Is Vipre Antivirus Any Good
Ahmend Studioz
VIPRE gets high scores for malware protection with some (though not all) independent testing labs, but its other features are mostly underpowered, and can't compete with the best of the rest. If price is top of your priority list, though, the steep first year discounts make it worth a look.
There are big savings to be made if you add devices and extend your subscription. A 10-device, 4-year Advanced Security license is priced at $399.99 for instance, just $10 per device per year (that's the standard price, too, so it won't jump up at renewal time).
Malware often tries to disable any security products it recognizes, so a good antivirus must be able to protect itself from external tinkering. Unfortunately, VIPRE doesn't do this very well, and our tests revealed various weak spots.
These weaknesses can only be exploited if malware is able to run on your system without detection. That shouldn't happen very often, and even if it does, most threats won't make specific efforts to kill VIPRE products. Still, these are security holes we don't see with Bitdefender, Kaspersky or other top providers, and that has to be a concern.
It's looks very basic, but there's no doubt it's easy to use. Move your mouse cursor over the dashboard Scan button, a dropdown menu of Scan options appears (Quick, Full, Custom), and you can click whatever you need. Very straightforward.
Sensible interface design reduces the need to hunt around VIPRE's menus. 'Last scan was 12 hours ago', a status line told us. With some apps we'd need to go look at the logs to remind ourselves what the scan found, but here, VIPRE's text is also a link, and clicking it opened the previous scan report with all its findings.
One reason for this simplicity is that there are barely any extras. The only one we noticed is a Secure File Eraser, turned off by default, which enables securely wiping confidential files from your device.
There are more settings than we expected, too. You can define the types of files the antivirus engine will automatically scan, for instance; automatically scan removable drives as they're inserted; save power by delaying updates and scheduled scans when you're not plugged in; and run a quick scan as soon as possible if a scheduled scan is missed.
While none of this is particularly outstanding, it'll be enough for most users. And if you're tired of overcomplicated security products, weighed down by a host of extras you'll never use, VIPRE's more back-to-basics approach should appeal.
Although VIPRE wasn't top of the detection rate charts, it's worth noting that it had minimal false alarms, only four across all tests. Panda, F-Secure and Trend Micro may have blocked 100% of threats, but they also raised 33, 44 and 63 false alarms respectively, a potential usability hassle.
AV-Test's October 2020 Windows 10 test showed better results, with VIPRE blocking 100% of test threats. Both labs found VIPRE's products had fewer than average false positives, and AV-Test found VIPRE had less of an impact on system speed than most.
Scan times are a little longer than average, though not so much that you're likely to notice. VIPRE took 46 minutes to scan our 50GB of test data, then 3 minutes 44 seconds on the second run. Bitdefender managed 39 minutes on the first scan, falling to 27 seconds next time. Kaspersky was initially faster at 19 minutes 14 seconds, but then took 2 minutes 50 seconds next time.
To test behavior monitoring, we make use of various scripting tricks (run a standard Windows app, which launches PowerShell, then uses it to download and run a malicious file). VIPRE didn't stop as many of these at the behavior level as Bitdefender or Kaspersky, but it did better than others, and all malicious downloads were detected as soon as they reached our hard drive.
There wasn't such good news with our custom ransomware, though. Bitdefender and Kaspersky both spotted this within a fraction of a second, killed its process and recovered the very few files our test threat managed to encrypt. VIPRE did precisely nothing, allowing it to encrypt more than 11,000 test files.
This doesn't mean VIPRE can't protect against ransomware, or even brand-new ransomware; it's 100% result at AV-Test shows it mostly performs very well. The company could even argue that because our sample wasn't 'real' malware, it made the right decision by allowing it to run.
What this does suggest, though, is that Bitdefender and Kaspersky are more cautious in how they handle suspect behavior, and more likely to raise the alarm than allow a potential threat to continue. And when you're thinking about ransomware, that's the approach we prefer to see.
VIPRE Antivirus Plus is stripped back, easy to use and has some decent independent lab test results. However, it doesn't really stand out in any area, and the lack of self-protection against malware attacks makes it difficult to recommend.
