When it comes to choosing an Antivirus, two names always come in our mind. These names are Norton and McAfee. McAfee and Norton (also known as Symantec) are very well known brands in the Antivirus and Cybersecurity industry. Today, in this post, we are going to compare both of these Antiviruses. At the end of the post, you will find out which amongst them has an edge over the other in terms of features, malware detection, popularity, and other similar factors. So, let’s start the Norton vs McAfee comparison without any further ado.
A brief introduction to Norton
Norton is a Security Software company based in Mountain View, California. After being acquired by Symantec Corporations, Norton has started providing a number of digital security software and services. In 2014, Symantec split its business into two units one focusing on information management and other focusing on digital security. Norton was placed in the digital security unit.
Norton has won a number of awards and honors in recent years. In 2014, Norton was awarded PC Advisor’s Best Security Software Award. Later in 2015, Norton by Symantec won AV-TEST’s Innovation Award for Mobile Security.
Products that are included in Norton’s Security Suites are:
- Norton Antivirus Basic
- Norton Security Standard
- Norton Security Deluxe
- Norton Security Premium
Must Red: Avast vs Windows Defender – Battle of Antivirus!
A brief introduction to McAfee
McAfee is an American global security software company based in Santa Clara, California. McAfee claims to be the world’s largest dedicated security technology company. In 2011, Intel purchased McAfee and made it a part of Intel Security division. McAfee was founded by John McAfee who is a well-known computer programmer and businessman.
Just like Norton, McAfee has also received a number of awards and honors. Recently, in 2019, McAfee received the 2019 CyberSecurity Excellence award for being the Best CyberSecurity Company.
McAfee Total Protection is one of the most popular and best-selling McAfee products. It provides highly advanced features and utilities along with excellent protection against the malware.
Norton vs McAfee Comparison
So, let’s start our Norton vs McAfee comparison. But before starting the comparison let’s see the factors on which we are going to compare these two antiviruses. These factors are:
- Advanced Security Features
- Malware detection
- System resource consumption
- User-interface
- Cost
- Popularity
Norton vs Mcafee – Advanced Security Features
In this age of increasing digital threats having just the security features is not going to help. That’s why it is important to have an Antivirus that can provide additional protection features.
When it comes to advanced security features, Norton provides you with various features such as two-way firewall, several PC optimization tools, file cleanup tools, parental control, automatic backup, etc.
McAfee, just like Norton is providing advanced security features such as two-way firewall, file shredding tool, file lock utility, parental controls, protection against phishing, True Key password manager, etc.
Both of the Antiviruses provide all the premium features that one would like to have in their Antivirus Software. Hence it’s a tie.
Norton vs Mcafee – Malware Detection
360,000 new malicious files are detected every day. That’s why it becomes important to have an antivirus that can detect both known and unknown malware (known as zero-day malware). In order to compare the malware detection capabilities of both the antiviruses, we will take a look at tests conducted by AV-Tests and AV-Comparatives. These tests were conducted in the month of January and February 2018.
Norton performed exceptionally well in these tests. Norton managed to block 100% of both known and zero-day malware. Due to this, Norton scored a perfect score of 6/6.
On the other hand, McAfee managed to block 100% of the known malware samples but when it came to zero-day malware, the detection percentage dropped to 99.2% in January and again went up to 100% in February. Just like Norton, McAfee also got a perfect score of 6/6.
As it’s pretty clear from the results, Norton has a slight edge over McAfee when it comes to detecting malware.
System Resource Consumption
Modern Antiviruses are known for being light on your PC. Let’s see how Norton and McAfee perform when it comes to System Resource statistics.
Again, in order to compare the two, we will use the statistics provided by the AV-Comparatives tests. To measure the system resource consumption of an antivirus, AV Tests executed some common tasks on the computer while the antivirus was running in the background.
Below are the test results:
As you can see, here also, Norton scored a perfect 6/6 while McAfee got 5.5/6. Another test was conducted by AV-tests in which they measure the impact of a security product on the system’s performance. After analyzing and measuring the impact they assign an impact score to the product. The lower the impact scores the better the product.
Norton got an impact score of 7.3 while McAfee got a score of 8.7. According to me, both the products are very light on the system but Norton has a slight edge over McAfee.
User-Interface
McAfee has really improved its user-interface a lot! The latest user-interface is easy on the eyes and brighter. At the default page, you get quick links to Quick Scan and Full Scans. You also get the protection status on the left sidebar. At the top, quick links to PC Security, Identity, Privacy, Home, and Account are present.
Norton has a very similar user interface. On the home page, you can see your protection status, and quick links to Protection, Report Card, Settings, Performance, etc. are provided.
Both the user-interfaces are easy to navigate and not at all complex to understand.
Popularity
Both Norton and McAfee are well-known digital security companies. But if you look at the monthly report of Antivirus Market Shares you will find that McAfee is among the top 10 with 9.59% market shares. On the other hand, Norton has not made it into the top 10. McAfee also has a larger social media influence and a greater total number of downloads in comparison to Norton. Hence we can say with certainty that McAfee is much more popular and well-known than Norton.
Final Verdict
As you can see, this Norton vs McAfee comparison was really tight. Both antiviruses have got some unique features of their own. Hence it’s really hard to decide a winner. I would say you can go with the product that suits you the best. When it comes to price, Norton is a little cheaper than McAfee but McAfee is available on various devices. So, choose what’s best for you. Stay tuned for more such informative comparisons. Thanks for reading.
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