5 Best FREE Antivirus Software for Windows in 2020

1. Panda Free Antivirus — Best Overall Free Windows Antivirus

Panda Free Antivirus is lightweight, secure, and easy-to-use. Everything is laid out on the dashboard in an attractive and intuitive way. It’s great for beginners who don’t want to worry about a lot of advanced settings — just open it up and let it run.

Panda might be one of the lesser-known brands on this list, but its antivirus scanner scored exceptionally well in my tests, with a 100% virus detection rate. The included firewall is also pretty powerful, blocking more intrusions than any other free antivirus I tested, including the Windows firewall.

I really like that Panda Free Antivirus comes with a virtual private network (VPN). I always recommend using a VPN if you’re on a public Wi-Fi network — not only is all of your data exposed to the network administrator, unsecured Wi-Fi networks are notoriously easy to hack into. While Panda’s VPN is free, it has a data limit of 150 MB per day — this is good for browsing the web and sending emails, but it’s not nearly enough data for things like streaming or file sharing. You can only get unlimited VPN data on the Panda Dome Premium plan.

Overall, in terms of anti-malware protection, Panda is my favorite free antivirus of 2020.

2. Avira Free Antivirus — Best for Internet Security

Avira Free Antivirus not only lets us experience Avira’s legendary German-engineered antivirus technology, it also includes Avira Browser Safety — an extension for Firefox and Chrome which protects against malicious websites and phishing scams.

Avira’s antivirus engine operates in the cloud, meaning that most of its malware detection and analysis doesn’t actually take place on your PC. This cloud-based technology has two main advantages.

First, it means Avira can keep its methods secret by only fighting malware on its own servers. This puts Avira one step ahead of the hackers at all times because hackers won’t know what Avira knows.

Second, it means Avira can maintain an extremely low “footprint” — it demands very few system resources. In fact, Avira has one of the smallest and lightest antivirus engines of all the major antivirus brands.

And because Avira runs so efficiently, even many older Windows PCs can run Avira Free Antivirus without much impact on performance. If your PC sometimes feels slow and sluggish when you’re using applications, Avira could be your antivirus solution.

3. Sophos Home Free — Best for Parental Controls

There’s plenty of bad stuff online that basic antivirus software won’t pick up. As well as protecting your devices and personal information from viruses, Sophos Home Free is a good free antivirus that helps protect your kids from the parts of the web that you might not want them to see.

Sophos Home Free includes great parental controls — something that usually comes only in premium internet security packages, such as Norton 360 Deluxe. Parental controls let us monitor how our kids use their devices and restrict which websites they can access. 

Sophos Home Free also includes real-time protection against malware and a browser extension that keeps you away from visiting malicious websites.

You can install the free version of Sophos on up to 3 devices. This is very generous for a free product, but if you have more devices, you’ll need to upgrade — luckily, there’s a 20% off discount on Sophos Home Premium right here.

4. Kaspersky Security Cloud (Free) — Best for Added Features

Kaspersky Security Cloud — Free is an impressive free antivirus suite. It includes Kaspersky’s cloud-based malware scanning engine, which caught 100% of the threats I threw at it during testing.

Not only does Security Cloud scan for malware, perform system cleanup and use active scanning to prevent new threats, but it also provides complete privacy protection with a VPN, a password manager, and dark web scanning.

The VPN is pretty good — it didn’t slow my computer down very much, and allowed me to unblock geo-restricted streaming content with servers around the globe. Unfortunately, there is a 200 MB daily limit, but that’s better than the 150 MB daily data on Panda’s free VPN.

The limit on the password manager is a little bit worse — only 15 separate logins can be saved, which is not nearly enough for most users. Still, if you have 15 logins which are your highest priority, the password manager generates and auto-fills extremely complex passwords for an added layer of security.

The dark web scanner is simple, but effective. After I gave it my essential logins, it regularly checked the database at Have I Been Pwned to see if my information was getting shared around the dark web.

5. Bitdefender Antivirus Free — Best for Simple Windows Protection

Bitdefender’s Antivirus Free is a great choice for users looking for an antivirus scanner that they don’t need to think about after installation. Bitdefender is designed to run in the background, with only essential notifications in case of suspicious program activity. Malware scans, detection, and removal all happen automatically, unless you decide to adjust the settings.

If you’re looking for extra features like a password manager, parental controls, dark web monitoring, or a VPN, this is not the right product for you (you’ll need something like Norton 360 for that). However, it’s still really good antivirus software, and its minimal design means that it won’t slow your PC down at all.

As we saw in our full review, Bitdefender’s malware scanner is one of the strongest on the market, and the Advanced Protection feature now extends to ransomware detection — any suspicious behavior on your PC will get frozen immediately. This scanner is really fast — malware files and ransomware processes were all caught just moments after I downloaded or unzipped them.

The anti-phishing and fraud protection features are pretty good as well. Bitdefender flagged all of the latest known phishing sites and alerted me when I was asked to enter private data onto 3 different suspicious web forms.

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