ESET NOD32 Antivirus

Between Kapersky and Eset, these two are the best AV's in the world; ignore cotton candy reviews, see the proof by independent research here, and HERE. In the second URL note ESET has a 13% higher OFFLINE detection rate than Kapersky, making it better for those who opt out of cloud services for privacy reasons, but this comes with a 13% increase in resource usage, such as browser loading. Eset Internet security and Eset Endpoint Security are both amazing. While extremely light-weight, Eset offers users more granular control over every single aspect of their setup, users can disable components they do not wish to use which can reduce overhead even further on top of this already highly efficient design. For advanced users, cloud search functionality, web/phishing protection, DNS hijacking protection, and SSL injection can all be disabled for those who do not wish to send private information to ESET or, potentially, weaken their security. Is your AV spying on you? read more here

At least in part, because ESETS model is based on a pay system and 30 day trials, rather than free, ESET is very quiet, (with cloud and dns/phishing services disabled) and doesn't constantly call home but for updates, and is not a data mining privacy risk like AVAST and Bitdefender, AVG, or 360 total security.

The one up on kapersky is its free for life if you prefer, so there is no messing around with licensing constantly, and its calls home can be quieted down and SSL injection and cloud detection disabled for the privacy oriented, however you also lose about 13% detection rate compared to ESET when doing the latter. Both engines are equivalent... month to month one out-wins the other but they are about equal in terms of detection with all security components enabled.

Pros:

• Protection is arguably the best of the best
• For an antivirus with so much modules, it's not very resource hungry
• Rarely detects false positives
• 30 day free trial

Cons:

• UI is ugly
• Expensive

[Edited by malphiteorafk, May 01]

NOD32 breaks Google Chrome based browsers and ESET can't find any solution for Linux users. If you use Chrome, Chromium, Brave etc, don't install NOD32 as the real time protection will make Chrome to segfault.

One of the best software I've ever used.

I don't know what fans of NOD32 are smoking but I suspect they are not bona fide computer experts and their comments must be taken with a grain of salt.

Anyone who knows anything about anti-virus software knows that NOD32 is reasonably good, but not great at detection, and is utterly hopeless at removal. How can you see the phrase "unable to remove" so often and think that NOD32 is a good AV product? Isn't the whole point of the AV to be able to REMOVE the offending file? How Eset continues to get away with this lack lustre situation is beyond me.

Then there's the ridiculous amount of popups! Man do you really need to keep telling me over and over and over again that you found a virus, just deal with it already and stop bugging me!! Problem is Eset doesn't seem to know how to get NOD to deal with locked files. Norton's approach is much better: detect it, delete it, stay quiet = nice!

I am currently disinfecting a heavily infected PC (mainly trojans) and NOD32 was only able to effectively detect and clean about 78% of the infected files (my first time back to NOD in about 6 months). Running VIPRE found another 33 infected files and easily removed or cleansed them no worries. Running Norton AV found the remaining 7 infected files. In the end I concluded that I will wait at least another 6 months before using NOD again.

My advice do not buy NOD32, if you want decent protection you are better off using Norton, Kaspersky, VIPRE, BitDefender or F-Prot.