefender had a little impact on application launch times, but was still very fast overall, and received AV-Comparatives top Advanced+ award.

Our own tests with the excellent PCMark 10 benchmark found barely any performance impact from Bitdefender and although our boot times lengthened a little, they’re still comparable to similar apps. Our test system took 65 seconds to fully load Windows and 81 seconds to fully load a collection of apps, for instance; Bitdefender increased this to 73 and 100 seconds, but that’s almost identical to Avast’s times of 72 and 102 seconds.

Overall, our tests suggest that although Bitdefender isn’t quite the most lightweight of antivirus apps, it has less performance impact than most, and didn’t cause us any significant speed issues.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Safepay

Many security vendors offer some form of ‘privacy browser’, but typically you can get much the same result by installing a few well-chosen extensions, or a third-party freebie like Brave Privacy Browser.

Bitdefender Safepay is a secure browser which protects you both from web dangers, and malware which might have smuggled itself onto your own system.

The protection starts by Bitdefender recognizing when you’re accessing a sensitive site. When we visited a banking site, for instance, an alert prompted us to open the website in Safepay (it can automatically connect to the VPN, too.) Sounds like a small point, but that one idea reduces the chance that you’ll forget to turn Safepay on.

The other major Safepay plus is it’s isolated from every other process on your system. Malware can’t capture your keystrokes or record screenshots of what you’re doing (we tried with commercial and custom tools of our own), and the virtual keyboard prevents even hardware keyloggers from recording your activities.

Put it all together and Safepay offers way more protection than other privacy browsers, making it one of the highlights of Bitdefender’s range.

Bitdefender Internet Security: VPN

Bitdefender Internet Security includes the free version of Bitdefender VPN. The paid edition is an excellent service with quality apps using the Hotspot Shield network, but, unfortunately, the freebie is so restricted that many will find it unusable.

You only get 200MB of data a day, for instance. We opened desktop Outlook and a few other applications on a Windows laptop, but just left them running without doing anything ourselves on the device,, and the background traffic alone used 70MB of data over the next hour. The free Bitdefender VPN is only suitable for light use.

The other big issue is you can’t choose your location. Hit Connect and Bitdefender VPN automatically selects whatever it thinks is the best server for you (the closest or the fastest, most likely.). That means there’s little hope of unblocking anything, and, if the VPN chooses a location in a neighboring country to you, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Still, if you only need a VPN very occasionally, perhaps to securely access your email on public Wi-Fi, the free Bitdefender VPN just might be enough. And, if you can live with the data and location limits, there’s a lot to like here.

Bitdefender Internet Security: VPN Features

Bitdefender’s Windows app takes up a lot of screen space, thanks to a large and mostly pointless map. But it looks good, and provides a lot of information: your current IP address, the session length, the data you’ve used, and more.

Using the VPN is easy - just hit the blue Connect button - but connection times were relatively slow for us at around 6-8 seconds (the best apps typically take under two seconds.)

Speeds were acceptable at 60Mbps+ on a 70Mbps connection. That’s adequate for browsing, or a short period of low-quality streaming (30 minutes of standard definition YouTube watching needs around 180MB, for example.)

Useful settings start with a strong choice of secure protocols, including WireGuard, OpenVPN and Hotspot Shield’s Hydra. Quality ad and tracker blocking enhances your privacy online, and we found the effective kill switch immediately blocks your internet access if the VPN drops.

Split tunneling support allows you to select apps which bypass the VPN and use the internet directly. That could help cut your VPN data usage and stretch that 200MB a day just a little further.

A very clever Auto-Connect option can automatically connect to the VPN when your device starts, if you connect to unsecured Wi-Fi, when you access specific domains (your business network, say), even if you visit a particular category of website: banking, online payments, health, and more.

There’s even an App Traffic Optimizer, which can improve speeds of up to three apps by giving them priority for your available bandwidth. That won’t help much with the free version - the more apps you use, the faster your data will disappear - but we have to applaud Bitdefender’s technical expertise.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Webcam and microphone protection

Bitdefender Internet Security includes video and audio protection, a feature which can prevent apps accessing your webcam or microphone without your permission.

Bitdefender says the suite blocks untrusted apps by default. We tested this by running our own custom webcam hijacker app, and Bitdefender realised there was a problem, displayed a notification, and our app couldn’t access the webcam until we clicked ‘Allow.’ 

We ran a safe but little-known command line tool to record microphone audio. Once again, Bitdefender handled the situation well, allowing the app to access our microphone but using a notification to keep us informed.

Although most top suites have similar tools, they don’t always work as well. If Avast One asks permission for an app to access your webcam, for instance, and you close that dialog box without giving an answer, Avast allows access anyway. Bitdefender is more secure because it blocks dubious apps until you specifically hit the Allow button.

