Pricing and Tiers
With some pairings, comparing pricing is tough. What if one product is expensive at the single-license level but handily beats its opponent in pricing for five or 10 licenses? With Avast One Basic and AVG AntiVirus Free, there’s no such problem, as both are free.
(Credit: Avast/PCMag)There is a difference in presentation, though. Avast One Basic is a free version of the Avast One suite. As such, it has quite a few features marked with a lock icon, meaning they’re not available for free. AVG is a straight antivirus, not a suite, and hence might have an edge in terms of feeling freer.
(Credit: AVG/PCMag)And yet, AVG doesn’t feel freer. Right in the main window, two of the five major feature areas are visibly locked away. In truth, you don’t see the locks in Avast until you dig in a little deeper. Both these apps are totally free, and both make clear that you don’t get everything for free.
Winner: Tie
Independent Lab Test Scores
When you see an antivirus listed in a report from one of the independent testing labs, it means two things. First, the lab considered the product important enough to merit testing. Second, the antivirus company felt confident enough to put the product forward (and pay the testing fee). If you don’t see lab scores for an antivirus, it simply means it wasn’t tested. But if you do see plenty of high scores, you know it’s a significant app.
On that basis, Avast is more significant than AVG, with test results from all four labs that I follow, compared with just two for AVG. Indeed, ever since Avast acquired AVG nearly 10 years ago, the combined company has given AVG a bit less prominence.
My aggregate score algorithm yields 9.9 of 10 possible points for Avast, based on perfect scores from three labs and one score just a hair short of perfect. AVG’s aggregate score is higher, 10 points, but that’s based on just two scores. Lab results show both to be effective, but Avast has the edge.
Winner: Avast
Scores From My Hands-On Tests
Of course, I can’t rely solely on lab tests performed by others. Nearly half the antivirus apps I track don’t participate with the labs at all. My hands-on tests give me useful scores for comparison and also let me get a feel for just how each app does its job.
My basic malware protection test uses malware samples that I collect and analyze myself. I expose the antivirus to the samples and let it use all its available protection layers to detect them and prevent malware installation. Given that Avast and AVG use the same antivirus engine under the hood, it should be no surprise that they got the same score in this test: 9.7 out of 10 possible points.
(Credit: Avast/AVG/PCMag)I also test each antivirus app’s ability to prevent downloads of the latest malware, using a feed of malware-hosting URLs that are no more than a few days old. The app gets equal credit for diverting the browser away from the dangerous URL and for eliminating the malware on download. AVG did well enough in its latest test, with 93% protection, though four competitors reached 100%, and another four came close with 99%.
Avast whiffed this one, scoring just 75%, one of the lowest scores. In tests over the last few years, it’s gone as low as 68% and as high as 98%. Clearly, the browser-level protection is not identical between Avast and AVG.
(Credit: Avast/AVG/PCMag)I also test each app’s ability to detect phishing frauds, websites that masquerade as secure sites to steal your credentials. The two both excelled here, with AVG scoring 100% and Avast 99%. Still, that dismal 75% score against malware-hosting URLs makes Avast the loser in this category.
Winner: AVG
VPN Protection
When you connect to Wi-Fi in a sleazy diner, do you think about the fact that the network’s owner may be a little sleazy too, tapping into your connection? Antivirus protects your laptop, but it can’t protect your lines of communication. For that, you need a VPN to encrypt your web traffic. Not only does the VPN secure your data from snooping, but it also hides your IP address so nobody can use it to get your location. You can even use a VPN to access region-blocked content by connecting through a server in another country.
(Credit: Avast/PCMag)Your Avast subscription comes with an integrated version of Avast SecureLine VPN, but don’t jump for joy just yet. The VPN component has serious limits. For one, you don’t get to choose your VPN server location, so you can’t pretend to be in another country. And your usage is limited to 5GB of bandwidth per week, which is admittedly better than what you get from some competitors.
Limited is greater than none, though, and you get no VPN protection from AVG. Even the commercial AVG Secure VPN doesn’t have a free edition, just a 60-day free trial. Avast wins this one.
Winner: Avast
Firewall and Exploit Protection
In the early days of security suites, personal firewall protection was typically one big bonus earned by upgrading from antivirus to a suite. Since Avast is a stripped-down suite, finding that it has a firewall built in is no big surprise. But AVG, nominally “just” an antivirus, includes a firewall, too.
In truth, AVG’s firewall is surprisingly complete. It imposes a collection of rules on your connections, configured differently for public and private networks. Those with true network savvy can tune these rules, or at least view the details.
(Credit: AVG/PCMag)AVG also manages network permissions for the apps on your system to prevent abuse. By default, it makes those decisions itself, but you can set it to report on each new attempt at a network connection and ask you how it should be handled. It’s a full two-way firewall, with protection both against attack from outside and betrayal from within.
Firewall protection in Avast is much simpler. It blocks unsolicited incoming network traffic and, if you’ve identified the network as untrusted, unsolicited local traffic. There’s no elaborate set of firewall rules and no option to make program control interactive. The closest thing to program control is a list of programs that are or have been connected, with an option to block access for any of them.
AVG brings a full two-way firewall to the party, while Avast barely does more than the built-in Windows Firewall. AVG wins.
