Oct 20, 2012 Never install any commercial 'anti-virus' products for the Mac, as they all do more harm than good. If you need to be able to detect Windows malware in your files, use the free software ClamXav — nothing else.
Best Mac AntivirusKaspersky Internet Security for Mac
Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac's top-shelf malware detection and barely there system impact make it the best antivirus solution.
Best Free Mac AntivirusAvast Free Mac Security
Avast Free Mac Security's malware-squashing proficiency, negligible performance impact and included password manager make it the best free option.
Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac
Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac offers top-shelf malware detection and protects files from ransomware.
After evaluating eight free and paid antivirus products, we've chosen Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac ($40 per year) as the best antivirus for Mac. It had a nearly invisible impact on system performance, and it caught all malware.
Avast Free Mac Security is our favorite free option, as it provided nearly perfect malware protection and an easy-to-use interface with an imperceptible performance hit.
You do need an antivirus program on your Mac. Recent years have seen more Mac malware and adware than ever before, from Trojans to targeted attacks, supply-chain attacks like the XcodeGhost attack and even encrypting ransomware.
MORE: Best Antivirus Software and Apps
Latest Security Alerts and Threats
— Google pushed out an emergency patch for its Chrome browser for Windows, macOS and Linux after a vulnerability was found that could let a malicious website take over a computer. ADVICE: Copy and paste 'chrome://settings/help' into your Chrome address bar to make sure your browser is updated to version 76.0.3809.132.
— Apple patched a security hole that let you -- or a malicious website -- jailbreak an iPhone and install any kind of app, including potential malware. (This is not among the flaws that let several websites infect any iPhone.) ADVICE: Make sure your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch is updated to iOS 12.4.1.
— Spammers have been sending emails to inject scam or malicious messages in regular people's Google Calendar pages. ADVICE: Follow our instructions to stop phony Google Calendar notifications from happening to you.
How We Tested
To find the best antivirus for Mac desktops and laptops, we evaluate ease of use, interface and performance impact, we installed each AV program on the same Late 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display running macOS 10.12 Sierra. It was powered by a 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7 processor and had 8GB of RAM and 70GB of data stored on a 512GB SSD.
We conducted our own tests in July and August 2017 based on how much each antivirus product affected our laptop's performance. To do this, we used our custom OpenOffice benchmark, which matches 20,000 names and addresses in a spreadsheet. We measured how long it took to run a quick scan and a full scan while the laptop crunched numbers in the background.
We assessed how easy each program was to use and the number of useful extra features it offered (including free add-on software). To gauge how effective each package was at stopping malware, we used the results of evaluations conducted in May 2017 by AV-TEST, a well-regarded independent product-testing lab in Germany, and results from other tests conducted in July 2017 by AV-Comparatives, a similarly well-respected firm in Austria.
Best Mac Antivirus
Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
Kaspersky Internet Security is the best antivirus for Macs because it offers both the lowest system impact and some of the best malware-detection rates recorded. It even provides extra security features, including parental controls and options to lock down your webcam and stop websites from tracking your browsing activity. If you're willing to pay to protect your Mac from malware, Kaspersky Internet Security is the best option available.
Best Free Mac Antivirus
Avast Free Mac Security
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
Avast Free Mac Security caught 99.9 percent of all malware, packs in a password manager, barely leaves a smudge on system impact and doesn't charge a dime. If only it caught 100 percent of malware, as Kaspersky did.
Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac is one of only a few solutions we tested that offers perfect malware detection. Further, its modern, streamlined interface places on-demand scans front and center. Bitdefender has dropped from first place, though, because its system-impact scores don't match the flawless marks posted by Kaspersky.
Norton 360 Deluxe
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
Norton 360 Deluxe may offer excellent protection, but it charges more (after the first year) than its competitors do, without offering as many perks. Norton AntiVirus Plus offers similar protection for a single Mac, but with fewer perks. Still, both have always-on-call customer support.