If you don’t like the default settings, Bitdefender provides various ways to customise your protection. You can turn notifications on or off, for instance; block browsers from accessing your webcam, or even block webcam access entirely if you’re sure you’ll never need it.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Firewall

Bitdefender’s firewall watches the network connections made by your apps, decides which apps can get online and which can’t, and works to protect you from network scans and attacks.

If you’re a networking novice and that’s already more than you want to know, that’s fine: the firewall makes all its decisions automatically, so you can safely leave it alone (or forget it even exists.) But if you’re the more technical type, there are potentially useful features to explore.

An ‘Application Access’ list showed us which processes had accessed the internet recently, for instance, handy if you’re monitoring what’s happening on your system. 

The Rules page listed the apps Bitdefender allowed online, and any it was blocking. You can change these rules or add new ones yourself, perhaps to prevent specific applications from connecting to the web.

Useful options provide various ways to configure the firewall to suit your needs. For example, if you’re looking for maximum security, you can have the firewall only allow traffic for known trusted processes. That might break a lot of applications (which is why Bitdefender intelligently decides which apps are safe by default), but it does make your system more secure, and could work for some people.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Antispam

Bitdefender’s Antispam tool is a simple spam filter that works for local email clients only (Outlook, Thunderbird, anything which sends and fetches emails via SMTP and POP3.)

The feature isn’t going to be relevant if you access your email in a browser, or you’re using Gmail or some other top provider. The likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft already do a decent job of filtering spam. If you get email from your ISP or a hosting provider, though, and they don’t provide spam filtering, then Bitdefender Antispam may be useful.

In theory, the feature should be easy to operate. Turn Antispam on, and it automatically scans incoming emails,moving anything sufficiently spam-like into your Junk folder. You can customise the results by building block and allow lists, or enabling one or two generic junk-blocking tricks (stop all emails encoded with Asian characters, for instance.)

In practice, it wasn’t quite that simple for us. Antispam should have added a toolbar to our Outlook, but we didn’t see it. Investigating, we found Outlook had disabled Antispam because it was taking too long to load. That’s disappointing, but it was easy to re-enable, and a quick test showed the filter working as advertised.

Overall, Bitdefender Antispam could be handy for some users. If you really need a local spam filter, though, something like MailWasher  gives you more features with even its free version. 

Bitdefender Internet Security: Parental Controls

Bitdefender Internet Security comes with a built-in parental control system to keep your kids safe from the worst of the web.

A decent feature set includes content filtering, screen time limits, device usage scheduling, location monitoring and more.

The service is managed from the company’s Bitdefender Central web dashboard, where you’re able to set up protection and monitor what’s happening on each of your kid’s devices.

Although the Bitdefender Internet Security license protects up to five Windows devices only, those rules don’t apply to Parental Control. These work on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS, and you can install them on as many devices as you need.

Installation varies depending on the device. Desktops are relatively simple, mobile devices more complex, as you have to set up various permissions. 

IOS setup is particularly complicated because the content filtering and app blocking relies on Apple’s built-in parental controls. For comparison, Bitdefender’s Android setup guide lists three main steps; the equivalent iOS document has six, and the Apple Family Control guide potentially has another 23. 

Apps installed, the next step is to create a profile for each child. This is quick and easy - enter your child’s name and birth date, and choose an icon - but Bitdefender does a little more work, using your child’s age to automatically configure which web content they’re allowed to you.

If you’re in a hurry then you could apply that profile to any device your child uses. You’ll probably want to fine-tune Bitdefender’s options to best suit your own children, though, and there are plenty of interesting options to choose from.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Content Filtering

Bitdefender’s Content Filtering allows you to block web content by an impressive 43 categories, covering inappropriate topics (porn, drugs, guns), social media, online shopping and more. We tested this and it worked correctly, blocking the specified types in all browsers.

This approach often blocks at least some sites you’ll feel are safe, but it’s easy to add exceptions so you can block YouTube and TikTok, say, but allow your child to watch their favorite Netflix kids shows.

Bonus features include the ability to enforce safe search at search engines and YouTube, reducing the chance that your child can find inappropriate content. 

The content filtering isn’t tamper-proof, and there is at least one way to bypass Bitdefender on Windows and browse whatever you like. It’s not straightforward and there’s no chance that young children will discover the trick by accident, but teenagers are more likely to find the workaround (or be told around it by more technical friends.)

Bitdefender Internet Security: Screen time limits

Bitdefender’s Parental Control provides several ways to define just how long your kids can use your devices.

You can manually set a total device usage time for each day of the week, though only in 30 minute increments. Your kids can request extra time from their device, or you can add extra time as a reward, or if they need it for some important reason (finishing homework, maybe.) But again, you can only add time in 30 minute blocks, which is a little restrictive.

