Vipre Security Antivirus Review, Demo, Pricing & Product Details

Vipre Security isn’t a household name like Symantec, McAfee, or Kaspersky, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be in the future. It’s a long-standing anti-virus firm with a solid history of advanced detection methods. Its suite of tools in the Vipre Security Bundle includes a powerful anti-malware client powered by Bitdefender’s detection system and an identity protection scheme.

Antivirus software is more important than ever, but sorting through the options can be tough. That’s why we’re taking a close look at VIPRE’s Advanced Security antivirus subscription, which offers protection against traditional viruses as well as emerging threats like malware, Trojans, rootkits, and more. In fact, we tested out the software ourselves to see how well it really worked on our 2014 Lenovo ThinkPad. With information both from our testing and our experience as users, we bring you an honest review about whether or not this antivirus software is worth it.

What components combine to make a security suite? Antivirus and firewall are almost always included, but beyond that, it varies. Spam filtering, once a mainstay, is less and less necessary. And parental control is only a benefit if you have kids and need to monitor their online activity. Of these four building blocks, Vipre Advanced Security includes all but parental control, along with a few bonus features. It beats many competitors on price, but it gets uneven results in our testing.

We thoroughly tested Vipre Security to see how well it performed and kept our machine safe, so read on to see how it stacked up.

You may be surprised to learn that Vipre has been around for more than 25 years. Originally published by Sunbelt Software, its name stood for “Virus Intrusion Protection Remediation Engine.” Over the years, the product was bought by GFI and then spun off as a separate company called ThreatTrack. You can still see this history in some of the product’s web pages. For example, if you click a malware notification popup for more information, you come to a page with sunbeltsecurity in the URL and several references to ThreatTrack on the page. More recently, Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, acquired Vipre.

The standard price for standalone antivirus protection is about $40 per year. Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security all fit this model. The full-scale security suites from those vendors cost twice as much and give you three licenses. McAfee is a bit trickier, at $59.99 per year for the antivirus or $159.99 per year for the top-tier suite. Both prices sound high, but, in both cases, you get protection for every Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS device in your household.

Vipre offers a single security suite license for $54.99 per year, or $64.99 for three licenses. That’s a good price for a suite that has all the expected components except for parental control, and it’s frequently discounted. Want more? You can get five licenses for $74.99 or 10 for $99.99. Note, too, that you can use your Vipre licenses on both Windows and macOS devices.

Like Vipre’s standalone antivirus, the product’s main window has three tabs: MyVipre, Account, and Manage. On the main MyVipre page, you get a simple report on antivirus and firewall status and buttons to launch or schedule scans. The Manage tab has the settings for the various security components. If you don’t like the color scheme, which defaults to green and white on dark grays, you can change it on the Account tab. There are six more color themes to choose from—three with a light background, and three with a dark one.

Design: Simple, Intuitive, Customizable – Vipre Security Antivirus

Many of even the best antivirus software are complicated with tons of buttons, features, and optional extras that can be confusing to new users. Not so with Vipre, which has a streamlined front page with a single-window and just three menu items to pick from. Scanning is activated via a single button and the Account tab gives you information like your product key code, the length left in your subscription, and a quick access help menu.

There’s even a way to adjust the color scheme of the client to better suit your tastes or eyesight.

One aspect of the design we really didn’t like, though, was that Vipre Security forced us to uninstall the free remediation tool, Malwarebytes free scanner. There was zero need for that to happen and it made the system’s security weaker because of it. There shouldn’t be any real problem in layering antivirus defenses and it’s a shame to see Vipre not even give users a choice in doing so.

Type of Protection: Antivirus, Firewall & ID Cover

The main Vipre Security suite offers comprehensive antivirus software protection and bundles in a firewall to prevent nefarious connections from taking place. There’s also e-mail spam protection built right in, and live web protection if you want it.

As for anti-malware scans, you can easily adjust various aspects of its operation, including the types of files it scans for, the level of advanced protection (performance or security-focused) and whether you want web and edge protection in place while surfing online. ID protection means both your webcam and microphone will be blocked to prevent anyone with prying eyes or wanting to eavesdrop.

Scan Locations: Everything You Give it Access To

There are three scan options with Vipre antivirus: Quick, full, and custom. The former performs a quick scan that’s great for daily threat detection, while full goes into more depth with greater scrutiny of more system files and the registry.

A custom scan lets you tweak which options you want. You can toggle looking at and for running programs, Windows registry, cookies, rootkits, and archived, and compressed files. You can also pick particular drives or folder subsystems to scan.

