Malware coders love Windows and Android because both have a big user base and imperfect security. It’s true that macOS is better secured and doesn’t have quite as many users, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to attacks. Macs get hit by malware, even ransomware. Much as you may not like to hear it, you need antivirus protection on your macOS devices. It’s not so bad, though, as you can get effective protection for free. Avira Free Antivirus for Mac doesn't cost a thing, and it earns excellent scores in tests by the independent labs.
A redesign a few years ago brought the macOS product closer in appearance to the Windows version. The main window features a simple menu down the left, like Avira Free Security. But where the Windows product just has Status, Security, Privacy, and Performance down the left side, the macOS edition adds two or three submenu items below each. Just as in the Windows edition, the rest of the window features oversized icons representing Security, Privacy, and Performance, with a button to run what Avira calls a Smart scan. More about the Smart scan later.
What macOS Version Does Avira Require?
Most Mac antivirus products need to run on recent versions of macOS. This only makes sense, given that Apple keeps adding security enhancements. Like F-Secure and Sophos Home Premium for Mac, Avira supports macOS version back to 10.13 (High Sierra). McAfee, Kaspersky, and Norton 360 Deluxe for Mac are more demanding, needing 10.15 (Catalina) or better.
If you're stuck using an old operating system for some reason, you may need to consider a different Mac antivirus. ClamXAV for Mac support goes back to Yosemite (10.10), Intego works back to Mavericks (10.9), and ProtectWorks can function on Snow Leopard (10.6).
Similar Products
Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac
Norton 360 Deluxe for Mac
Avast One Gold for Mac
Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac
Intego Mac Internet Security
Malwarebytes Premium Security for Mac
McAfee Total Protection for Mac
Total Defense Essential Anti-Virus for Mac
Webroot Antivirus for Mac
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online
There's a big range of prices for Mac-based antivirus support. At the high end, Intego Mac Internet Security X9 lists at $99.99 per year to protect three Macs, and Norton 360 Deluxe for Mac asks $104.99 per year for five cross-platform licenses. Granted, these two are security suites. Norton goes way beyond the features offered by a simple antivirus utility.
The most common pricing plan among products we've reviewed is $39.99 per year for one license and $59.99 for three. As for Avira, you don’t have to pay one red cent. Like AVG AntiVirus for Mac and Avast, it's totally free.
Note that this program is also available for free on Windows. However, Avira also offers Avira Free Security to Windows users, with significantly more features, so there’s really no reason to use the free plain antivirus on Windows.
Scanning and Scheduling
On the MacBook Air I use for testing, a quick scan finished in less than a half-minute, and the full scan took 52 minutes, slightly longer than the current average of 41 minutes. Out of the box, Avira schedules a weekly quick scan and a bi-weekly Smart Scan. You can adjust those schedules, or schedule additional scans, quick or full, on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Clicking Protection Options in the left-rail menu brings up a very simple page with two options: Real-time Protection and USB Protection. You can turn off the Real-time Protection system, but don’t do that! USB protection, meaning automatic scanning of any mounted USB drive, is unavailable unless you upgrade to the feature-complete cross-platform Avira Prime suite. That’s not a big loss, as it’s a snap to drag the USB icon onto Avira for scanning.
Excellent Lab Test Scores
When evaluating Windows antivirus utilities for malware protection, I rely on a wide range of testing apps that I've coded and refined over the years. I don't have anything similar for the macOS platform, as my many hand-coded testing tools and my coding skills are both Windows-only. For Mac antivirus, I necessarily rely heavily on the independent testing labs to know which products are the most capable.
Two of the independent antivirus testing labs I follow report on macOS products, and both have Avira on their test roster. Avast One Essential for Mac, AVG, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac also show up in reports from both labs, but well over half the products I track don’t even have one lab result.
The experts at AV-Test Institute rate antivirus utilities on three criteria: how well they protect against malware, how little they impact performance, and how carefully they avoid interfering with usability by flagging valid programs as malicious. With six points available for Protection, Performance, and Usability, the maximum score is 18.
Almost all the products I follow score six for Protection; Avira misses that goal by half a point. It did manage the full six points for Performance, along with all competitors except F-Secure and Kaspersky. And all the tested products earn six points for Usability, meaning they exhibited next to no false positives. Avira’s 17.5-point score is good enough to earn it the designation Top Product. Of course, all the products reached that level in the latest test.