A separate Focus Time supports creating a simple schedule. If you want your kids to do their homework in the evening, for instance, you could set up Focus Time to run from 7:30-8:30pm, and only allow them to use web search or educational apps during that time. While that’s useful, we’d like the option to set up multiple Focus Time blocks per day.

You’re also able to define two periods of time when device usage won’t be allowed: Bedtime and Family Time. That’s important, but again, you’re limited to one block of time in each case. That’s not much use if you want to set up two or three Family Time blocks for meals.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Location monitoring

The Parental Control system allows you to view the current location of your child’s mobile device (there’s no location support on Windows or Mac.) Just open the Bitdefender Central web dashboard, choose your child’s profile and click Locate to see the device location on a map.

What you don’t get is even the most limited form of geofencing (the ability to raise an alert if your child leaves or arrives at a particular area.) Some security suites deliver far more. Norton 360 Deluxe, for instance, can create multiple Favorite Locations - home, school, grandma, the local park - and display notifications as your kids move from one to the other.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Reporting

Bitdefender Parental Control not only limits what your children can do online: it also logs their activities to help you find out more about what’s going on.

Access your child’s profile from the Bitdefender Central web account and you can view stats including their internet use over the past one, seven or 30 days, and the apps, website categories and websites they’ve used most often.

The ‘Prevented content access’ panel lists any content that Bitdefender Parental Control has blocked. That’s useful, and not just to check whether they’re trying to break the rules. If Bitdefender is preventing access to a kid-safe site then you’ll see it listed here, and can quickly create an exception to make sure it’ll be accessible the next time they visit.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Will Parental Controls work for you?

Bitdefender Parental Control has a lot of features, but these aren’t always available on every platform. Sometimes this is understandable (location monitoring is on mobile devices only), but others are a surprise: kids can only request more time on Android and iOS, for some reason. 

The system isn’t as powerful as the top specialist parental controls applications, either, which are typically more configurable, with better content filtering tools and the ability to raise location alerts when your child arrives at (or leaves) key places.

If your needs are relatively simple then Parental Control could still be useful. That’s especially true if you’ve devices on several platforms, as you can manage them all from the Bitdefender Central web dashboard.

If your devices are all on a single platform, though, especially iOS, we would recommend checking out the built-in parental controls options first. Or if you need lots of functionality, check our Best Parental Control guide to the top competition. 

Bitdefender Internet Security: More features

We’ll complete this review by running through some additional features that Bitdefender Internet Security shares with Bitdefender’s starter product, Antivirus Plus. We’ve only space for a summary here, but check the full Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review for more details. 

Bitdefender Internet Security: Vulnerability scan

Bitdefender’s Vulnerability Scan checks your device for various issues which might make it open to attack: missing updates, weak passwords, dubious Windows and browser security settings, and more.

Sounds good, but this didn’t help us much, incorrectly reporting that our Wi-Fi network had no password and highlighting a couple of very minor technical issues. Avast and Avira did a better job of identifying issues on our review system.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Password manager

Bitdefender includes a password manager on its feature list, but this turns out to be only a three-month trial. That still beats Avast, who dropped its own password manager a few years ago, but it can’t match Norton, who still includes a password manager with even its starter Antivirus Plus package.

We signed up for the trial, and were happy to see Password Manager was available on desktops via Chrome, Edge and Firefox extensions, with mobile apps for Android and iOS.

The option to import passwords from browsers or your current password manager should get you up and running quickly, at least in theory. Bitdefender didn’t correctly import all of our Dashlane logins, though, so it might not always be so simple. 

We found some issues with the tool in real-world use. Importing data from Dashlane didn’t work if we had multiple accounts for a website; it didn’t always automatically enter our email address on login forms, and it had occasional problems capturing our credentials from complex forms.

But there are plus points, including a secure password generator, highlighting of weak or reused passwords, and a check to see if your email address appears in any data breaches.

Bitdefender Password Manager might be suitable if you only need the password basics, especially if you get the full version for free as a part of Bitdefender Ultimate Security or Bitdefender Premium Security. But we wouldn’t pay for it, and if you’re looking for a powerhouse password manager with every possible feature, check our Best Password Manager guide for better ideas.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Anti-tracker

Bitdefender’s Anti-tracker is a Chrome, Edge and Firefox extension which prevents intrusive trackers from collecting data on your online activities.

The technology blocked an impressive 93% of sample trackers, but that success came at a price: it broke some websites, preventing key features from working. There are ways around this - you can tell Anti-tracker not to block anything on these troublesome sites - but that’s perhaps more hassle than it’s worth. 

You might be more lucky, though, so Anti-tracker is well worth a try. And if it doesn’t work out, no problem, you can disable it with a click.

