McAfee vs Kaspersky: Which is best?McAfee vs Kaspersky: Which is best?McAfee vs Kaspersky: Which is best?

McAfee vs Kaspersky: Which is best?

It’s a battle of two major players in the antivirus world, McAfee vs Kaspersky. They’re both well-known brands, but which one offers the better product at the right price? Let’s jump in and find out.

For this review, I will purchase, download, and run both programs on my own PC. To get some impartial statistics on the performance of both products, I have turned to independent test labs that run their own virus tests on all major antivirus software.

In the malware test, Kaspersky recorded a 99.90 percent success rate at protecting a PC from malware. This score ranks Kaspersky in the middle tier of all antivirus brands analyzed in this test.

In the Real World Protection test, McAfee also came out on top, protecting against 99.8 percent of online threats. The remaining 0.2 percent were user-dependent, meaning the user was given a choice to allow or block the threat. Kaspersky blocked 99.9 percent of online threats, with the remaining 0.1 percent resulting in the machine being compromised.

Both antiviruses produced zero false alarms, also known as false positives, where an antivirus incorrectly flags a safe file as malicious.

I also looked at the most recent tests available from AV-Test, a well-respected and independent test lab.

The lab’s September and October 2021 test was set up to find out the effectiveness of major antivirus brands for home users over a period of time.

AV-Test has given a rating to each provider, with a top score of six available in each category.

Both Kaspersky and McAfee scored a perfect 6.0 out of 6.0. The results show both McAfee and Kaspersky earned a 100 percent success rate at detecting established and known viruses discovered in the last four weeks before testing.

Similarly, the 0-day tests for real online threats give both of them with a 100 percent success rate in both September and October, which is very impressive.

Overall McAfee performs slightly better in the most recently available lab tests, however both products were very impressive with zero false alarms and they were in the top bands of every test. McAfee achieved 100 percent in all but one test where it let the user decide to block or allow the threat for 0.2 percent of the threats.

Impact on PC performance

To test out the impact of each antivirus on PC speed, I timed both full and quick scans on my PC and also measured the impact on the system. Besides this, I also looked at performance benchmarking tests from independent test labs.