Pros & Cons
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- Protects all devices in your household
- Identity theft detection and remediation
- Helps remove abandoned online accounts
- Excellent antivirus lab test scores
- No-limits VPN
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- Missed two real-world ransomware attacks
- Some familiar features are no longer present
- Limited children's identity features
McAfee+ Specs
| $1 Million Insurance | |
| Antivirus | |
| Behavior-Based Detection | |
| Dark Web Monitoring | |
| Data Broker Opt-Out | |
| Firewall | |
| Flag Anomalous Transactions | |
| Identity Theft Remediation | |
| Malicious URL Blocking | |
| Monthly Credit Score | |
| On-Access Malware Scan | |
| On-Demand Malware Scan | |
| Password Manager | |
| Phishing Protection | |
| Protection Type | Cross-Platform Suite |
| Ransomware Protection | |
| Social Media Tracking | |
| VPN | Full |
| Website Rating |
Early PC enthusiasts were proud to protect their singular PC with a singular PC-centric antivirus utility. These days are different, with devices running different operating systems everywhere you look. Fortunately, a modern security suite like McAfee+ has you covered two ways, protecting all the devices in your household and supporting all popular operating platforms. At its higher subscription tiers, it provides 24/7 help to recover from identity theft, with up to two million dollars in insurance to cover your costs. It also works hard to call out scams and protect your privacy, making identity theft less likely. McAfee+ is the most complete solution in the company's line, and its combination of unlimited device security with identity protection is appealing. Norton’s LifeLock division has been defending against identity theft for even longer, though, and Norton 360 With LifeLock remains an Editors’ Choice for a security suite with identity protection. Bitdefender Ultimate Security shares that honor, combining full-powered identity theft services with award-winning device-level protection.
McAfee+ vs. McAfee Total Protection
Device-level security suite protection in McAfee+ is precisely the same as what you get with McAfee Total Protection. All the additional features in McAfee+ are in the identity protection realm. That being the case, I’ll ask you to read my review of Total Protection before you continue with this review. That leaves me free to focus on the features that distinguish McAfee+.
Very briefly, McAfee Total Protection comes in one-, three-, and five-license subscription packs. It earned near-perfect scores in lab tests and mostly excellent scores in our own tests, though it totally missed a brace of ransomware samples. Over the last few years, the service has been shedding features that the developers found to be less essential, such as spam filtering and parental control. More recently, it dropped its network protection scanner, vulnerability scanner, and more. McAfee’s new emphasis on scam protection is very evident in McAfee Total Protection, especially on Android, but McAfee+ boasts the same scam protection. Without the lure of unlimited device licenses, McAfee Total Protection alone isn’t as attractive a choice as it once was.
How Much Does McAfee+ Cost?
McAfee+ has three service tiers: Premium, Advanced, and Ultimate. At each tier, your subscription lets you add security suite protection to every device in your household. That includes the expected Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices, as well as Chromebooks and ARM-based laptops.
The Premium version of McAfee+ is effectively the same as McAfee Total Protection but with unlimited licenses, while the two higher tiers add additional identity features. McAfee+ Premium costs $149.99 per year, the same as a 20-license subscription for F-Secure Total and $10 more than a 10-license subscription for ZoneAlarm Extreme Security NextGen. At the Advanced level, you pay $199.99 per year for McAfee+, and the Ultimate edition costs $279.99.
The most similar competitor is Norton 360 With LifeLock, which also comes in three tiers, Select, Advantage, and Ultimate, costing $149.99, $249.99, and $349.99 per year, respectively. However, only the Ultimate edition gives you unlimited Norton licenses. With that edition, you also get unlimited VPN licenses, the highest level of LifeLock protection, and 500GB of hosted storage for your online backups.
With Panda Software’s product line, you can get unlimited licenses at three levels: Advanced, Complete, and Premium. But even though Panda Dome Premium costs $334.99—more than the top-tier McAfee+ Ultimate and nearly as much as Norton’s unlimited tier—it doesn’t offer any identity protection features.
In this review, I cover McAfee+ Ultimate, but I’ll note how features differ at the other, lower McAfee+ tiers.
Can I Protect My Family With McAfee+?
