Many security companies offer multiple tiers of security suite protection, with higher prices naturally bringing more and better features. In Avira’s case, there’s a free feature-limited suite and an entry-level commercial suite that still suffers significant limitations. And then there’s the top-of-the-line all-access suite Avira Prime, reviewed here. An Avira Prime subscription gets you a year of protection from the full-featured Pro edition of every Avira tool, including existing apps, mobile apps, and software that haven’t even been invented yet. If Avira is what you want, this is the suite to get.
Like Avira Free Security, this product will offer to activate the Avira Crypto cryptocurrency mining utility if your hardware meets the stringent requirements. For a full discussion of this component, see my review of Avira Free Security.
What Does Avira Prime Cost?
You pay $99.99 for one year's Avira Prime license, which gives you five licenses to install Avira products on your Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. Norton 360 Deluxe gives you five cross-platform licenses and five unlimited VPN licenses for a bit more, $104.99, but that also includes 50GB of hosted storage for your online backups. Kaspersky Security Cloud seems expensive at $149.99 per year, but that gets you protection for 10 devices. Still not enough coverage? For $10 more than Kaspersky, McAfee Total Protection offers unlimited licenses to protect every device in your household.
If you’re already spending $99.99 for five Avira Prime licenses, you might consider upping your spend to $129.99 for the Family Pack. This subscription gets you 25 licenses, which, for most people, is effectively equivalent to the unlimited licenses you get from McAfee Total Protection.
Similar Products
Kaspersky Security Cloud
Norton 360 Deluxe
Bitdefender Total Security
Kaspersky Internet Security
Bitdefender Internet Security
Norton 360 With LifeLock Select
McAfee Total Protection
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Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete
These price-comparison comments wouldn't be complete without a mention of the fact that Avira isn't what you'd call a full-featured suite. It doesn't offer a firewall, spam filtering, parental control, or backup, among other features found in the competing suites. And while its core antivirus component is good, it isn't up there with the best.
Avira Prime’s main window looks just like that of Avira Free Security, with a dark grey theme, a simple left-rail menu, and three big icons showing status for Security, Privacy, and Performance. Oddly, these icons aren’t clickable. To drill into more detail in these three areas you must click the corresponding icon in the left-rail menu.
Shared With Free Security
This suite’s basic antivirus protection is the same as what you get with the free suite, bolstered by a few Pro-level additions I’ll discuss below. For a full understanding of this suite’s abilities, you should read my review of Avira Free Security. For those in a hurry, I’ve summarized my findings here.
Tested by independent labs, Avira gets scores ranging from perfect to just decent. Avira appears in results from all four labs I follow. Its aggregate lab score is 9.0 out of 10 possible points, quite a drop from the perfect 10 it held for a while last year. Kaspersky gets perfect and near-perfect scores in the latest reports from all four labs. It holds the current top aggregate score, 9.9 points.
In my own hands-on malware protection testing, Avira doesn't do nearly as well. Its score, 8.2 of 10 possible points, is the lowest among products tested with my current collection of malware samples. Avira shares that low score with Heimdal Premium Security Home.
Other products score much better against this same malware collection. Malwarebytes earns a perfect 10 points, McAfee takes 9.9 points, and Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete comes in third with 9.8 points.
Avira’s Browser Safety component installs as an extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera, with the aim of keeping the browser away from dangerous and fraudulent websites. Tested with a large collection recently discovered malware-hosting URLs, Avira protects against 78 percent of them. Note that I give equal credit for diverting the browser from the URL and for eliminating the malware payload after download. This score is middling at best. McAfee Total Protection managed 100% protection its latest test. Bitdefender, G Data, and Sophos came very close, with 99%.
Coding a malicious program that steal private data while evading detection by antivirus tools is hard. Fooling naïve web surfers into giving away their credentials by faking secure websites is not. Fraudsters set up phishing sites, sites that masquerade as banks or other sensitive sites, and disseminate links to the fake site. Every user who logs in is a user whose account the fraudsters now own. I test phishing protection using the very latest reported frauds. In a test using hundreds of such possible phishing sites, Avira manages 91% detection, tying with Bitdefender and Total Defense. Numerous others detect more fraudulent sites. F-Secure and McAfee top the list with 100% detection.
Just about everything on the Security page is available in the free suite. You can launch or schedule scans, view and manage quarantined items, and apply easy on/off control to Windows Firewall. The software updater component finds apps that lack important security patches and, at your command, applies those patches. In the paid suites, this component can automatically keep apps patched, without any user interaction, but that’s not a huge enhancement.
