AVG  Free is an antimalware security suite that includes an active file and email scanner, plus Web browsing protection. Avast Software (AVG’s main competitor) bought AVG Technologies in October 2016, but the two brands and product lines remain separate.

Antivirus It doesn’t look like it at first glance, but AVG Antivirus Free offers a variety of sliders and checkboxes to let you tweak its scanning behavior. Click the Menu button and select Settings to see all your options. They are categorized and nested intuitively, and you can create backups of your settings (it would also be nice to have an option to reset everything to defaults).

AVG AntiVirus FREE 2018 is a fast, effective and extremely popular antivirus tool, mixing the best of AVAST and AVG’s technology.

A stylish and appealing Windows 10 interface makes it easy to see the latest security status for various areas, with panels for “Computer” and “Web & Email” (there’s also greyed out “Hacker Attacks”, “Private Data” and “Payments” which are modules in the paid-for AVG Internet Security 2018).

Each panel represents an aspect of AVG FREE’s protection – antivirus, browsing protection, behavioural monitoring and email scanning – and you can click any of these to enable, disable or configure it to suit your needs.

Helpful explanations of jargon: A lot of settings have an “i” icon you can put your mouse pointer on to display a small pop-up window with more information. If that’s not enough, there’s a context-sensitive? button in the upper right that will take you to an AVG webpage with more detailed information about what the setting does. Ideally, this extra layer of info would be available offline, but such a feature is unfortunately rare among antivirus apps.

Smartphone, safe phone

AVG AntiVirus for Android guards your mobile phone against malware attacks and threats to your privacy. We give you on-the-go protection against unsafe apps, Anti-theft locker & tracker, and plenty more security and performance features.

Historically above-average malware detection: According to the tests performed in the past by independent labs such as AV-Test and AV Comparatives, AVG has performed moderately better than one would expect from a free malware scanner.

Upsell-oriented interface: Antivirus companies prefer paying customers, and they are sometimes more aggressive about converting free users than we’d like. When you double-click the AVG icon in the Windows system tray, it doesn’t take you to the antivirus interface. Instead, it displays AVG Zen, which advertises three tools not included in the AVG Antivirus Free package: PC Tuneup, HMA Pro VPN, and Web Tuneup. There’s a button on the far left to access your antivirus, but the following window divides your tools into Basic