The best antivirus software 2025: our top five picks

Whether antivirus software is something you think about obsessively or only think about twice a year like visits to the dentist, you deserve to have an antivirus program that is effective, functional, easy to install and operate, and comes with a set of features that you know will be useful to you. Here we outline our top three picks, based on our in-depth testing process.

In order to provide you with the clearest possible recommendations for your needs, we spent weeks testing each of the programs on this list. We installed and uninstalled them, tested their performance impact, ran each other their scan settings, played around with their features to see if they were truly useful and even contacted customer support. We know their strengths, weaknesses and what kind of user would benefit from what kind of antivirus package.

Based on our testing, benchmarks and research we recommend Bitdefender Total Security as the best overall antivirus software – it’s easy to use, doesn’t make any impact on performance, provides effective malware protection and has a lot of features you’ll use. If you’re looking instead for all of the features, each and every one you can snag, then check out Norton 360 Deluxe, and if you have a lot of devices to cover you’ll want to read up on McAfee+ Ultimate.

Editors' Note: in our more in-depth buying guide we rated Microsoft Defender in second place, but as it's a free product it can't be incorporated into the tech that powers our buying recommendations above