This article is also available in Spanish: AVG Free Anti-Virus vs. Avira AntiVir Personal Talking about a free anti-virus a few years back would have been blasphemy, while today, users have the luxury to be picky about the security brand to ent rust the protection of their system to. And even if nowadays there are at least eight free anti-malware programs available, not too many of the well-known developers have given the market a free, longer lasting taste sample oftheir technology, besides the trial versions of the paid products. Kaspersky, ESET or Symantec, well-established names in the security field, have still to align to the trend of maintaining a free product in order t o gain user base. However, this does not mean that the choices left are to be discarded as inefficient. On the contrary, some of the freebies managed to rise above paid products. This time around, we have decided to put to the test two of the most appreciated free anti- malware products among freebie users: the long time used AVG Anti-Virus Free against the recently updated Avira AntiVir Personal. They are both reliable security tools that have earned their name and reputation through their quality and constant improvements. As far as the amount of followers is concerned, it seems that the race is pretty tight, with both companies being backed by more than 100 million users each. AVG reported surpassing the 110 million threshold back in January this year, while Avira boasts 145 million users worldwide. So, they are both big wigs when it gets down to keeping your computer malware-free. Although they belong to different developers, products like these come with a shared set offeatures. In this case, the common ground of the two apps is the antivirus, anti-spyware and anti-rootkit components, real-time protection feature and heuristic analysis of the suspicious items. Of course, the different engines rule over the behavior of the shared components, as well as overall functioning of the product. Apart from these similarities, the two freebies are as different as can be, with AVG providing a larger rack of options and components. In comparison, Avira brings a rather limited extension of its capabilities, providing its users, besides the aforementioned features, with generic repair and quick malware removal. The larger pile of possibilities in AVGs yard includes email scanning capa bilities and a link ve rification tool. These definitely give AVG the edge over its German competitor. Installation Installing the two products goes fairly the same. In both cases, you get to choose between a customized process or a standard one that c ompletes faster and kicks off protection suitable for most of the users. However, Avira seems to be les s confident in the installation process than AVG, as it lets you enable the creation of a restore point that will he lp revert the system to its previous state in case something goes wrong.