Bitdefender Internet Security: File shredder

Bitdefender’s File Shredder is a simple tool which securely deletes files by overwriting them multiple times. Use File Shredder on your most sensitive documents and even if someone has full access to your device (you’ve sold it, or it’s stolen), they won’t be able to undelete or recover that dara.

The feature worked for us, but it’s not very configurable, and there are far more powerful file wiping tools available for free. File Shredder’s ease of use is a plus, though, and we’re glad it’s included in the package.

Bitdefender Internet Security: Final verdict

Bitdefender Internet Security is a capable entry-level security suite that mostly does a great job of keeping your PC safe. We’re just not sure the parental controls, firewall and webcam add quite enough to justify the upgrade from Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, though, especially when many other entry-level suites protect Macs, Android and iOS devices, as well as Windows.

If you’re happy with Bitdefender Internet Security’s PC-only protection then it could still be a decent choice, but Bitdefender Premium Security looks the best value product in the range to us, with apps for desktops and mobiles and an unlimited VPN, too.

We feature the best internet security suites.

Read more Bitdefender reviews:

• Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review
• Bitdefender Internet Security review
• Bitdefender Total Security review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS review

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus is a Windows malware-hunting powerhouse which includes all the antivirus basics, and also packs in more protective layers and features than many security suites. Top-notch ransomware protection, reliable tracker-blocking, effective anti-phishing, a limited 200MB a day free VPN, one of the most secure browsers around, and that’s just the start. Fair prices and excellent protection rates make this one of the best PC security tools around; keep reading and we’ll tell you exactly why. 

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Pricing

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus is the company’s lowest-priced desktop antivirus. It protects up to three Windows devices for $44.99 in year one, $59.99 on renewal. A 30-day trial gives you a chance to check out the app before you buy.

Bitdefender Internet Security (next up in the range) adds a firewall and parental control. That lifts the price to $59.99 in year one, $84.99 on renewal.

If you’ve anything other than Windows hardware to protect, Bitdefender Total Security could be a better deal. Not only does it include the firewall software and parental controls, it also throws in device optimization, and - crucially - protects any mix of up to five Mac, Android and iOS devices as well as Windows. And yet, it’s only a little more costly than Internet Security at $69.99 in year one, $99.99 on renewal.

If you’re after maximum power, Bitdefender Ultimate Security includes absolutely everything: antivirus and security functionality for up to ten devices, a full and unlimited VPN, and a complete identity theft protection package with up to $2 million insurance. The price is much higher at $119.99 in year one, and $239.99 on renewal.  But the full VPN alone has a lot of value. Sign up for even the most basic NordVPN package and you’ll pay $68.85 in year one, $112.35 on renewal.

These are fair prices, but depending on the mix of features you need, there could be better deals around. Avast One’s cheapest paid plan, Avast One Silver, protects all platforms, has a more generous free VPN (5GB data a week vs. 200MB), includes a firewall and blocks webcam hijacking, but it’s only $35.88 in year one, $79.99 on renewal.

The Norton antivirus range is another one worth a look. Norton 360 Standard covers up to three mobiles or desktops, has antivirus, a full VPN, 2GB cloud backup and a password manager, but is priced at only $39.99 in year one, $94.99 on renewal.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Easy to use

If you’re looking for an antivirus you can install and forget, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus has a lot of appeal. The app installed easily for us, then moved to the background and made most of its decisions entirely automatically, keeping any technical hassles to a minimum.

Other providers often have a very different user experience. Present Avast One with an app it doesn’t recognize, for instance, and it’ll launch a scan and leave you waiting for up to 15-20 seconds before you can continue. By comparison, Bitdefender might ask if you trust the app, but mostly it sorts out the issue for itself.

Try Avira antivirus and you’ll get notified with pop-up alerts for every threat, which can become annoying (a malicious web page opens lots of dangerous links, for instance.) Bitdefender displays the first alert, but doesn’t bother you with the rest. The information is still available in a Notifications page, but you don’t have to look at it unless you’re interested.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Interface

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus opens with a simple dashboard offering one-click access to its most useful features: quick scan, system scan, the VPN and the secure browser, Safepay.

In theory you can customize the dashboard with your own shortcuts. But in practice, there are only two other items you can add, in the Password Manager (only a trial) and the Data Shredder. The dashboard would benefit from more flexibility, such as the ability to pin your own custom scans (more on those below.)

There are plenty of other tools and options available, and Bitdefender organizes those with icons in a left-hand sidebar: Protection, Privacy, Utilities, Notifications, Settings. If you need to control the Anti-Tracker, for instance, click Privacy, and you can edit its settings, or turn it on and off with a click.