Types of Malware: Almost Everything

Using Bitdefender’s antivirus and Vipre Security’s own threat detection systems, the software is able to target almost every type of malware out there. It blocks and quarantines worms, trojans, viruses, spyware, adware, exploit kits, and even ransomware. It detects the latter with real-time behavior monitoring to watch for files that are acting suspiciously, stopping them in their tracks if they’re detected.

The only attack vector that Vipre doesn’t protect against is cryptojacking via the web browser. For that, it recommends third-party tools and web extensions. It does, however, employ website scam detection systems, so it’s possible that it might stop you visiting a site with a crypto jacker infection, even if it can’t stop the actual attack itself.

Ease of Use: Simple As Can Be – Vipre Security Antivirus

With Vipre’s seamless and intuitive client tools, regular updates, and comprehensive protection, it’s one of the easiest to use antivirus solutions we’ve come across. It has plenty of options for power users, letting them customize their Vipre antivirus experience, but if you want a tool that’s perfect for set-and-forget use, Vipre Security is a great choice.

It even has a “Quiet Mode” that you can toggle for complete hands-off protection.

All options that might be a little confusing have handy tooltips explaining what they do as well and there is an extensive knowledge base and forums where you can get more information if you need it.

Update Frequency: As Often As You Like

Vipre antivirus has a default virus update schedule of every 30 minutes, but you can customize this to whatever you like. There are options ranging from once a day to every fifteen minutes. Alternatively, you can set it to manual mode, so that it only updates when you decide, but that is less advisable because if you forget, you could end up with antivirus solution that is woefully out of date to tackle any new incoming threats.

Performance: Fast When It’s a Quick Scan, Slow When It’s Not

Vipre is a comprehensive antivirus solution, but it’s not the fastest if you don’t choose the “Quick Scan” option. Quick scans finish within a few seconds and give you a good idea of whether your system is safe or not. Full scans, however, take much longer and that was on a reasonably fast system with an SSD as the main drive. If you’re using a hard drive and/or a slower processor, it might take upwards of 15 minutes to complete a full scan.

The installation process was quite slow, too, requiring a lengthy wait to use the software. Once it was up and running, though, the rest of it was snappy. Menus were responsive and easy to navigate through and the scans weren’t egregiously slow.

The fact that they picked up any viruses we threw at it was a great sign, too. Third-party tests show that Vipre is an effective solution for blocking all manner of threats.

Additional Tools: Firewall, Privacy & ID Protection

Although Vipre antivirus is the main focus of its Security Bundle, you do get a lot of extras, too. In the main security software, there is a history cleaner and secure file eraser for getting rid of personal information that you don’t want anyone else to see–permanently. There’s also a Social Watch tool that keeps an eye on your Facebook feed for you and notifies you if anyone tries to take control of your account or post anything that you’re not happy with.

In its own separate client, you have Identity Shield. This is a separate product from the Antivirus but comes as part of the Security Bundle. It includes a webcam blocker and microphone blocker, which stops anyone snooping on your active recording devices, and a tracker block for preventing advertisers from following what you’re doing on the internet.

Other features include a safe storage solution for passwords and login credentials, a scanner to make sure that you aren’t storing any personal information in an unsecured fashion, and a tracking blocker that actively puts out information about you to prevent anyone from figuring out your identity by your online habits.

Type of Support: A Bit of Everything

Vipre antivirus makes sure that if you need help, you can get it. There are forums and knowledge bases should you want to find the information yourself, as well as a phone number for actively calling a real person for some help with your software.

The only thing missing is live chat support, but Vipre does employ a support bot that can help you with some specific questions.

Price: Stomachable To Cover Multiple Machines

The base price of the Vipre Security Bundle is great for the first year—the Antivirus Plus plan starts at $9.99 and the Advanced Security plan is $19.99. However, after that initial year, the plans are a little expensive for single systems, charging $35 and $55 per year. However, the Vipre Security Bundle does scale very well with multiple systems. It costs $81.24 the first year for up to five devices and only $68.24 for up to 10 devices the first year.

Free trial version

It’s good to know that you don’t actually need to pay for Vipre if you simply want to test its antivirus protection capabilities. That’s because you can simply download a 30-day free trial of Vipre Advanced Security, Vipre Antivirus Plus, Vipre Privacy Shield, and Vipre Android Security.

It’s quite a generous move on the part of Vipre, as many antivirus products give you only seven days to try their software.

Is Vipre worth the money?

I’d say it’s worth paying for Vipre Antivirus for the first year when the subscription is the cheapest. After that, the cost can get you a more extensive antivirus package elsewhere.

My main concern is the limited selection of supported devices. Also, even though the most expensive plan includes a full-fledged VPN, it’s actually quite basic. In this case, I’d rather invest in a security tool and a quality VPN (like NordVPN) separately.