Zonealarm antivirus ratings

Unlike Norton AntiVirus , however, ZoneAlarm with Antivirus doesn't perform a preinstallation scan, which would be an added measure of protection. ZoneAlarm with Antivirus's antivirus module allows you to run manual scans or schedule scans at recurring intervals.

Zone Labs' Instant Support screen is a virtual chat tool that lets you probe the company's knowledge base with natural-language queries. The Good Good firewall and antivirus protection at a bargain price; well-designed interface; low impact on system resources.

No tools for detecting spyware or instant-messenger attacks; expensive phone support. A quick scan took about 90 seconds, while a full scan took just over three hours. Both of them had a minimal impact on the CPU while scanning, with a jump of about five percent, which is great compared to competitors such as F-Secure read our F-Secure Antivirus review. ZoneAlarm does not offer a custom scan option.

This is a major oversight, as many antivirus programs offer you the ability to scan just the drive that you think may be compromised.

Read our Avira review for an example. This does not mean that they have been blocked or that ZoneAlarm determined they are dangerous. This simply means that it analyzed the program and judged whether that program should be allowed through the firewall or not, otherwise known as application control. If you choose not to use this feature, it will ask you about every single program the first time they attempt to access the internet, including obvious ones such as operating system functionality and popular programs like Skype and Spotify.

Due to the scarcity of lab results for this program, we had to rely more heavily on our hands-on testing, which indicated good protection from almost everything but fell short on phishing. Unfortunately, only AV-Test has any results for ZoneAlarm, so we had to rely on our own tests more than usual. This is especially impressive when it comes to zero-day vulnerabilities, a bar which is not met by many. Its performance is fairly solid, as well, with one exception — installing applications takes significantly longer with ZoneAlarm active than the industry average.

It had no issues identifying legitimate software and did not alert on a single false positive. It successfully blocked the manually downloaded malware, the drive-by downloads and the PUAs potentially unwanted applications.

It also successfully blocked the cloud-based threat, but it did not detect the phishing page. While there was no notification indicating that the files had been blocked, ZoneAlarm did succeed in blocking downloads from the malicious websites.

In the single case when the file downloaded, ZoneAlarm blocked it before the download was complete. Read our roundup of the most secure antivirus programs for a comparison. In general, lab results should be given more weight in this analysis. However, both our tests and the lab results show that ZoneAlarm does a great job at its core functionality, blocking malicious software from accessing your computer. Although it claims to have phishing protection, it may not be effective and you should always use your own best judgment before entering information online.

Check out our guide to phishing scams for more information. Of note here is that ZoneAlarm recommends several more technical virus-removal utilities created by Kaspersky Labs during the scanning process. Many malicious programs will cause antivirus programs from running or take over them completely, removing the ability to scan certain file locations or adding malicious software to your whitelist. These tools are helpful in the case that a virus is blocking ZoneAlarm from fully scanning your disk.

The support that ZoneAlarm offers was helpful when we were able to access it. It operates under the assumption that the only help you need while offline is tips to get back online. This is confusing especially for an antivirus, as you may be intentionally running it offline or in safe mode due to a virus. If you need help in that case, they very unhelpfully suggest that you access their web portal using another computer or phone.

This new support system is also still facing some minor bugs. Registering an account on the support page, which is the first step to submitting a ticket, returns a server error. The support team resolved this through their chat system, which luckily does not have a registration requirement. After a second conversation with the support team, logging out and back in resolved this issue. On the plus side, both of these issues were addressed quickly via their chat system, which had a surprising amount of technical knowledge about the support website.

We also tested their email support and found that they responded in just under an hour and with accurate information, although our message was sent during work hours on a weekday. Your results may vary depending on the time and day. Both of them are more focused on advertising, and occasionally sending out announcements about their products. They do not offer support over the phone at all. ZoneAlarm Antivirus needs an upgrade.

The firewall is smart enough to know how to handle most situations all on its own, but security or network experts can also adjust its settings to suit their needs. ZoneAlarm's identity theft protection feature is actually a free one-year subscription to Identity Guard's Good Start plan, a simple service which enables daily monitoring of your credit bureau file, raises alerts about any significant changes and gives you unlimited toll-free support.

It's only available to US users, unfortunately, but if you don't have any similar service it could justify installing ZoneAlarm Free all on its own. ZoneAlarm's online backup is also outsourced, this time via IDrive.

ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus isn't assessed by the major testing labs, or even the minor ones, most probably because it uses the standard Kaspersky engine rather than one of its own. Checking Kaspersky's own results in the lab reports gives a general idea of ZoneAlarm's likely effectiveness.

It didn't raise a single false alarm across all five tests, beating everybody else. That's not a minor point. Trend Micro managed third place, but also raised 47 false positives. It's much easier to block threats if you raise the 'suspicious' bar so high that you catch many legitimate packages, too. While that's great, Avast Free Antivirus was rated even higher in the report, at equal fifth place.

The difference in protection rate was marginal ZoneAlarm Free only includes the core Kaspersky antivirus engine, and we wouldn't expect it to deliver the same level of protection. As a final check, we tested ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus with a custom ransomware simulator we have developed ourselves. We've seen Kaspersky Antivirus block this in its own review, so weren't surprised to find our test threat was killed immediately, before it could encrypt a single file.

What did surprise us, was that ZoneAlarm didn't raise a single alert about the detection, or even display it in the logs. We think that's a sign of poor integration between ZoneAlarm's interface and the Kaspersky engine, but whatever the reason, it's an issue.