Many features found on the Privacy page are present in the free suite. As noted, the Browser Safety extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera is free. You get a simple File Shredder for secure deletion of sensitive documents. And the Privacy settings tool checks dozens of internal security settings, helping you configure the best balance between privacy and convenience. Avira Phantom VPN is present, but the free edition is limited to 500MB per month, with no access to advanced settings. On the other hand, the free password manager has all the features of the Pro edition except for an advanced password security report.
Finally, we come to the disappointing Performance page. If you’re not paying, you can still run a simple tune-up with the Optimizer component. You can check for outdated drivers using the Driver updater, and manually update any flagged by the scan. You can also locate instances of disk space wasted by storing identical duplicate files, but you’ll have to delete the redundant copies yourself.
The remaining performance features all invoke the completely separate Avira System Speedup app. This app serves mostly as an advertisement for the commercial System Speedup Pro. A goodly number of its features involve scanning for some kind of performance problem, but withholding the solution unless the user upgrades to Prime, or to the Pro edition.
See How We Test Security Software
Shared With Avira Internet Security
As you’ve seen, users of Avira’s free suite get quite a lot of security protection. Upgrading to the for-pay Avira Internet Security brings a few enhancements but not enough to merit its price.
To the free edition’s Real-time Protection, the paid upgrade adds Web Protection, Email Protection, and Ransomware Protection. Email Protection simply checks incoming and outgoing email for malware, which seems redundant given the other protection layers. Ransomware Protection uses behavioral analysis to detect ransomware that gets past the regular antivirus. I couldn’t test it, because turning off Real-time Protection (which deleted all the ransomware samples) also disabled Ransomware Protection.
Web Protection is another layer aimed at fending off dangerous websites. Unlike Browser Safety, it works below the browser level, so it could theoretically protect any internet-aware program. In testing, though, it missed real-world dangerous pages that Browser Safety blocked. Tested with the same collection of suspected phishing URLs, dozens of them, Web protection caught exactly one, which is disappointing.
The paid suite gets you the pro editions of the password manager and software updater components. That’s nominally more than a $60 value if you bought those programs separately, but neither is worth the price. The password manager just adds a full security analysis for your passwords, and the software updater gains the ability to apply found updates automatically.
Finally, the VPN gets a slight lift for its bandwidth limit, doubling what you get for free to one gigabyte per month. With a cap like that, there’s no way you could run all your web traffic through the VPN. In addition, you still don’t get access to the VPN’s advanced features, and you must accept whatever nearby server the VPN service chooses for you.
As for the performance-related tools, nothing changes. The other performance tools will happily scan for problems, but if you want a fix you must upgrade to Prime.
In the distant past, Avira’s entry-level suite has fared poorly in my performance tests, doubling or even tripling the time required to boot a test system. That problem, at least, is gone. In the latest round of testing Avira had little or no impact on performance. While it’s not zero-impact in all three tests the way ESET Smart Security Premium and Webroot are, its impact shouldn’t be detectable.
No-Limits VPN
Your antivirus or security suite works hard to protect your data, your devices, and your privacy, but its protective aura is strictly local. Once your data heads out into the wilds of the internet, it's vulnerable to sniffing, stealing, and spoofing. A clever hacker could even modify your sensitive communications, perhaps changing the destination for a bank transfer. That's why you need a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. The VPN encrypts your network traffic and routes it through the VPN company's servers. This both protects your internet traffic and hides your actual IP address from the sites you visit.
How much bandwidth do you use in a month? It’s not an easy question, but the answer is surely quite a bit more than 1GB, which is the monthly limit for VPN usage in Avira Internet Security. You can’t make proper use of a VPN with that kind of cap. Fortunately, Avira Prime gives you the limit-free power of Avira Phantom VPN. Please read our review for a full discussion of this product’s features. I’ll very briefly go over its virtues here.
As noted, Prime users have no bandwidth cap. That’s normal for any commercial VPN, but Avira also doesn’t cap the number of devices you can protect. While unlimited devices as a distinguishing feature is becoming more common, most VPNs impose a limit on simultaneous connections, with five being a common value for that limit.
You can choose from over 50 country or city locations, though the number of servers at each location isn’t clear. For all VPN services, the precise number of servers varies, but CyberGhost currently has the most, over 7,000. At least the Avira VPN’s selection list handily reports the latency measured at each location.