Bitdefender’s Explorer integration gives you an easy way to access features without launching the full dashboard. Just choose your preferred files, folders or drivers, and you can scan (or securely delete) them directly from Explorer’s right-click menu.

Bitdefender hasn’t changed the core of its interface for a very long time. That’s a pity, because as we’ve discussed, there is room for improvement. But at its heart the interface is generally easy to use, and it’s likely you’ll find the functions and features you need without any difficulty.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Antivirus Scanning

Bitdefender offers a strong range of scan types covering all kinds of situations.

Quick Scan runs a brief check which inspects the most commonly-infected areas only. This took a reasonably short 8:14 on our test system, falling just a little to 7:36 on the second scan.

System Scan is a deeper analysis which crawls your entire storage device and explores everything it finds. That takes much longer for the first scan, but drops hugely afterwards as Bitdefender only scans new or changed files.

To test this, we scanned 50GB of application files. The first run took 37:44, a little behind Avast (35:40) and Norton (32:01.) The story changes on subsequent scans, though, with Avast taking 34:53, Norton falling to 3:48, but Bitdefender completing in just 90 seconds.

Rescue Environment is a bootable scanner which lives on your hard drive and removes even the most stubborn of threats. Just launch it from the dashboard, reboot when you’re prompted, and Rescue Environment hunts down and removes any threats. It’s a great tool and the ability to launch it from your Bitdefender app is a major usability plus (Avira and many other vendors expect you to download, set up and run their boot scanners separately.)

A scheduler allows you to run scans automatically. That’s good news, though it’s not as flexible as some of the competition. Avast allows you to choose which days of the week need a scan (Monday, Wednesday and Friday, say); Bitdefender can run as a scan every day, or the same day every week, but that’s it. 

On the plus side, Bitdefender has an excellent Custom Scan feature which allows you to create new scan types for different situations. Looking for speed? You could create something which checked running processes, RAM and the Registry only. Maybe you’re worried about the contents of your Downloads folder? A custom scan could check that location only, maybe scan larger archives than usual (regular scanning ignores zips larger than 10MB) to be sure of catching any threats.  

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Antivirus Lab Test Results

Although we put every antivirus app we review through our own series of tests, we also pay close attention to results from the big antivirus testing labs.

We follow nine tests from labs including AV-Comparatives (Real-World Protection, Malware Protection, Android, Anti-Phishing, Performance), AV-Test (Windows, Android), MRG Effitas (360° Protection Testing) and SE Labs (Endpoint Security Home).

Each test has its own scoring system, making it tricky to compare performance. To address this, we use a special algorithm which (as long as an app is in at least five tests) converts the various results into a single summary score from zero to 10 representing the vendor’s overall rating.

Bitdefender appears in the latest reports for eight out of our nine core tests, making this a strong all-round test of its abilities. And Bitdefender’s combined score was excellent at 9.97, earning it second place just behind Avast’s 9.98.

Looking at the individual tests, Bitdefender’s most significant weak spot was an 11th place in the Malware Protection test. But that doesn’t represent a huge difference in results; Bitdefender achieved a very creditable 99.92% protection rate, and it just happened that the top-rated Norton and F-Secure managed 99.97%.

Results can vary month to month, though (Bitdefender topped the previous Malware Protection test), and the company scores very highly elsewhere. Bitdefender tops the anti-phishing charts, for example, blocked 100% of Android threats, and scored full marks in the latest MRG Effitas and AV-Test Windows reports.

Overall, the lab test results are very positive for Bitdefender, showing above average performance in most areas, and market-leading results in many. If you’re looking for reliable protection across the board, Bitdefender delivers.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Anti-Ransomware

Defeating ransomware isn’t just about spotting known threats as they’re downloaded. A good antivirus needs multiple other layers of protection, such as using behavior monitoring to detect even brand new threats before they can do any harm.

We test an antivirus’ ransomware-fighting abilities by pitting the app against our own simple ransomware simulator. This has never been publicly released, ensuring that an antivirus can only detect it by picking up on its suspicious behavior (spidering through test files and opening each one in turn.)

Previously we’ve managed to bypass Bitdefender’s protection for just a few seconds, but not this time. Bitdefender killed our simulator almost immediately, before it could damage a single file.

Even if some of your files are damaged, that’s not the end of the story. Bitdefender’s Ransomware Remediation can automatically protect ransomware-encrypted files, recovering them once the infection was removed. The technology has worked faultlessly in previous reviews, giving Bitdefender a major advantage over other security vendors.