When originally released, McAfee+ covered identity protection for just one individual, with a $20 Family plan option at each level that simply added McAfee Safe Family. In January 2023, the company enhanced the Family plan to include identity protection for two adults and four children. The Premium level doesn’t include identity protection, as noted, but the $169.99 Family plan gives each family member basic identity monitoring and licenses for a password manager and VPN. The two adult members also get access to Personal Data Cleanup scanning, discussed below.
The Family plan at the Advanced and Ultimate tiers costs a bit more: $269.99 for Advanced and $424.99 for Ultimate. Note that features like credit monitoring, ransomware coverage, and the million-dollar guarantee apply specifically to the two adults. The system only performs basic identity monitoring for children, which may not be sufficient to prevent their identity data from being abused.
It’s hard to compare family plans as they’re all so different. With Aura, you can protect five individuals for $444 per year. Norton’s family plan covers two adults and five kids for $389.99 at the Select level, rising to $819.99 at the Ultimate Plus level. IDX Complete’s plan also covers two adults and five kids, but costs $701.88 per year. With almost all services, you get a bump in device protection along with adding protected individuals; McAfee+ is an exception (in a good way) because it offers unlimited devices from the start.
Getting Started With McAfee+
As with other McAfee programs, your first step involves activating the registration code you received with your purchase online. During this process, you create or sign into your McAfee account online. I recommend opting in for auto-renewal, which activates McAfee’s Virus Protection Pledge. If malware gets past the antivirus, McAfee will mobilize tech support to remotely control your system for manual cleanup. In the unlikely event the cleanup fails, the company refunds your purchase price.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)The main window looks much like that of Total Protection. A large panel at the upper left offers advice to improve your security, or reports that everything is fine once you’ve dealt with all its advice. The AutoPilot recommendations you get from Bitdefender Total Security work in much the same way.
Like McAfee AntiVirus and McAfee Total Protection, McAfee+ offers quick access to important features in four panels across the bottom. The collection of shortcut features differs for each product. With McAfee+, you see Scam Detector, Secure VPN, Identity Monitoring, and Personal Data Cleanup.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)A left-rail menu includes an item titled My Protection, which opens a menu of all available features organized into five groups: Scan Detector, Identity, Privacy, Web, and Device. A box and arrow icon on some of the menu items indicates that selecting them sends you to the online dashboard for your account. Most of the features that distinguish McAfee+ are the type you manage online.
Privacy Protection in McAfee+
McAfee Total Protection buzzes with security features that protect your data and devices. With McAfee+, you gain additional powerful features to protect your privacy. One of these, the password manager, comes with the entry-level suite. But Online Account Cleanup, Personal Data Cleanup, and Social Privacy Manager are reserved for McAfee+.
Personal Data Cleanup
During installation, McAfee+ advised me to set up Personal Data Cleanup. First, a little background. While it’s true that cyber criminals may steal your personal information, there’s also a legal business model that involves finding publicly available data, aggregating it into personal profiles, and then selling those profiles to advertisers and others. Data aggregation is legal, but to stay on the right side of the law, data aggregators must remove your data on request.
The problem is that there are hundreds of these sites, and each can have its own unique opt-out system. And, of course, you don’t necessarily know which of them has profiled you. That’s where Personal Data Cleanup comes in.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)On the Personal Data Cleanup page, you enter personal data that McAfee will use to find your profiles online. To start, it wants your first and last name, date of birth, and current address. After the initial scan, you can supplement this by adding an alternate name (if you have one), three phone numbers, and two more physical addresses. McAfee checks its list of usual suspects and reports anywhere it finds your data profiled.
If you’ve selected McAfee+ Premium, that’s as far as the process goes. It’s up to you to visit each offending site and ask to have your data removed. For those who purchased the Advanced or Ultimate edition, McAfee automatically sends the opt-out request. Opting out removes your data from a broker’s site, but that doesn’t prevent that broker from reacquiring it, so McAfee runs the scan again every three months.