Prime users can choose to always keep the VPN running. That’s an option that wouldn’t make sense with a bandwidth cap in place. Other useful Prime-only settings include the ability to cut all internet access if the VPN stops working. NordVPN and a few others also sport this Kill Switch feature. Avira builds protection against malicious online content right into the VPN, though we didn’t test this separately from the suite’s antivirus protection.
In our testing, this VPN’s effect on upload and download speeds hovered right around the median. It doesn’t restrict P2P or BitTorrent usage, and its privacy policy impressed us. However, its server coverage is paltry compared to some competitors. You won’t go wrong using it when it comes as part of Avira Prime, given that it costs $78 per year as a standalone.
System Speedup Pro
The biggest difference between Avira Prime and the other Avira suites is the presence of System Speedup Pro. You can run performance scans with the free suite or the entry-level suite, but when you go to fix any issues found by the scan, you find that Prime is required.
As with the other Avira products, you can launch a simple Optimizer scan to clean up junk files and such. Driver updater finds drivers that are out of date, and even in Avira Antivirus Pro it performs any necessary updates. As with the lesser Avira products, the other three items on the Performance page launch the separate Avira System Speedup app.
The difference with Prime is that you get the Pro edition of System Speedup. That’s a big difference. The Pro edition doesn’t just point out performance issues—it actually fixes the problems it found.
System Speedup Pro looks very different from Avira Prime itself. Instead of a plain white or colored background, it uses a scene from nature. The appearance is reminiscent of Panda Dome Advanced, but without the option to select from a collection of scenes. Across the top of the app’s main window are tabs titled Quick optimizer, Power cleaner, Startup optimizer, and Tools.
Launching Quick optimizer scans your system for easy fixes. On completion, it summarizes the junk files, wasted storage, damaged Registry entries, and slow startup apps it found. You can just click to optimize or dig in for more detailed results and optionally exempt some items from cleanup. Most users will just smack the big Optimize button. On my test system, this scan freed up 2.1GB of disk space.
The Power cleaner runs a more intensive scan, with the option to run optimizations automatically when the scan finishes, and to shut down the system after optimization completes. Those settings suggest this is meant as something you can launch at the end of the day for a long run. However, the Power cleaner scan ran faster than the Quick optimizer on my test system. On finishing, it went straight to a detailed list of its findings. Of the dozen categories of found items, only two were checked for full optimization. Another six had some, but not all, detail items checked. And Avira flagged seven of them with a warning that you should check the results, because they might contain items you want to keep.
Unfortunately, the average consumer doesn’t have the knowledge needed to check those results. For most users, I advise just accepting the deletions marked by default. By default, this scan creates a System Restore Point before optimizing, with the idea that you can fix any damage done by deleting the wrong items. On my test system, that meant clearing up 270MB out of a possible 2.6GB.
Many suites include some form of startup optimization. Norton, for example, reports on the resource usage and prevalence of your startup apps, and lets you reversibly prevent them from launching at startup or set them to launch after a delay. Bitdefender Total Security, too, lets you enable, disable, or delay startup programs. With BullGuard Premium Protection you get a complete (and complex) timeline of startup activities.
Avira’s startup optimizer does more than most. It analyzes both Windows services and startup tasks and automatically takes action to optimize the boot process, setting some to launch after a delay and others to remain dormant until launched manually. You can also click a snooze icon to terminate an app and disable it from the next boot. Naturally, the start-time tracker requires a reboot.
If you really want a startup speedup, you can invoke the Hyper Boost feature, which reboots your device five times while taking measurements. I found that after each reboot it spent a little while optimizing the start time. And I had to be present after each reboot to log in again. Overall, the Hyper Boost analysis took about 15 minutes, which is better than the “several hours” in the feature’s description. According to Avira’s chart, the boot time went from 146 seconds down to 42 seconds.
Battery manager is an option on the main suite’s performance page, but within System Speedup it’s buried in the Tools menu. On this page you can use a simple slider to select one of five power modes, from Energy Saver, through Balanced, to Power Boost. My virtual machine test system naturally doesn’t have a battery, but if you’re using a PC that does, this could be handy.
Digging further into Tools, you’ll find a dizzying array of additional optimization features. Among this component’s many other skills are finding large files and folders, finding empty files, thoroughly erasing drives (other than the boot drive), uninstalling apps, defragmenting disks and the registry, recovering deleted files, managing Windows services, and many more. There’s even a very simple encryption tool and a simple backup system.
System Speedup Pro is a veritable Swiss army knife of tools for optimizing and maintaining your PC. What it isn’t, except for a few items scattered among its myriad features, is a security program. Gamers and others who are enthused to spend time tuning performance will love it. To the average user, though, it can be overwhelming.