AVG Antivirus for Mac
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
If you're looking for the best antivirus for Mac without having to pay, AVG AntiVirus for Mac is not too shabby, with its 99.9 percent detection rate and easy-to-use design. Unfortunately, other free competitors provide extras (Sophos with parental controls, Avast's password manager) that AVG does not.
Best for Families
Sophos Home
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
With Sophos Home for Mac's simple interface and low system-performance impact, you'll barely realize the program is shielding you until you need it. Anyone with young children at home will find Sophos' parental controls useful, as they allow for remote scans and checks, and let you block sites by category. Sophos even keeps a log of when users try to reach banned pages. This program's major drawback, though, is its lackluster malware-detection rate.
Avira Free Antivirus for Mac
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
Once our favorite, Avira Free Antivirus for Mac is no longer the best antivirus for Mac. That's because it is a hair shy of perfection in its malware detection, and fell behind in system-performance testing, earning some of the higher performance impacts recorded.
McAfee Antivirus Plus
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
While McAfee's unlimited licenses mean you can support a whole family of Macs (and PCs and Android devices, too), this program's lack of special features (for a paid version) make it hard to recommend. Further, we don't have malware-detection testing scores for McAfee, so its protection powers are unproven.
- Pros
Certified by one independent testing lab. Speedy full scan. Excellent phishing protection for Chrome and Firefox. Network security scanner. Password manager. Website rating. Active Do Not Track. Free.
- Cons
Poor phishing protection in Safari. Password manager includes only basic features.
- Bottom Line
Avast Security (for Mac) delivers effective malware protection along with unusual bonus features. Phishing protection only works well in Chrome and Firefox, but this free utility is still worth a look.
For years, Mac users basked in the mystique of virus-free computing. It wasn't true, alas, and as time goes on we see more and more Mac-specific malware attacks. The situation may not be nearly as bad as for Window or Android, but prudence still dictates that you install antivirus protection on your Macs as well. Avast Security offers Macs protection against malware along with advanced features including a password manager and a network security scanner, all for a cost of exactly nothing.
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Installation went quickly, though I did find I had to separately activate the password manager and the Online Security browser extension from the Tools page. You'll also find Avast's SecureLine VPN on that page, but it's not free like the others. When you click to activate, you get a choice of signing up for $2.99 per month or starting a 30-day trial.
The product's spacious main window features a large status indicator centered in an otherwise-empty white region, with a menu down the left side. It's a very different appearance from Avast Free Antivirus on Windows, which uses pops of purple and green on a dark gray background.
Pricing and OS Support
Like Bitdefender and Kaspersky, Avast supports macOS versions back to 10.9 Mavericks. If you have an antique Mac that for some reason can't even run Mavericks, consider ESET Cyber Security (for Mac),
Like Sophos and Avira, Avast offers full antivirus protection for free. Avast Security Pro (for Mac) costs $59.99 per year for one license or $69.99 for three. The Pro edition adds ransomware protection and real-time notification when new devices connect to your network. The free edition is strictly for non-commercial use; in a business setting, you must pay up.
Good Malware Protection Scores
When reviewing
It took years to develop my hands-on tools and tests for Windows. Most of them don't carry over to the macOS platform. Hence lab results become extremely important for my Mac antivirus reviews. Two of the labs I follow, AV-Test Institute and AV-Comparatives, test Mac antivirus, and Avast participates with one of them.
Experts at AV-Comparatives test Mac antivirus products using the latest macOS malware. They also evaluate each product's ability to detect Windows malware. Why? While a Trojan written for Windows wouldn't run on a Mac, the Mac could serve as a carrier.
Avast managed 99.9 percent protection against Mac malware. That's very good—better than most. However, Bitdefender and Kaspersky exhibited 100 percent protection. In the Windows malware test, Avast detected 100 percent of the samples. Most competing products also took 100 percent. However, Webroot only caught 75 percent, and Intego Mac Internet Security X9 got just 18 percent. Like most tested products, Avast received certification from AV-Comparatives for Mac antivirus protection.
Having one certification is good; having two is better. Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Sophos are among the products that received certifications from both labs for Mac malware protection.