To confirm our results, we took a look at the latest MRG Effitas Ransomware tests. This tested the performance of Avast, Avira, Bitdefender, ESET, Microsoft, Norton, ThreatDown and Trend Micro when faced with 37 ransomware samples. Bitdefender, ESET, Microsoft and ThreatDown came equal first by automatically blocking every threat, without needing to use their behavior-monitoring layer. That’s another great result, and suggests Bitdefender is one of the best vendors around for battling ransomware.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Quarantine

Any potential threats Bitdefender detects and removes are sent to quarantine, rather than being deleted. Quarantine is like a Recycle Bin for executables: it keeps potentially dangerous files locked away where they can’t do any harm, but, if Bitdefender accidentally removes something you’re 100% sure is safe, you can restore the file and tell Bitdefender not to touch it in future.

Although this is generally a very good idea, we noticed a problem. Bitdefender detected part of a legitimate app as a potentially unwanted threat, and moved it to quarantine. We hit the Restore button to put it back, but Bitdefender complained that ‘the system does not have rights to access the specified path.’ It had broken our app and couldn’t fix the problem.

This wasn’t a huge issue, as we were able to restore the file to our desktop and manually move it to the right location. But some users may not know how to do that, and even if you’ve no problems restoring any files, this is still a small usability hassle.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Anti-phishing

The best security tools don’t just detect and block web threats as they appear: they prevent you ever reaching them in the first place. That’s why we’re always very interested in an app’s ability to keep you safe from phishing and other malicious websites.

Antiphishing doesn’t get much attention from the labs, but AV-Comparatives did run a small test on the feature last year. Bitdefender led the pack with an excellent 96% protection rate, just ahead of Avast (94%), AVG (94%), ESET (92%) and Avira (88%.)

We ran a test of our own, and attempted to access 100 brand new phishing URLs on a Bitdefender-protected system. The protection rate was identical at 96%, but Bitdefender didn’t lead the way this time. Avira topped our anti-phishing chart with 100% protection, while Avast managed 99%, and Norton scored 95%.

We also compared Bitdefender’s results with Chrome, to give us a better idea of how much extra protection it adds. The answer turned out to be a lot, as Chrome ‘only’ blocked 64% of our test URLs. These included the four URLs that Bitdefender missed, though, so if we used both Bitdefender and Chrome together, we would have received warnings about 100% of our test links.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Performance Impact

We expect a quality antivirus to offer reliable and accurate malware protection, but that’s not all. The best apps deliver their protection without slowing down your device, raising endless false alarms or otherwise causing daily hassles.

AV-Comparatives’ Performance Test measures the performance impact of 16 antivirus apps on various common tasks: browsing websites, downloading files, installing and launching applications, and more. Bitdefender had a little impact on application launch times, but was still very fast overall, and received AV-Comparatives top Advanced+ award.

Our own tests showed much the same results. The excellent PCMark 10 benchmark found barely any performance impact from Bitdefender, and although our boot times lengthened a little, they’re still comparable to similar apps. Our test system took 65 seconds to fully load Windows and 81 seconds to fully load a collection of apps, for instance; Bitdefender increased this to 73 and 100 seconds, but that’s almost identical to Avast’s times of 72 and 102 seconds.

It’s a similar story with false alarms. Bitdefender has a few more than Avast in AV-Comparatives’ most recent Real-World Protection Test (3 false alarms vs. 1.5), but that’s across 512 test cases, such a marginal difference that you’re unlikely to notice.

You may have a different experience, depending on the websites that you visit and the apps you use. But our tests suggest that although Bitdefender isn’t quite the most lightweight of antivirus apps, it has less performance impact than most, and didn’t cause us any significant speed issues.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Safepay

Many security vendors offer some form of ‘privacy browser’, but typically you can get much the same result by installing a few well-chosen extensions, or a third-party freebie like Brave Privacy Browser.

Bitdefender Safepay is a secure browser which protects you both from web dangers, and malware which might have smuggled itself onto your own system.

The protection starts by Bitdefender recognizing when you’re accessing a sensitive site. When we visited a banking site, for instance, an alert popped up prompting us to open the website in Safepay (it can automatically connect to the VPN, too.) Sounds like a small point, but that one idea reduces the chance that you’ll forget to turn Safepay on.

The other major Safepay plus is it runs on its own virtual Windows desktop, isolated from everything else on your system. Malware can’t capture your keystrokes or record screenshots of what you’re doing (we tried with commercial and custom tools of our own), and the virtual keyboard prevents even hardware keyloggers from recording your activities.

Put it all together and Safepay offers way more protection than other privacy browsers, making it one of the highlights of Bitdefender’s range.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Vulnerability Scan

Bitdefender’s Vulnerability Scan checks your device for various issues which might make it open to attack: missing updates, weak passwords, dubious Windows and browser security settings, and more.

This kind of tool can be very useful, but Bitdefender’s offering has rarely told us anything interesting in previous reviews, and we didn’t see much improvement this time around.

