Is there a difference between premium and free antivirus software?

Picking the right antivirus software for your machine can be a gamble. You can never be sure if you are picking the right one since you are not an expert in the field of computer security. It is even hard for you to know what you should base the decision on. They all seem to say that they do the same thing and the only noticeable difference that you can see is the price of the product. While you may look at it as a good thing when some of the prices are cheaper than the other, the same pricing scale might cause you suspicion when the software is free. We have been brought up to automatically think that free products are useless and if they were worth anything then they would cost some amount of money. That is not always the case when it comes to software. There is plenty of good software that is available for free including antivirus software. So we will take a look in this article and see if there is any real difference between free and premium antivirus software.

Is there a difference?

The quick answer to that question is no. There is usually no difference in the quality of software between the free versions and the paid versions. The long answer is that which software you are looking at makes a huge difference in the discussion. There are some high quality free pieces of antivirus software and there are some low quality ones as well. The same rule goes for premium versions of antivirus software. There are some good brands and there are some bad brands as well. It can be hard to tell the difference but you will find out if your computer is not well protected. If you want to be sure then take a look at reviews of the software.

Why is it free then?

Most free antivirus software is that price because of two reasons, one it is software that has an enterprise version and they want you to buy that one and two the free version is missing certain features. The free version of the software for the ones that have an enterprise version is just to get you used to the software itself so that you will buy a business license. Security software vendors are able to charge a business at a higher price than they can the average consumer so it makes sense that they give it away for free. You can consider it free promotion. The same is true for the software vendors that give away a crippled version for free. They want to sell it to businesses but they also want the regular person to buy it as well. So if you want to make sure that you have full protection then you must purchase the full product. The free product will not usually give you protection for things such as your email, real time scanning, and other things of that nature.

The quality of the software all depends on the particular software that you are talking about and not the price of the product. In the software world, there is a lot of software that is free.