Scan Choices
Avast offers several scans to improve your Mac's security. A full scan on the Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch that I use for testing took 14.5 minutes, just a hair over Intego's 14 minutes, and quicker than the 18 minutes required by Avira. The average for recent products is 24 minutes, so Avast proved quite speedy. Norton is the current speed champ, completing a full scan in 10 minutes.
There's a separate scan for removable volumes, though you can configure the full scan to include them. I scanned a thumb drive containing my Windows malware collection and found that it quarantined 85 percent of them. For comparison, Avira detected 82 percent of these, while Sophos Home (for Mac) wiped out every single one.
There's no predefined quick scan, which makes sense given the speed of the full scan. The custom scan settings confused me, though. As with the full scan, you can add file locations to exclude from scanning, and configure it to scan Time Machine backups. But the full scan's settings include those
You can schedule a daily, weekly, or monthly scan if desired. Settings for a scheduled scan include two additional choices. You can set it to skip scanning if your device is running on batteries, and you can have it wake from sleep if necessary, to perform its scheduled scan. Avira Free Antivirus for Mac not only offers scheduled scanning, it defaults to a weekly scan with no effort on your part. Sophos skips scheduled scanning, relying instead on real-time protection.
Network Security Scan
The final scan choice doesn't look for malware. Rather, it collects information about all the devices on your network and flags any security problems. On my own network, the scan finished in just under three minutes.
The scanner correctly reported that my main router has an open port that could theoretically become a point of attack. It's true that the port is open, as my ISP uses it to run remote diagnostics when necessary. But that function requires a key that only the ISP has.
More interestingly, it found serious problems with a network storage device (fortunately, one that I'm not currently using). Not only does this device have numerous open ports, it's vulnerable to a buffer overrun attack. Avast advised updating the firmware; I just unplugged it.
The report also serves as a list of everything that's connected to your network, identifying each by name and type. It's similar to the output of Bitdefender Home Scanner. With both products, I found devices with names like unknown6542990b6483—not much help! Bitdefender includes an option to edit the name and type, and it remembers your edits in subsequent scans. I'd like to see that ability in Avast.
Excellent Phishing Protection in Chrome and Firefox
In the Windows realm, one thing that differentiates Avast's premium product is better protection against phishing sites, those fraudulent sites that imitate secure sites and try to steal your login credentials. The free Windows edition scored very poorly, while the premium edition did an extremely good job. Based on initial round of testing, the Mac product's phishing protection, both free and Pro, seemed to match that of the free Windows product, meaning it's not very good.
I learned later that Avast's phishing protection is not fully functional in Safari. The developers are working on making it completely browser-independent. In the meantime, they advise using Chrome or Firefox. Norton was also having problems during my original test, so I tossed those results and started fresh.
My phishing protection test uses URLs reported as fraudulent, but not yet verified. Typically, these are only a few hours old. That's
I simultaneously launch each URL in Safari on the Mac and in a browser protected by long-time antiphishing champ Symantec Norton Security Premium. I also launch each in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, relying on the browser's built-in protection. If any of the five browsers throw an error message, I discard the URL. A true phishing fraud masquerades as a secure site and tries to capture your login credentials. Any URL that doesn't match that profile also gets junked.
I've written a Windows-based tool that handles launching URLs and capturing results. On the Mac, I copy and paste each URL into Safari and manually record the result. When I have enough data, I dump the five reports into Excel for comparison.
The malefactors that perpetrate these phishing frauds are clever. They're always devising new techniques to get past security software. That being the case, I report results not as hard figures but as the difference between the product under test and the others.
Tested using Safari's incomplete phishing protection, Avast's detection rate lagged Norton's by 32 percent, and Norton itself was having a bad day. All three browsers soundly drubbed Avast. When I retested using Chrome, Avast tied with Norton and beat the detection rates of the three browsers. That's impressive. Of the Mac security products I've tested, only Bitdefender did better, beating Norton by 5 percentage points.