Unfortunately, due to my frequent testing of similar services, I didn’t have any exposed profiles for McAfee to process, so I couldn’t see this feature in action. The screenshot below was supplied by McAfee at my request.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)The exact number fluctuates, but McAfee tracks around 40 of the most popular data brokers. Some dedicated data broker monitors check many more sites. Top picks Optery and Privacy Bee process data from many hundreds of brokers. Both Optery and Privacy Bee offer a free version that, like McAfee+ Premium, reports its findings but leaves opting out as a DIY project. Norton’s Privacy Monitor feature offers a similar service covering a few dozen brokers; automated removal requires the add-on Privacy Monitor Assistant.
Online Account Cleanup
How many online accounts do you have? I’m talking about anything at all, from online banking to Neopets. Chances are good that you can’t even list them all and that you haven’t touched some of them in years, even decades. The problem is that a breach at any of those sites could still expose your information. Maybe you’re correctly using a password manager now, but did you ever go through a phase of using the same password everywhere? If so, that promiscuous password is probably haunting your ancient accounts.
McAfee’s Online Account Cleanup addresses this problem, and it’s a winner. It identifies the dozens or (more likely) hundreds of accounts you have just lying around. If you subscribe at the Ultimate level, it does its best to automate the process of closing those you no longer need. If not, you’ll have to go to each one and close it yourself.
To manage this feat, McAfee needs full access to your email account, both to read past messages for account information and to write opt-out emails on your behalf. Also, at least for now, it can only manage its magic if your email account relies on Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo.
When setting up scam protection for my review of McAfee Total Protection, I gave McAfee access to my Yahoo and Gmail accounts. This allows it to analyze all incoming messages and flag any that look scammy. Conveniently, with those permissions in place, all I had to do was pick which one should be scanned for the old account. I picked the less-used Yahoo account first.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)The scan found 11 accounts, flagging those it deemed risky, rarely used, or financial. By default, it displays 10 items at a time, sorted with the newest first. Those new ones are the least worrisome—it’s no surprise that an account I created last week doesn’t have massive usage. I couldn’t switch the sort order, but I found I could set it to show all the items at once, which allowed me to start at the bottom, the oldest accounts.
For each account you don’t recognize or no longer need, you first click Review to see details. The resulting page lets you know the account's age and risk level. It also tags the item with types of data often requested. For example, it tagged one online merchant with Financial, Personal, Email Address, Credit Card, Precise Location, and Gender.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)Apparently, I cleaned up this address last time I reviewed McAfee+, as it didn’t contain any accounts I was willing to discard. I switched to tracking my much busier Gmail account.
You can click to keep the account, in which case it won’t appear in the list of pending items. More likely, though, you’ll click to delete it. Doing so brings up an informative and congratulatory pop-up. Clicking Next from the pop-up gets you another message, a reminder that you must keep an eye on the My Activity tab going forward, with a “Don’t show this again” checkbox. Once you click Close, you can go on to the next item for review. If this process sounds a bit busy, well, it is. On the other hand, you don’t really want to check off dozens of accounts for removal willy-nilly. I’d suggest reviewing 10 or 12 at a time.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)Note that if you’ve subscribed at the Premium level, you must cancel each account manually. Automation is a perk of higher tiers.
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Until seeing McAfee’s implementation of this feature, I hadn’t really thought much about the danger of old, abandoned accounts. Getting rid of those you don’t need is a seriously smart idea. It also means giving McAfee full access to your email account, but chances are good you’ve already done that to let it detect and flag scam messages in your Inbox. If you’ve chosen not to have McAfee filter scams in your email, you may want to remove the tap on your email when you’ve finished working through all the old accounts. You’re paying more attention now, less likely to abandon more accounts. And you can always hook up your email for a checkup in six months or so.
Social Privacy Manager
We all know that sharing too much on social media can get you into trouble, anything from offending friends to helping scammers bamboozle you. But what are the correct privacy settings? Even if you sort it out, the site in question might later make changes to its available settings. McAfee’s Social Privacy Manager becomes your social secretary, examining all your accounts, developing recommendations for better privacy, and (with your permission) correcting those settings.
You’ll find this feature in the Privacy section of the main menu. Like Online Account Cleanup just above, it has the box-and-arrow icon that means clicking it will send you online to manage the feature. And from the online dashboard, you’ll install the Social Privacy Manager extension for your default browser. Note that you get the full power of this feature even at the entry-level Premium tier.
