About Us

Who We Are

Antivirus-Review.com has been publishing independent consumer-antivirus reviews since 2018. We are a small editorial team of reviewers, writers, and a part-time test lead who sit down with each product, install it, run it for days, read the community complaints, and then write what we actually think.

We are not owned by an antivirus vendor. We do not have a parent company that also sells security software. Nobody on the editorial team has ever worked for Norton, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, McAfee, ESET, Avast, AVG, Trend Micro, or any other vendor we cover. That independence is the only thing that makes a review like this worth reading, and it is the one thing we will not compromise.

The site runs on a small WordPress-plus-static-HTML stack, hosted independently. No corporate PR team controls what goes on the page. The byline reflects the actual person who wrote the review.

Our Editorial Principles

Every review on this site follows the same five-point editorial standard:

• Evidence-based, not marketing-based. We start from independent lab data — AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives, SE Labs — and cross-check against what users actually report. Vendor datasheets are read but not trusted.
• Community signal included. We read r/antivirus, r/techsupport, r/cybersecurity, and product-specific subs (r/bitdefender, r/Norton, r/Kaspersky) before writing. If a subreddit is full of identical removal complaints, that is a data point that belongs in the review.
• Hands-on before publish. The test lead installs each product on a current test rig and runs it through a minimum one-week evaluation. CPU, RAM, scan time, boot delta, and VPN throughput are measured, not estimated.
• No fabricated quotes. When we paraphrase community sentiment, we attribute it to the thread or subreddit, not to a made-up user persona. We will never invent a "Sarah M., small business owner" quote.
• Dated content. Every review shows when it was last updated. If a vendor changed pricing, shipped a new version, or got banned by a government (as happened with Kaspersky in the US in 2024), we patch the page — we do not leave stale claims standing.

How We Fund the Site

This section is where most "About" pages get vague. We will be specific.

Some outbound links on this site are affiliate links. When a reader clicks one of those links and subsequently purchases a subscription, we may receive a commission from the vendor. That commission is what keeps the site running — it pays for hosting, test licenses, the test rig hardware, and the writers' time.

What affiliate funding does not do:

• It does not change our rankings. A product at position #3 is there because of test data, community signal, and hands-on results — not because its affiliate payout is higher than the product at position #5.
• It does not trigger softer criticism. If a product has a 180-day renewal-price doubling pattern, we document it, regardless of whether the vendor pays us a commission.
• It does not change which products we review. We choose what to cover based on what readers are searching for, not which vendor has the biggest affiliate program.

Some products we cover have no affiliate relationship with us at all — Microsoft Defender, free tools like ClamWin, and a handful of vendors whose affiliate programs we declined. Those reviews follow the exact same standard as the ones with an affiliate link.

What We Test

Our coverage is focused on the consumer and small-business segments. Specifically:

• Consumer antivirus suites — Norton 360, Bitdefender Total Security, Kaspersky Premium, McAfee+, ESET Home Security, Avast One, AVG Ultimate, Trend Micro Maximum Security, Webroot, Intego (for Mac), plus a curated editorial reference layer of long-tail brands (Sophos Home, HitmanPro, Emsisoft, Panda, TotalAV, VIPRE, 360 Total Security) we keep documented for direct-search intent. We do not recommend the long-tail set as primary picks — see our methodology for how scoring decides what we feature on the homepage.
• Small-business endpoint products — the business-tier versions of the above, suitable for 1 to 50 seats, not enterprise-grade EDR.
• Free tools — Microsoft Defender, Avast Free, AVG Free, Bitdefender Free, Malwarebytes Free, and similar. We cover free tools honestly even when there is no affiliate link to offer.
• Compare and "vs" scenarios — head-to-head product comparisons on our /compare hub, and "best for X" roundups (best for Windows 11, best for Mac, best for families, best free).

What we do not cover: enterprise EDR, XDR, NDR, SIEM, or SOC tooling. CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2, Palo Alto Cortex — these are products for IT teams with dedicated security engineers, not home users, and they need a different kind of review than what we publish.

What We Do NOT Do

The clearest way to describe editorial policy is in the negative. Here is what will never happen on this site:

• No sponsored content. We do not accept payment in exchange for a review, a placement, a featured-product slot, or a positive tone. We have turned down these offers. Any page labeled "Sponsored" would disqualify the site from the kind of reader trust we are trying to build.
• No pay-for-placement. Our "best of" rankings are not auctions. A vendor cannot buy the #1 spot, a "recommended" badge, or a mention in the top-three compare table.
• No vendor-approved reviews. Some publications let vendors review draft copy before it goes live. We do not. The vendor sees the review when the reader does.
• No ghostwritten vendor PR. If a vendor sends us a pre-written "guest post," we reject it. Everything published here is written by the editorial team.
• No stale claims. Rankings, pricing, and test scores change. When they change, we update the page, add a note if the change is material, and move on. We do not let a 2021 review pretend to be current.

How to Contact Us

If you spot an error, want to flag a pricing change, or want to ask about our methodology, visit /contact-us. Corrections are welcome and taken seriously. Press and vendor outreach should also use the contact page.

For methodology deep-dive — exactly how we score, which test rigs we use, how we weight lab data against community signal — see /how-we-test.