While phishing is browser-agnostic, phishing protection is not. Bitdefender beat Norton by 5 percentage points, but its Windows cousin more than doubled that gap. Even Symantec Norton Security Deluxe (for Mac) didn't detect many frauds that its Windows edition caught.
Site Rating and Do Not Track
Like McAfee AntiVirus Plus (for Mac), Avira, Trend Micro, and several others, Avast marks up results in popular search engines with green for safe, red for dangerous, and gray for unknown. You can click to vote a page up or down. Simple!
Clicking the Online Safety toolbar button displays the status
Digging into the settings for Online Safety reveals a hidden gem: SiteCorrect. If you mistype a site name, this feature offers to change to the correct name. You can even set it to automatically make the fix, with no prompt. However, in testing, I couldn't tease it into action. I tried pyapal.com, pcmga.com, whitehous.gov, wallmart.com, and many others, with no reaction from SiteCorrect.
Basic Password Manager
Like Avast's Windows antivirus, this product includes
There's no limit on the number of devices, and you can sync your passwords between them all, macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. Avast doesn't keep your passwords in the cloud. Rather, it uses your Avast account to authorize syncing data that's stored locally on your devices.
Once you've enabled syncing on a device, that device becomes an authenticator for adding more devices. The new device displays a numeric code, and the existing device gets a notification with the same code. If the numbers match, just click to approve. What if you lose all your devices? On installation, Avast sends an email with a recovery link; don't lose that email!
On each of your devices, you create a master password to protect the local password stash. The master passwords need not be the same, but who'd want the confusion of making them different? Avast offers advice on creating a strong password, with a color-coded line representing the strength of what you've typed. It's not easy to get all the way to green, but Avast doesn't require it. In fact, it accepted 'Password' as a master password.
Avast offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. When you log in to a site, the extension offers to save your credentials. If you come back to the site, it fills your saved credentials. Clicking the key icon in one of the fields brings up a menu showing all the credentials you've saved. And it handles two-page logins like what Google uses.
Avast doesn't use the typical menu of logins attached to its toolbar button. Rather, you click the button and launch the main application. Unlike the Windows edition, this is a separate app, not integrated with the main antivirus. Its main window is seriously tall and skinny, like something you'd find on a smartphone, and you have only limited control over its size. Clicking an item opens its details, with a link to open the site itself.
You can also use the password manager to sync and share secure notes between your devices. These are simple, unformatted text snippets, suitable for saving such things as locker combinations and non-digital passwords.
The left-rail menu offers simple icons to manage passwords and secure notes, and one to bring up the password generator. By default, it generates 18-character passwords using all character types. You can set the length anywhere from four to 30 characters using a slider.
Avast analyzes the strength of your master password when you first create it, but not when you update it. Avast Pro Antivirus on Windows can analyze your passwords, flagging any weak or duplicate ones. The free Windows edition used to include this feature, but it was recently enhanced and redefined as a Pro-only feature.
This password manager handles all the basic tasks and no more. Fancy features like secure sharing, two-factor authentication, and password inheritance aren't here. But you do get it along with the antivirus, at no charge, so if it does enough for you, go ahead and use it.
Worth a Look
AV-Comparatives certified Avast Security as an effective Mac antivirus. Impressively, it offers a network scanner and password manager, features often reserved for full security suites. On the other hand, the password manager handles basic functions only—nothing advanced. And while Avast earned great stores in my hands-on antiphishing test, that function currently works well in Chrome and Firefox, but not Safari. But the pros outweigh the cons. If you're looking for free Mac antivirus protection, give it a try, along with Sophos and Avira, and see which you like best.
For truly top-notch Mac security, you'll need to lay out some cash. Our Editors' Choice products in this realm are Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac. Both received certification from two labs. Both scored well in our hands-on antiphishing test. Bitdefender's AutoPilot mode means you can set it and forget it. And Kaspersky goes above and beyond feature-wise, with full-scale parental control, protection against webcam peeping, a network attack blocker, and more.
Bottom Line: Avast Security (for Mac) delivers effective malware protection along with unusual bonus features. Phishing protection only works well in Chrome and Firefox, but this free utility is still worth a look.
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