The Vulnerability Scan warned that our Wi-Fi network was ‘unsafe’, for instance, because it didn’t have a password. We had intentionally set up a vulnerability, but we hadn’t removed the password; we had changed it to, well, ‘password.’ If a user doesn’t look closely, Bitdefender’s misleading description makes the real issue easy to miss. Worse, this issue has been around for years (we found apparent references to it on the Bitdefender community forum from 2017.)

The Vulnerability Scan found four low-level browser and operating system issues. That sounded interesting, but they turned out to be extremely minor, such as a setting on our system which allowed users to edit Internet Explorer security zones. 

The scan didn’t find any missing application updates. It did report a missing Windows Security update which had just come out, which is good news, although we would expect any properly configured system to find and install Windows updates all on its own. 

Other providers delivered more on the same system. Norton’s Software Updater found 11 missing application updates, for instance. Avast’s Smart Scan clearly warned us about our weak (not missing) Wi-Fi password, and although it ignored the Internet Explorer security zone ‘issue’, did make some more useful suggestions, including turning on Data Execution Prevention (a valuable Windows exploit protection technology) and ensuring device notifications weren’t displayed on the lock screen. 

The Vulnerability Scan still has a little value. Malware often changes system settings to help stay hidden, so if you’ve been infected previously, there’s a chance the report will find something useful. But we’d like to see it updated with a more in-depth look at your system and application settings.
 

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: VPN

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus includes the free version of Bitdefender VPN. The paid edition is an excellent service with quality apps using the Hotspot Shield network, but, unfortunately, the freebie is so restricted that many will find it unusable.

You only get 200MB of data a day, for instance. We opened desktop Outlook and a few other applications on a Windows laptop, and the background traffic alone used 70MB of data over the next hour. The free Bitdefender VPN is only suitable for light use.

The other big issue is you can’t choose your location. Hit Connect and Bitdefender VPN automatically selects whatever it thinks is the best server for you (the closest or the fastest, most likely.). That means there’s little hope of unblocking anything, and, if the VPN chooses a location in a neighboring country to you, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Still, if you only need a VPN very occasionally, perhaps to securely access your email on public Wi-Fi, the free Bitdefender VPN just might be enough. And, if you can live with the data and location limits, there’s a lot to like here.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: VPN Features

Bitdefender’s Windows app takes up a lot of screen space, thanks to a large and mostly pointless map (you can’t pan or zoom, it doesn’t show Bitdefender’s location or even precisely highlight your own location when connected.) But it looks good, and provides a lot of information: your current IP address, the session length, the data you’ve used, and more.

Using the VPN is easy - just hit the blue Connect button - but connect times were relatively slow for us at around 6-8 seconds. Many WireGuard VPNs take only a couple of seconds, and ExpressVPN’s Lightway protocol often gets us connected in less than one second.

Speeds were very acceptable during testing at 60Mbps+ on a 70Mbps connection. That’s adequate for browsing, or a short period streaming if you turn the quality down (30 minutes of standard definition YouTube watching needs around 180MB, for instance.)

Bitdefender VPN’s highlight is its array of advanced features and configurations. Most VPN apps from antivirus providers are a little underpowered, but Bitdefender offers more functionality than many specialist VPN providers.

A strong choice of protocols includes WireGuard, OpenVPN and Hotspot Shield’s Hydra, for instance. Quality ad and tracker blocking enhances your privacy online, and we found the effective kill switch immediately blocks your internet access if the VPN drops.

Split tunneling support allows you to select apps which bypass the VPN and use the internet directly. That could help cut your VPN data usage and stretch that 200MB a day just a little further.

A very clever Auto-Connect option can automatically connect to the VPN when your device starts, if you connect to unsecured Wi-Fi, when you access specific domains (your business network, say), even if you visit a particular category of website: banking, online payments, health, and more.

There’s even an App Traffic Optimizer, which can improve speeds of up to three apps by giving them priority for your available bandwidth. That won’t help much with the free version - the more apps you use, the faster your data will disappear - but we have to applaud Bitdefender’s technical expertise.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: VPN alternatives

Bitdefender VPN might work for you if you only need the bare minimum of protection, perhaps to stay safe while you spend 15 minutes a day accessing the web on coffee shop Wi-Fi.

If you like Bitdefender but can’t live with the restrictions, upgrading to Bitdefender Premium Security adds the unlimited Bitdefender Premium VPN. It’s more expensive at $79.99 in year one, $159.99 on renewal, but that’s still fair value. NordVPN’s Basic plan costs $68 in year one, for instance, $112 on renewal, for the VPN alone.

Other antivirus vendors offer free VPNs with a little more. Avast One Essentials gives you a far more generous 5GB a week data allowance, for instance, although it also doesn’t allow you to choose a location.

