Free Antivirus usually lack of full functions, or come with integrated bloatware, adware or spyware - track your data, pops ads, including for their full version, or bloated with additional tools, which increases the attack surface. Isn’t a good habit and Windows Defender great enough?
Actually this was, is, and probably will be a huge debate.
Before starting, free antivirus don’t always come with pop-ups, bloatware and telemetry : the AVs you are describing are especially those from Gen Digital (Avast/AVG/Avira), which are known for this harassing behavior. However, firstly free antiviruses don’t all spam you with their ads to upgrade to paid, hopefully, and secondly in most case you should have settings to regulate that. Maybe lots of people are complaining with Avast Free, but I’ve seen people who have never seen a single pop-up while using it. Spyware and telemetry is another thing, it’s more specific to Avast and AVG especially, don’t know if they really changed it or not.
The only main reason I would really keep using Windows Defender over free AV is real-time protection. Sure, WD’s one isn’t perfect, but this specific protection on free AVs is completely nerfed even with well-known companies like Bitdefender or Kaspersky. But on the other hand, most free AVs are based off paid AVs whose detection rates and scan varieties are way more polished than Windows Defender. Surely those are getting nerfed too, but in the case of BitDef, Kaspy or Avast, to say the least, virus scans are more efficient. As for the firewall, 3rd-party firewalls made by other AVs then WD are generally better than Windows default firewall. Although often for free AVs you don’t get that more secure firewall, you are still tied with Windows Defender at that point.
Overall I’d say most people who use free AVs do it because they want more safety and they will feel more safe if they get one. Windows Defender has improved over the years but not enough at their eyes, which I can understand, it’s still pretty easy to disable it.
Honestly, the best you could get for free is Kaspersky Free if you don’t live in the US, BitDefender Free if you live in the US, and Windows Defender + Malwarebytes Free (which acts as a second virus scanner) if you wanna have a better scanner while keeping a good enough real-time protection.
There are a lot of clueless people who don’t act by common sense.
If you can’t spend money, obviously you use Defender.
If you can, you can buy whatever you want.
You have to see the difference between different antivirus products.
There are plenty of bloatware and scareware data selling antivirus companies that no one recommends. But there are also good antivirus companies that provides great protection with advanced features.
Windows Defender is unreliable in many cases. Mostly because it lacks in terms of detecting new/unknown threats. It relies on the cloud and signatures in order to detect threats. It is also vulnerable to exploits attackers use such as the exclusion folder, password protected archives etc. If Windows Defender was a super good product, normal innocent people wouldn’t actively get infected while using it. Don’t get me wrong, Windows Defender is a lot better than what it used to be, but it’s not as good as some other products.
I use Bitdefender free at the moment, better than Windows Defender, and it’s great, it doesn’t sell your user data, it provides great real time protection and behavioral monitoring, doesn’t take up much resources (for me) and it’s free. Although it is great, I am considering moving over to Kaspersky, an even better product that offers better protection than Windows Defender.
Watching TPSC you’ll eventually understand the difference between Windows Defender and other antivirus products: https://youtu.be/a5O4MiCAveU?si=1jyrBUgeLWYtuqJk
They get scammed, basically. Microsoft Defender consistently ranks among the best malware protection money can buy, and it’s free. You don’t need anything else, but there’s still people out there that claim you do. So, people find something that’s “free”, which either doesn’t offer any better protection or tries to convince you to get the paid version “for better protection”. In short, a lot of people aren’t even using “free” antivirus, because if they didn’t know enough to avoid it in the first place, they likely also don’t know better than to start paying for it, because of some scare tactic.
Old habbits. Because they dont know that since windows 10 you dont need no “free antivirus” anymore. For a normal user that knows how a pc works. Defender and brain. exe is completely sufficient.
Windows defender most often will detect malware that has already been installed to your PC!
That is, in my mind, way too late.…
If you do not believe me then check out all defender related threads here on reddit…
Everyone claims that defender alerts about malware-FILES on their harddrive (that means the malware has already attacked their PC and these has had plenty of time to do their dirty things) and most often they also claim to need help since Defender is unable to remove these malicious files…
In my eyes this is not good enough!...
Defender is, in my eyes, to be seen as a protection between you uninstalling one 3rd party antivirus software and until you have installed the new 3rd party antivirus software… No more!
20 years ago a lot of people would be laughing at people using Windows Defender and how much a joke trusting them for safety.
I can imagine people who aren’t terminally online could still feel that way.
Defender is better than nothing. But it’s still lacking of features and a lot of modern malware can go around defender. Free av are not a lot better most of the time.
Proper protection with all the features that are not just a signature based scan, will cost money.
Cheapest Bitdefender for me and a VPN with added filtering when I’m doing any online “exploration”. I like having a anti-vir that lets me know what it’s doing, when it’s needing upgrade, then upgrading in under 3min WITHOUT interrupting my entire PC…(oh small footprint is nice too but not a deal breaker)
Kaspersky detects Lantern as a malware for political reasons, besides that, I’m not a fan of soviet/russian stuff including the companies that pay tax to Putin.
Most free AVs lack of active realtime defence and HIPS, so they are basically useless. A ransomeware won’t wait for your on-demand scan before its running. Also, whatever the free AVs are based on, their processes and/or system services, including some paid ones, can be terminated manually, if users can terminate them, trojans can too.
Anyway I think the root cause of most security incidences on Windows is Windows itself, its poorly designed in both system and user interface. At least it should guide users to use a non-admin account for daily use after its installation, and containerize its apps.
so any suggestions then if you have it all figured out ?
Kaspersky remains still better in terms of efficacy even in its free version. I can understand that you don’t wanna use it because of its Russian origin, or whatever this controversy is about now, but lots of people don’t even care about that. They just want their PC protected.
Ransomware is indeed another thing I should have talked about. Most AVs will detect it if you do a scan before opening it, or even if you open it, if their real-time protection is decent, but what they don’t have compared to some paid AVs is the rollback feature used to counterattack the ransomware. I know WD does have a ransomware protection where it protects or at least tries to protect specific folders from being encrypted, but it doesn’t have that rollback too.
Anyways, Windows Defender has always been a good idea but firstly as you said the UI is kinda barebones, and secondly there are a bit too much usable security breaches. I’m not saying that WD has more than the other AVs (which isn’t the case, especially if you compare it to garbage like McAfee), but these are sadly more easy to get around. There is literally a surprising amount of trojans whose goal is just to disable Windows Defender. I’m not against using Defender but it needs to be more safe, more sophisticated. For an average Windows user, why not, but for someone more tech-savvy…I’m not sure this is the best option.