McAfee offers to tighten up your privacy settings for Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, X/Twitter, and YouTube. A similar feature in Trend Micro Internet Security just covers Facebook, LinkedIn, and X/Twitter. In testing, McAfee’s solution proved more comprehensive.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)Social media privacy isn’t a one-size-fits-all affair, so McAfee starts by asking you to pick your user type: Unplugged, Explorer, Connector, or Socializer. The tightest settings appropriate to the Unplugged user would prove too restrictive to the sharing-centric Socializer, and so on.
After trying the system, I wished for an option to assign different user types to different platforms. On X/Twitter, I would be a Socializer, broadcasting information about my new articles to everyone. But my Facebook account is just for sharing thoughts with my friends, making me a Connector. As a LinkedIn user, I’m more of an Explorer, or perhaps Unplugged—I only use LinkedIn to arrange introductions, the way it was designed.
The Social Privacy Manager needs to reach into your various accounts to capture your existing privacy settings and make any needed changes. As you log in to link each account, the browser extension captures your connection.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)Even though I’ve used this helpful advisor the last time I reviewed McAfee+, it still found three Facebook settings for me to review. I leave my employment, college, and high school information publicly visible, on the chance it will help old friends find me. McAfee reasonably advises changing those to Friends only, but I continue to walk on the wild side.
Testing this feature a couple of years ago, I wiped out a dozen or so settings that allowed LinkedIn to target me with ads. This time, the only suggestion was that I limit who can find me using my public email. I didn’t take that advice because I want people to find me on LinkedIn.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)As with the similar Trend Micro feature, McAfee advised me to limit my X posts to followers only. But I use X to broadcast each new review—I want everyone to see those posts. I simply ignored that suggestion.
The Social Media Manager is truly useful for perfecting your privacy settings. You should run through the process and seriously consider following its recommendations, unless they clash with the way you use the particular social account. Once you’ve completed this review, you may want to unlink the accounts and delete the extension, just to tie up loose ends.
Identity Theft Protection in McAfee+
When a security suite has mastered local protection against attacks on your devices and data, includes VPN protection for data in transit, and offers scans and services to proactively protect your privacy, what’s left? Identity theft protection, that’s what! At its higher tiers, McAfee+ extends its scanning to the dark web, monitors your credit rating, and offers cash-backed help if you get caught by identity theft. Its monitoring doesn’t go into the detail you’ll find at Norton’s highest tier, but it definitely covers all the important facets of identity theft monitoring and remediation.
Identity Monitoring for All Users
McAfee’s Identity Monitoring feature is present in all tiers of McAfee+ and also in McAfee Total Protection. You enter a boatload of personal information to be monitored, and McAfee reports details about any data breach that includes your personal information. You review each breach event and take the appropriate action, such as changing a password. Then you let McAfee know that you’ve handled that one, so it moves out of the active list.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)It’s tedious. Many of the reported breaches may well be a decade or more old. But grit your teeth and work through that initial report. Now, if something new comes in, from a new and serious breach, it will stand out.
Credit Monitoring
Clicking Credit Monitoring in the main menu will take you to the Credit Monitoring section in the online identity dashboard. Here, you’ll see a big display of your score, with a color-coded legend explaining the numbers.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)Below the score display, you can click each of the three credit bureau names to see what positive and negative factors went into your score from that bureau. For example, having a few inquiries on your credit is a plus, as is credit that’s not all recently established. A total credit card balance that’s high compared with your available credit is a negative.
You can drill in for a detailed display of the credit report from each bureau. There’s even a link to get help correcting any errors you may find. This is a spot where your pricing tier matters. Ultimate subscribers get credit scores and reports from all three bureaus, with the score updated daily. Those subscribing at the Advanced level get reporting on one bureau, updated monthly. As for the entry-level Premium tier, alas, it offers no credit monitoring.
One way to prevent account takeover or other abuse of your credit is to lock or freeze your credit reports. McAfee+ can directly lock your TransUnion report, and it also includes links and instructions for freezing all three bureaus, plus up-and-coming contender Innovis. Credit Lock is an Ultimate feature, while Credit Freeze is available at both the Advanced and Ultimate tiers.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)You can also put a lock preventing new bank accounts in your name, freeze access to your utility bill history and to the opening of new utility accounts, and freeze accounts managed by other agencies, such as CoreLogic, ChexSystems, and SageStream.