Avira Prime on macOS
You can use your Avira Prime subscription to install the Pro edition of Avira Antivirus for Mac. When you log into your account and download the macOS installer, you get a personalized file that automatically registers the installation to your account. Handy! This is a good macOS antivirus, but not the very best. See my review for a full rundown of its abilities. I’ll summarize the shared features and Pro-only features here.
Both testing labs that I follow for macOS antivirus results certify Avira’s malware-fighting abilities, though not at the highest levels. Avast, Bitdefender, Clario, and Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac also appear in reports from both labs, though none earns a perfect score from both.
In a simple hands-on test, I found that Avira does an excellent job detecting and eliminating Windows malware. I also determined that the phishing protection in macOS works exactly as in Windows, scoring 91 percent detection. That’s quite good, but Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus for Mac gets a perfect 100 percent.
The Pro edition, installed using one of your Prime licenses, adds scanning of USB devices and full-scale phone support. It also upgrades the VPN component to the Pro level, meaning there’s no bandwidth limit and you can choose any server you want. And if you install the separate password manager, you get the Pro edition.
If you don’t plan to use the VPN, and didn’t purchase the 25-device subscription, it probably doesn’t make sense to expend one of your licenses on macOS protection. Just stick with the free edition. On the other hand, standalone VPN protection costs almost as much as a five-license Avira Prime subscription, so if VPN is your bag, this is a good deal.
Comprehensive Android Protection
Avira Prime gives you Pro apps on mobile, too. Choosing my Prime subscription from the Avira website, I found that it offered me four separate apps: Antivirus Security Pro, Optimizer Pro, Phantom VPN Pro, and Password Manager Pro. That’s not as convenient as installing the Windows edition, but I’ll grant that mobile apps do tend to install quickly.
Inconsistent Installation Experience
I installed the Android app without incident, and was pleased to see it installed as Prime, without requiring me to log in again.
On installing Optimizer Pro, I got a surprise. A screen warned me that this app is being discontinued, and directed me to Avira’s security app. My contacts at Avira confirmed that the separate Optimizer Pro app will be discontinued this fall.
Phantom VPN installed successfully, but just as the free edition. I had to log in again to get my Pro features. As for the password manager, tapping that link got a peculiar octopus-themed 404 error with the peculiar message, “Wooh: not the tentacular path you expected?” Fortunately, I managed to reach and install the password manager by going through the main security app. I did get all four apps installed, but it wasn’t the easy-breezy experience I expected.
I should note that there are other ways to get protection for your Android. You can simply install the main mobile app from the Play store and then log in to access all Prime features, including the other apps. Or you can click the Mobile icon in your Windows installation and install using a QR code.
Smart Scan at Startup
As with the desktop security products, Antivirus Security Pro wants to run a smart scan as soon as you install it. It scanned for security, privacy, and performance issues. My test Android is malware free, so naturally I had no issues with security. The privacy scan advised me to turn on the VPN and enable Identity protection. For a performance boost, the app advised me to run the Optimizer component, not to be confused with the separate (and doomed) Optimizer Pro app.
This app’s user interface has changed significantly since my previous review, and it’s a change for the better. In the current edition, the main dashboard is organized much like its desktop cousins, with three large icons representing Security, Privacy, and Performance. Instead of a left-rail menu, it has a bottom-edge menu, with icons for Dashboard, Security, Privacy, Performance, and Profile. A big button just above the menu invites you to run a Smart Scan at any time.
Security Features for Android
Tapping Security in the menu brings up a page with two security-related items, Web Protection and Anti-Theft. Tapping Web Protection leads you through the steps needed to enable this feature. Once you’ve enabled it, tapping Web Protection again lets you turn the feature on or off and manage user-defined lists of blocked and allowed websites.
Enabling Anti-Theft requires giving Avira a variety of permissions including location and Device Manager. Once you’ve done so, you gain the power to locate, lock, or wipe the device, or have it sound a loud alarm (handy if you’re misplaced it around the house).
With most mobile security products, you invoke anti-theft features from an online dashboard, but I couldn’t find anything like that on Avira’s site. It seems that the only way to invoke anti-theft for a mobile device is to do it from another mobile device. Everybody has at least two mobile devices, right? I had no trouble managing the Android’s anti-theft features from an iPad with Avira installed.