AV-Comparatives certifies Avira for malware protection, with 99.6% protection against macOS malware, down from its 99.8% score in the previous test. This lab separately tested the antivirus defenders using PUAs, potentially unwanted applications. Scores against these less-risky examples ranged from 97% to 99%—Avira’s 98% score is right in the middle.
Like Avast, Bitdefender, Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac, and almost all the tested products, Avira detected 100% of the Windows malware used in this lab’s testing. Of course, these samples couldn’t infect a Mac, but removing them prevents your Mac from becoming a carrier.
I ran my own simple test of Avira’s ability to detect Windows malware, challenging it to clean up a USB drive containing the samples from my Windows-centered testing. As noted, automatic scanning of USB drives is a Prime-only feature, but as soon as I opened the infested folder, Avira wiped out 10% of the samples. Dragging that folder onto Avira for a custom scan wiped out 73% more, for a total of 83% detection. That’s not quite as good as Avira’s previous 90% score, but it did wipe out every ransomware sample. Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus for Mac and Total Defense top the scores in this test, both managing 97% detection of Windows malware samples.
Protection Against Phishing and Malicious Sites
Phishing pages are frauds that attempt to steal your login credentials by imitating sensitive websites. It’s easy to craft a fake bank site and fool people into giving away their passwords. Plenty of users have no clue about how to spot a phishing scam. Certainly, creating a phishing page is vastly easier than coding a Trojan that can actively steal those passwords and exfiltrate them, all while dodging discovery by antivirus programs.
In addition, malware programs are platform-specific, while phishing works on any platform. If you’re foolish enough to log into a fake banking page on the browser built into your high-tech tractor, you lose your credentials just the same as if you entered them in a browser on your Mac. Preventing access to such pages, or to pages containing malicious code, can be the first line of defense for an antivirus tool, whether it's Mac or Windows antivirus.
Avira Free Antivirus does not in itself protect against malicious or fraudulent URLs. That’s handled by Avira’s Browser Safety extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera (sorry, Mac purists—there’s no Safari extension). I found that Avira auto-installed it in Chrome, but not in Firefox. No matter, as it’s easy to install in the browser of your choice.
If you’re going to use Avira’s free antivirus for macOS, be sure to pair it with the free Browser Safety extension. I installed it for Chrome and proceeded to test Avira's browser-based protection.
For this test, I gather the newest phishing URLs I can find, including ones that haven't yet been analyzed and blacklisted. I use one of my Windows-specific hand-coded tools to launch each URL and record results in three browsers, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, each protected by the browser's own built-in protection. As for the Mac product under test, my analysis tool works strictly on Windows, so I test by hand on the Mac. I’ve grown quite adept at the button-mashing involved in copy/pasting each URL from the list to the browser. I ran this test simultaneously with my test of Avira Free Security on Windows.
For testing purposes, I discard any URL that doesn’t load properly in any of the browsers, and any URL that doesn't actively attempt to capture login credentials. Analyzing the confirmed phishing pages, I found that Avira's detection rate came at 97%, exactly as it did under Windows. It makes sense that the scores match since both used the same Chrome extension.
Avira’s 97% brings it near the top, score-wise. McAfee AntiVirus Plus for Mac, also earned 97%, but only five products have scored higher. Norton, Trend Micro, and Webroot stand at the top, each with 100% detection.
As it does on Windows, Browser Safety also actively blocks ads and prevents advertisers and others from tracking you. Or rather, it does so if you tell it to—click the toolbar button, click the settings gear, and enable Block Ads & Web Tracking. A small numeric overlay on the toolbar button lets you know how many trackers it found on the current page. You can click for more detail, but you don’t get the option to fine-tune what it blocks the way you do with Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and others.
The Avira Safe Shopping browser extension aims to save you money when you shop online. It displays coupons for shopping sites you visit, when available. And for each item you put in the cart, it tries to find a better deal. My experience remains that the “better” deals often come in at a higher price. I remain doubtful about the value of this feature.
