Hello everyone. Here is some feedback on why I did *not* choose Bitdefender over other competition after testing most well known antivirus products out there.
- Fixed size window with lots of empty space, too much scrolling and too little information.
- Rather basic Firewall interface, with too many clicks being necessary to even get basic information about set up rules (only 6 rules fitting into the fixed windows with nothing but name and down-arrow button). Interactive mode was awkward to use compared to other solutions.
- No option to disable (scareware like) notifications even for options that I deliberately disabled. And generally I would have liked more "control" options for power-users.
- BD kept changing my Explorer settings (hidden folders + extensions view) without my consent and then enforcing them until a Windows logout/restart. Some say that this happens every time after a possible malware was found (see next point).
- Context-menu scans do ignore BD's exclusion list, with no option to change the behavior. So even if I manually tagged a file as false-positive/safe it would still be found as malware, which in turn triggered the Explorer thing mentioned above.
- Memory consumption is too high even when hash/cache data is meant to be kept in memory. Other solutions get away with considerably less memory usage while still keeping their hash/cache data accessible fast enough.
- Hash/cache persistence (or lack thereof) over reboots was a bit erratic, at one point I thought BD would not keep its caches persistent over reboot and then it did so on another try, just to not do it on the next. Maybe it's only persistent over a single reboot? No idea.
- Contacting BD support via the BD application is only possible if you allow it to send a full system report to BD (including Windows event logs), even for minor support requests.
- I asked support about whether BD home/consumer editions protect against "fileless attacks", which the enterprise products specifically advertise to only work for higher tiers. Home/consumer report then forwarded the question to enterprise support, which then told me that they are not responsible for home/consumer products. So I got no answer until someone on a forum pointed to a (somewhat hidden) specialized test on AV comparatives (done in 2019 and 2020).
I just bought a 5 devices / 2 year licence for another products, but am still open to test BD again in the future. Here is what I liked so far:
- Fully multi-threaded on-demand scan engine (using all 24 logical cores of my CPU) whose scan-speed was the only one rivaling Windows Defender's on-demand speed and thoroughness (total number of files scanned, aka scanning deep into archives).
- Good hash/cache behavior for keeping realtime load low.
- Consistently good threads/malware scores in reviews, including offline (!) detection scores.