Despite these extras, there's little change to the interface. VIPRE Advanced Security looks and feels almost identical to Antivirus Plus, with just the addition of a Firewall option in the left-hand sidebar, and additional Firewall, Updates and Email pages in the Settings area.
It's still a little basic. If you like your internet security suites to be stuffed with features, this one might seem a little lightweight. But if you're happy with the essentials, and tired of suites which come weighed down with junk you'll never use, VIPRE's approach just might work for you.
The firewall doesn't have the intelligence you'll get with Bitdefender or NortonLifeLock, though. The best firewalls monitor your process network traffic from the start, automatically making decisions on what to block, and what to allow. By default, VIPRE just uses its standard ruleset; even if you switch it to Learning mode, the firewall asks you what to do for each unknown process. Figuring that out can be a challenge, even for experienced users, and it's easy to start approving every request without really thinking about it.
The default settings could be an issue, too. The firewall includes a Host Intrusion Prevention System to stop attacks against processes on your system, for instance, while an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) protects you from attacks on the local network. Sounds great, except they're turned off by default.
You could just turn them on, assuming you notice, but there are more decisions to make. By default, the IDS blocks high priority intrusions, but allows any flagged as medium or low priority. Is that a problem? What might be the consequences of blocking medium and low priority intrusions, too? Good question: we don't know, either.
There is some power here. The firewall will make you safer, out of the box, and experts can tweak it to enhance their security further. But if you just want something that works, immediately, with no manual tweakery required, this probably isn't the best choice.
VIPRE Advanced Security includes a spam filter which scans POP3 and SMTP traffic for junk mail. There's direct support for Outlook via an add-in, although it should work with any other local email clients.
It's a very basic setup, even by security suite standards. The Outlook add-in doesn't seem to have any interface, and SSL connections aren't supported (VIPRE's website tells us these will 'cause mail to stop flowing'), plus there are no real settings beyond simple blacklists and whitelists and an On/Off switch.
The filter detected 75% of our test junk emails, suggesting it has some value. But quality spam filters can block 90% or higher, and VIPRE's offering doesn't have any 'sensitivity' or other tweaks to adjust performance. If you really need a local spam filter, you'll be better off elsewhere.
The official list of supported apps is short and outdated (it still includes Yahoo Messenger, shut down in July 2018), but does include some important products: Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Adobe Reader, and freeware tools including VLC Media Player, Paint.Net and more.
Overall, the patch manager does a basic job, but we're not sure we'd want to pay for it. Most of the supported apps handle their own updates without any issue. If you do want to do everything from a single tool, Avira's Software Updater covers more applications, or you can use Ninite's one-stop installer and updater for free.
The VPN is the real bonus here, especially in the first year, where a steep introductory discount means you get everything for just $40. You'd probably spend more than that elsewhere for the VPN alone (ExpressVPN charges $100 for its 1-year license).
It's a different story at renewal time, when the discount expires and the price jumps to $140. Still, if you're happy with VIPRE antivirus, VIPRE Ultimate Security might be worth a try, if only for the cheap first year.
VIPRE Internet Shield is a simple VPN which isn't exactly leading-edge, but more than covers the basics. We're giving the service a quick evaluation here as part of this suite review, but do note that for the complete lowdown, we already have a full review of VIPRE Internet Shield which you'll find here.
Internet Shield gives you 80+ locations across 50+ countries, which is not the largest VPN network we've ever seen, but should be more than enough for most users. (We're unsure why the website talks of 'hundreds' of locations, though; they weren't visible from our Windows client.)
Internet Shield doesn't support WireGuard or have any other speedy custom protocols. But there is OpenVPN and IKEv2 (on Windows), and a kill switch to protect you if the VPN drops, and that's also probably enough.
And if you're wondering why you should trust an antivirus company to supply you with a VPN, relax; Internet Shield is powered by WLVPN, a white label VPN company used by companies like Namecheap to deliver a branded VPN. We've found from previous reviews that WLVPN provides a reasonable mid-range service, not the best, but as we've said above, enough for most users.
Tap Connect on the opening page and it'll connect you to the nearest server, for instance, or you can choose another from the location list. There's no favorites system, so you must find your preferred locations each time, but a search box might speed that up, and server load figures help you make the right decision.
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