You could also choose a provider from our best free VPN list. PrivadoVPN, for instance, allows you to choose from 12 locations, and has a far more flexible 10GB monthly data allowance. Well worth a look if you’re on a strict budget.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Password Manager

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus includes a password manager on its feature list, but it’s only a three-month trial version. That still beats Avast, who dropped its own password manager a few years ago, but it can’t match Norton, who still includes a password manager with even its starter Antivirus Plus package.

We signed up for the trial anyway, an ultra-easy process which took just a couple of clicks. Bitdefender supports Password Manager on desktops via Chrome, Edge and Firefox extensions, and there are mobile apps for Android and iOS. 

The tool supports importing existing passwords from many sources, good news if you’re looking for a quick start. There’s direct support for 1Password, Bitwarden, Chrome, Dashlane, Edge, Firefox, KeePass, LastPass, Roboform, Sticky Password and many more.

We tried importing data from Dashlane, and it mostly worked, with one issue. Dashlane supports multiple accounts for a website (same email address, different passwords); Bitdefender Password Manager doesn’t, so where Dashlane had multiple accounts, it imported one and ignored the others.

We found some issues with the tool in real-world use. When we complete a ‘new account’ web form with Dashlane, it recognises fields like ‘email’ and allows us to fill them with a click; Bitdefender does this with passwords, but we had to enter our email address manually.

Although Password Manager correctly captured simple ‘username and password’ screens, it sometimes failed with more complex forms. When one site asked for our name, email and password, for instance, Password Manager recorded the login as our name instead of our email.

But there are plenty of plus points, too. It was easy to access our logins and copy usernames and passwords as required. A secure password generator creates strong passwords as you need them, with your choice of upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols (and a neat ‘easy to type’ option to avoid the harder-to-find symbols.) The Security Report highlights weak or reused passwords, and can even run a leaked password check (via haveibeenpwned.com) to see if your account appears in any data breaches.

Bitdefender Password Manager is a useful tool, especially if you get it for free as a part of Bitdefender Ultimate Security or Bitdefender Premium Security. If you need to buy Password Manager separately, it’s cheap at $19.99 for year one, $29.99 on renewal (that’s half the price of Dashlane.) But if you’re looking for a powerhouse password manager with every possible feature, check our Best Password Manager guide for better ideas.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Anti-tracker

Bitdefender’s Anti-tracker feature is a technology that prevents intrusive trackers from collecting data on your online activities.

Anti-tracker is available as a very easy-to-use browser extension for Chrome, Edge and Firefox. 

We installed Anti-tracker on Chrome and it began blocking threats immediately, with nothing else to configure. You can leave the service to do its work, or, if you’re curious, click the extension icon for a report on whatever it’s blocked on the current page.

Our tests showed Anti-tracker blocked an excellent 93% of sample trackers. But we found that it also blocked trackers that are essential to website functionality. View the radar maps on weather.com, for instance, and although you’ll see radar images of incoming weather, the site doesn’t display cities, roads or any of the underlying map. Reading user reviews, we found many similar complaints of Anti-tracker breaking websites.

You can address this, in theory, by telling Anti-tracker not to block trackers on sites where you notice issues. But if, like weather.com, the only issue is a site not displaying some usual content, you may never realize there’s a problem. And the idea of having to exclude sites on Anti-tracker every single time something doesn’t work as you’d expect just feels too much time-consuming trouble than it’s worth. But if you disagree, give the extensions a try: they’re all free, no need to buy Bitdefender products or even create an account.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: File Shredder

Bitdefender’s File Shredder is a simple tool which securely deletes files by overwriting them multiple times. It’s an easy way to get rid of sensitive documents, and ensures that even if someone else has full access to your device (you’ve sold it, maybe it’s been stolen), they won’t be able to undelete or recover that dara.

The easiest way to make this happen is to choose the files in Explorer, then right-click and select Bitdefender > File Shredder. Your files appear in the File Shredder console, and you can wipe them all forever with a click.

There are no configuration options, which might be an issue for the demanding expert users. For example, specialist secure deletion tools often allow you to choose a wiping algorithm, perhaps to overwrite data more often for extra security.

File Shredder delivers all the functionality most users will ever need, though. It doesn’t add a lot of value to the suite because there are more powerful file wiping tools available for free, but File Shredder’s ease of use is a plus, and overall we’re glad it’s included in the package.

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus: Final verdict

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus consistently delivers great PC malware protection results from the top independent testing labs and in our own checks. But where it really scores is in Bitdefender’s array of additional security layers, including effective anti-phishing to block dangerous websites, and multi-layered ransomware protection that can recover damaged files in seconds. It’s our top Windows antivirus, and a must-try for anyone with a PC to protect. 

Read more Bitdefender reviews:

• Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review
• Bitdefender Internet Security review
• Bitdefender Total Security review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS review

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