Winner: AVG
Ransomware Defense
Imagine sitting down to write another chapter of your novel to find that all your existing work has been encrypted by ransomware. Dismal thought, isn’t it? Because a ransomware attack is so consequential, many antivirus apps add layers of protection against ransomware, supplementing their existing real-time scanning.
One way to keep your essential documents safe from ransomware is to ban all changes to those documents by unauthorized programs. That’s how Ransomware Protection works in both Avast and AVG. To test this feature, I turned off the main antivirus system, disconnected the test virtual machine from the network, and released a dozen real-world ransomware samples, one by one. Note that the ransomware protection component in both apps applies strictly to file-encrypting ransomware, not the less-common type that encrypts the whole disk.
Turning off the main File Shield in Avast was simple, and I got right down to testing. Three of the samples did nothing and hence didn’t trigger the protection system. Surprisingly, two of them ran completely unhindered, encrypting files and presenting their ransom notes. As for the other seven, Avast blocked them as soon as they tried to encrypt files in any of the protected folders. However, in every case, some files in unprotected folders got encrypted, anywhere from 50 to 10,000 files.
(Credit: Avast/AVG/PCMag)Testing AVG was a little more complicated. In addition to turning File Shield off, I had to juggle Behavior Shield and Anti-Exploit Shield. (Avast includes those features, too, but one toggle turns them all on or off.) After some experimentation, I hit on the right setup to test just the Ransomware Protection component. At that point, the results precisely matched Avast’s. Three samples did nothing, two completely bypassed protection, and seven were caught but managed to encrypt files in unprotected folders.
While experimenting with settings, I determined that Behavior Shield alone would have caught four of the samples, and Anti-Exploit Shield alone would have caught four. I considered giving Avast the edge in this comparison, but in fact AVG has the same features. It just doesn’t allow controlling them separately. This is a tie.
Winner: Tie
Secure Backup for Files
What would you do if disk wiper malware completely blanked out everything on your hard drive? If your answer was, restore from backup, good for you! Not everyone has the forethought to be so prepared. When all other security layers fail, if you at least have your files backed up, you can rebuild.
In many product lines, adding backup is among the benefits you get by upgrading from the entry-level security suite to the top-tier all-features suite. But even at their respective top tiers, neither Avast nor AVG includes backup. Certainly, it’s not found in the free antivirus apps examined here. Zero to zero, that’s clearly a tie.
Winner: Tie
Breadth of Security Features
Every antivirus must be capable of scouring a computer for malware and removing any threats it finds. After that, it should quietly monitor files and processes to detect and head off any future attacks. And it really should perform some kind of check on the websites you visit, to help you avoid those that contain malware, or that try to trick you into giving away your credentials. But an antivirus that does these things and no more, well, it’s boring. To get your attention (and enhance your security), antivirus companies pack in extra features, sometimes just a few, sometimes so many it’s hard to imagine.
With Avast being a stripped-down security suite and AVG just a regular antivirus, I figured Avast would probably take this category easily. But when I sat down to compare the two in detail, it wasn’t the romp I expected.
(Credit: AVG/PCMag)First, there’s a lot of overlap. Both apps are fully cross-platform, supporting Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Both install a secure browser alongside the antivirus, with a page full of online security features, including blocking advertising trackers and browser fingerprinters. Both include a Network Inspector feature that warns about insecure networks, finds unsafe network settings, and reports on all devices connected to your network, flagging any that have security issues.
(Credit: Avast/PCMag)AVG’s Email Shield actively scans the incoming POP3 or IMAP email stream and marks messages containing malware and other dangers. Avast’s Email Guardian does the same. Paying customers can also run webmail accounts through its scan, but you don’t get that for free.
The Hack Check feature in either secure browser checks whether your email address has been exposed in a breach, but it’s very limited. Avast goes further, with a full Dark Web Monitoring system (though real-time monitoring for new breaches is a premium feature). Both include the option to run a scan at boot time, defeating persistent malware by scanning before it loads. AVG offers stronger protection in the form of a Rescue Disk that boots into a non-Windows environment, to winkle out the very worst infestations.
(Credit: Avast/PCMag)Avast and AVG both encourage you to regularly run a Smart Scan, which includes a scan for performance issues. But in both cases, the scan won’t fix anything unless you fork over cash for a premium edition. Avast’s Smooth Performance tools do more, including optimizing slow apps and identifying missing security patches. You can use it to find junk files and duplicate files, but you’ll have to handle the cleanup yourself. Even so, Avast’s tune-up features have the edge.
(Credit: AVG/PCMag)There are hardly any features found in one of the two free antivirus apps that are absent in the other. AVG comes with a file shredder component, useful if you need to delete maximally sensitive documents beyond the possibility of forensic recovery. That’s about it.
Of the special features I looked at, most work just the same in the two antivirus apps. Avast has a better implementation for a few, but AVG also makes a better showing for a few. Surprisingly, this bonus feature competition ends in a draw.
Winner: Tie
Verdict: You Can’t Go Wrong With Either
Going into this comparison, I guessed that in a competition between stripped-down security suite Avast One Basic and enhanced standalone antivirus AVG AntiVirus Free, the suite would come out ahead. I was wrong. Comparing them in eight categories, I found that four came out deadlocked and two apiece went to Avast and AVG. Even when it comes to breadth of features, they’re quite well matched. So choose the one you like best and you won't be disappointed.