Privacy Features
With Avira’s Windows-based free security tool, you click Privacy in the left-rail menu to view a page of privacy-related features. These include feature-limited versions of Avira’s VPN and password manager, as well as secure deletion file shredder and a tool to tune privacy settings in Windows and popular apps. In the latest Windows edition, VPN support is integrated right into the main program.
In the macOS edition, you access the VPN and password manager via submenu items in that left-rail menu. Clicking the button to get VPN support sends you off to download the separate free edition of Avira Phantom VPN. Using the free edition, you’re limited to 500MB of bandwidth per month and you can’t choose your VPN server location. These limitations mean you can’t rely on using the VPN regularly. I played a three-minute YouTube video and used up 6% of my monthly allotment.
Clicking for the password management component sends you to its online home. You log into your Avira account and, on first use, create a master password. Be sure to install the browser extension to get the full range of features. This tool handles basic tasks like capturing login credentials you enter, replaying them as needed and syncing across all your devices. You can enable two-factor authentication, which functions by texting a code to your smartphone. But it doesn’t offer form-filling, secure sharing, digital inheritance, or other top-tier features. See our review of Avira Password Manager to learn more.
The third macOS privacy feature, Cookie Cleaner, isn’t available unless you upgrade to Avira Prime. This feature would be less useful under Windows, because on that platform all modern browsers support clearing cookies and other saved data by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Del. You can still access cleanup features in browsers on macOS, but there isn’t a universal key combo. Even so, I wouldn’t purchase Prime just to get the Cookie Cleaner.
Performance Features
Under Performance in the left-rail menu you find Junk Cleaner, Uninstaller, and Startup Apps. Junk Cleaner is available; the other two require an upgrade.
Like the Optimizer in the Windows product, Junk Cleaner searches for files that you can delete to free up disk space. You can proceed straight to cleanup or pause and view the app’s findings. On my test Mac it reported finding cache files, downloads, logs, and files in the trash; by default, it only selected cache files for deletion. Just as in the Windows product, it reported how much space it freed and offered to free up even more space if only you upgrade to Prime.
Smart Scan
I mentioned that Avira runs a Smart Scan upon installation. You can also run this scan any time by clicking a button on the main window. On Windows, this scan covers Privacy Issues, Performance Issues, Viruses, Outdated apps, and Network threats (though the free edition won’t deal with findings in some of these areas). The Mac edition is simpler, sticking to Security, Privacy, and Performance.
A Smart Scan on my test Mac ran in less than a minute. For security it reported finding no viruses. In the privacy realm it reported finding Chrome tracking cookies and noted that my Email is not monitored. The performance scan, equivalent to the Junk Cleaner, found 350MB in junk files.
When I clicked to fix the issues, it reported that it didn’t actually do anything. The Chrome browser trackers remained, as did the junk files. And my Email still was not monitored (just what that means, it did not explain). Taking care of those items would—you guessed it—require an upgrade to Prime.
Should You Go Prime?
At the bottom of the main screen's left-side menu is a highlighted item titled "Get Prime." Clicking it gets you a laundry list of the virtues of Avira Prime, which costs $99.99 per year for five licenses. You may also see a recommendation for Avira Prime Family, at $129.99 per year for 25 licenses.
If you’re strictly a macOS household, I don’t see any reason to go for Prime. Personal VIP tech support is nice—free users only get FAQs and community support forums—but not $99.99 per year nice. Windows users get more benefits from Avira Prime.
Free and Simple
Too many Mac users have experienced years of hearing the mantra, “PCs get viruses; Macs don’t.” Even though they now admit that’s not the case, they still may resent having to pay for antivirus. Avira Free Antivirus for Mac does a good job (verified by independent testing labs) at no cost. Avast and AVG also offer free antivirus utilities for macOS, so you may want to sample the options before you settle on a free protector.
If you can lay out some cash on antivirus for your Mac, there are several choices. Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac earns a perfect score from both labs, and Norton 360 Deluxe for Mac aced tests by the one lab that included it. Bitdefender includes such advanced features as ransomware protection for your documents and backups. With Norton 360 you get five cross-platform licenses and five no-limits VPN licenses. These two are our Editors' Choice products for Mac antivirus.
Avira Free Antivirus for Mac costs nothing, and it’s easy to use, but full access to all features requires a commercial upgrade.
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