Android Performance Features and Optimizer Pro
There’s just one component, called Optimizer, on the page of performance features. The Optimizer component reports on the amount of free memory and free storage available and offers to boost performance at the tap of a button. My test Android started with 52% memory and 66% storage free. Tapping Boost Now edged those up to 54% and 67%—not an impressive boost. You can free additional memory by clearing out apps running in the background, and you can free up additional storage space by clearing caches and manually deleting extra-large images, videos, and other files.
As noted, Optimizer Pro is going to be discontinued in the fall. If you just install Avira Mobile Security directly from the Play store, you won’t even see Optimizer Pro. For testing, I installed it from the My Avira dashboard. Naturally it duplicates the memory and storage cleanup mentioned above. Other features include Boost Battery, which can disable apps and features to make your charge last longer; Lock with gestures, which locks your device when you wave across it or place it face down; Manage Apps, an uninstaller; and Clean Private Data, which lets you clear such things as browser history and data stored in the clipboard. I found it hard to navigate between features, but given that this app is slated to vanish, I didn’t worry too much.
Privacy Features Abound
When you tap the Privacy icon in the menu at the bottom of the screen, Avira Mobile Security really opens up. Eight distinct features fall into the privacy category, including the VPN and the password manager.Avira installs the VPN feature the first time you request it from the main security app. The Android edition looks and acts much like its equivalent on Windows, with a few minor differences. The list of available server locations doesn’t include latency information on Android, and I couldn’t find any way to access settings. Interestingly, launching the separate VPN app gets you a somewhat different experience, one that includes access to configuration settings. You can set the app to connect automatically on startup, and you can open a Settings page. Settings are limited compared to the Windows edition—there’s no Kill Switch nor is there built-in malicious site blocking. But in the separate VPN app you can choose to use the very modern Wireguard protocol.
Password management on Android works very much as it does on Windows, though you need to go into settings and enable autofill, both for browsers and for applications. You can configure the password manager for biometric authentication if your mobile device supports it. The security status report is present and easy to view. And on Android, the password manager itself is a fully functional authenticator app for any site or service that supports Google Authenticator.
New since my last review, there’s a call blocker feature built in. I couldn’t test it because the Android device I use isn’t provisioned for cellular calling, but it looks simple enough. You add unwanted numbers to the block list and optionally turn on blocking of spam and scam calls.
I encountered Identity protection during the initial Smart Scan but didn’t do anything about it at the time. This feature checks whether your email address has appeared in known breaches, with an option to get notification if it shows up in a new breach. My PCMag address has been around for many years, so I wasn’t surprised to find that Avira reported 17 breaches, some as old as 2012. Note that this doesn’t mean my account and password were compromised, only that my email appeared in a breach. Avira advises using the password manager to create and save a strong new password for any breached accounts. Once you’ve done so, you can tap to discard the breach notifications.
When you enable Microphone protection, only approved apps can use the microphone, preventing sneaky apps from activating the mic and eavesdropping. Permissions manager lists apps with permissions that could be dangerous to your privacy if misused—a simple tap takes you to an offending app’s info page, where you can uninstall it. App Lock, a common feature in Android security products, lets you put specific apps behind a secondary unlock pattern. And Network Scanner lists all the active devices on your network. This isn’t a full-scale network security tool. It doesn’t check devices for security problems like Bitdefender Home Scanner, or let you block unwanted devices like Panda Dome Advanced. It’s just a list.
With antivirus, web protection, anti-theft, and system tune-up, this app has everything you might want in an Android security app. Additional bonuses like network scanning, permissions management, and a check on unrestrained use of the phone’s microphone make it still more appealing.
Avira for iOS
I tried to install Avira on an iPad by going to the My Avira dashboard and clicking Install. Unfortunately, the website’s platform-recognition code delivered a macOS-specific DMG file instead of what I needed. My Avira contacts confirmed this glitch and advised me to simply install Avira from the App Store. On installation, the app located my paid subscription and enabled all Pro features. As is common, there’s not nearly as much protection on iOS, mainly because the safeguards Apple imposes to defeat malware also defeat many malware-fighting techniques.
As on Android, the app requests a Smart Scan as soon as you install it, checking for issues in Protection, Privacy, and Performance. On my test iPad, the Protection component advised enabling Web Protection. Once I followed the instructions to do so, Avira announced that both Safari and Chrome are protected against malicious and fraudulent sites. It also showed how to manually scan the current site using the Share button.
Under Privacy, Avira advised enabling Identity Protection and the VPN. More about those shortly. Finally, under Performance the photo cleaner offered to free storage space by deleting duplicate photos as well as photos that, while not exact duplicates, are very similar.