Transaction Monitoring
Like the similar feature in Norton and Bitdefender, Transaction Monitoring closely watches your accounts and calls out any anomalies. Of course, you must give it access to any account you want tracked. This feature is powered by McAfee partner Yodlee.
The page for adding financial institutions displays big buttons for Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America, and seven other big names. If yours isn’t displayed, just start typing its name in the search box. You will need to log into the website of each bank you choose to track, giving McAfee access to transaction details.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)The next step is to review or change the limits that will trigger a notification. Out of the box, McAfee alerts you upon detecting a deposit larger than $400 or a purchase larger than $400. It will also trigger if a recurring bill or subscription payment changes by more than 10%. If those don’t fit your financial style, change them! Once you set up all your accounts, you can put this feature aside. If it notifies you of an anomaly, you dig in for details and, if necessary, contact the bank or merchant.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)Suspicious transactions appear in a handy list. Even handier, you can remove the filter to show all transactions in this list. If you use more than one credit card and don’t always remember which card you used for what purchase, this combined list can provide a handy cross-account search option.
Identity Restoration
If identity thieves get access to your personal information, the various monitoring features should let you know about the attack quickly. Even so, the thieves may do some damage to your credit and identity. In that case, McAfee’s Licensed Restoration Experts can help. Identity restoration is available at the Advanced and Ultimate levels.
When your identity problems stem from a lost wallet, the restoration experts handle canceling and replacing the IDs and credit/debit cards for you and arranging for replacements. Bitdefender Ultimate, among others, has you record the various cards found in your wallet during setup to make the recovery process easier. With McAfee, as with Aura and IDShield, the restoration experts jump in to help without requiring that you have previously recorded your wallet contents.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)McAfee backs the restoration process with a guarantee to spend up to a million dollars on identity restoration and on reimbursing any stolen funds, up to two million for Ultimate subscribers. That million-dollar guarantee is standard in this field, though some offer even more. For example, upgrading Bitdefender Ultimate Security to the Plus level also raises the guarantee to two million and adds $25,000 specifically for ransomware losses. McAfee+ offers the same $25,000 ransomware coverage at the Ultimate level, though it comes out of the two million. Norton’s top-level LifeLock protection backs the restoration process with a total of three million dollars.
If you dig into the actual insurance policy, you’ll find that there are some limits on specific expenditures. For example, McAfee allocates no more than $1,000 each for initial legal consultation, travel expenses, child care, and CPA costs. You can be reimbursed for lost wages, but only up to $1,500 per week and for no more than eight weeks. These sub-limits are common, though Norton doesn’t use them.
The TransUnion Connection
You may have noticed a note in the big credit score chart that mentioned TransUnion as the source of the data. There are a couple of other spots where TransUnion stands out, such as the simple switch to freeze TransUnion credit compared with DIY instructions for the others. McAfee+ does have a TransUnion connection, along with other partners such as Yodlee, for transaction monitoring.
Note, though, that this is not the full TransUnion-powered identity protection found in Avast One Platinum, Bitdefender Ultimate Security, ESET Home Security Ultimate, and Malwarebytes Ultimate. Identity protection is almost identical across these four, with just a few differences in features covered. They extend simple data breach tracking into the BreachIQ scoring system, which includes several action items to improve your privacy. The credit score simulator lets you see what effect various financial actions would have on your score. A page of resources offers calculators for projects such as comparing loans, form letters for privacy-related topics, and links to opt out of junk mail and calls.
That said, McAfee hits all the most important notes. It tracks and reports your credit scores, warns when your data appears in breaches, and offers help for problems ranging from a lost wallet to full-on identity theft. You can set it to monitor your accounts for anomalous activity. Its personal data cleanup proactively eliminates loose personal data that might serve an identity thief. And the automated reporting of old accounts, with the option to cancel them, is a true gem.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: McAfee)
McAfee+
With McAfee+, the company's top-tier security suite, you get protection for all your devices, guaranteed expert help for identity theft remediation, and innovative options to reduce your online exposure.