With the initial Smart Scan out of the way I could get a better look at the app’s main Dashboard. As on other platforms, it features three oversized icons along with a left-rail menu. But where other platforms identify those icons as Security, Privacy, and Performance, the iOS edition changes the first to Protection. That makes sense, given that this app (like most similar iOS apps) doesn’t include an antivirus security component.
iOS Protection Features
Tapping Protection at left revealed a page with four components. At the top was Web Protection, which I already enabled during the initial scan. An iOS Updater checks for operating system updates, something that iOS already does by itself. Contacts Backup collects your contacts but doesn’t store them in your My Avira dashboard. Rather, you can either have it email you the resulting package or log into your Dropbox and store it there.
That leaves Anti-Theft, which you must enable before you can use it. Avira needs access to your location, of course. It also requested that I allow notifications, with a button labeled Enable. However, tapping the button just took me to Avira’s section in Settings, with no indication how to allow notifications. By observation, the feature worked even without that setting. Remote lock and wipe aren’t available on iOS, but from the Android test device I managed to remotely locate it and trigger the loud alarm.
Performance Features for iOS
You don’t get much help for performance from Avira’s iOS app. It doesn’t attempt even the limited optimization available for Android devices. Its Device Analyzer reports on storage and memory usage, but it doesn’t offer to do anything about it. You do get the Photo Cleaner app, which aims to free up space by helping you eliminate duplicate photos.
On my test iPad, the Photo Cleaner found about a dozen sets of duplicates. I verified that these were all truly identical and let the app go ahead and delete only the dupes while retaining the originals. The scan also found numerous collections of similar images, but some of these were real head-scratchers. In one case, it paired a self-portrait of a newspaper political cartoonist with a cartoon imagining a conversation between Hodor, Groot, and Pikachu. And it matched a screenshot of a Google map showing Tomales Bay in California with a photo of a 20-foot-tall alien statue. Avira did correctly detect the similarity between several original photos and versions modified by the DreamScope, but in that case I wanted to keep both. I suggest you carefully examine all pairs of “similar” photos before allowing Avira to delete any.
Many Privacy Features
As with the Android app, the Privacy page offers the most features, among them the password manager and VPN. When you first access the password manager, Avira sends you to the App Store to get the separate app, which is almost identical to the Android edition.
You can use the VPN within the main Avira app, but if you want full access to settings, you’ll need to download Avira Phantom VPN from the App Store. Alas, the iOS VPN doesn’t give you the option to connect using the WireGuard protocol the way the Android app does.
The Call Blocker component ties into the call blocking system built into modern versions of iOS. Naturally, I couldn’t exercise this feature on my test iPad. Identity Protection and Network Scanner work just the same as on Android. That leaves the iOS-specific Privacy Manager.
Though its name sounds generic, Privacy Manager has a very specific function. It downloads a profile that suppresses your iOS device’s Siri app from logging your requests at the server level. This could be especially significant if you’ve enabled the “Hey Siri!” voice activation function, as this can sometimes trigger accidentally. My own thought is that you’re better off disabling that function. Do you really want your phone listening to everything that goes on around you?
Avira’s iOS app does more than many competitors, but it’s still limited compared to the protection you get on other platforms. Unless you purchased a 25-device subscription, I’d suggest you think twice before expending a license on iOS protection. Install the free app and see if it’s enough for you. If you really want the unlimited VPN or the handful of other Pro-only features, you can always log in to your account later.
Avira at Its Best
Avira offers tons of free security and privacy tools, and tons more that start out free but require purchase for full functionality. With Avira Prime, you get it all. For one price, you get access to every free and commercial Avira product, including any new products that come out during your subscription. And if you choose the 25-license subscription, your per-device cost is among the lowest around. If you're determined to buy an Avira security tool, make it Avira Prime.
On the other hand, installing every available Avira product still doesn’t give you the equivalent of a traditional full security suite. Norton 360 Deluxe and Kaspersky Security Cloud include firewall, parental control, password management, and more. Kaspersky adds a check for compromised email accounts and a hard drive health monitor. With Norton you get 50GB of storage for your online backup data, a powerful intrusion protection system, and a full-powered VPN with no bandwidth limits. Both offer a full protection suite on macOS, plus effective mobile apps. These two are our Editors' Choice winners for cross-platform multi-device security suite.
If you're going to buy any Avira software, Avira Prime is the one to get, as it includes every free and paid tool from Avira. However, even with its entire posse of apps it can't top the best cross-platform multi-device security suites.
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