TotalAV Antivirus Reviewed by Experts: Does It Give Total Protection in 2024?

Getting Started: Buying A TotalAV Package

We started by choosing a subscription package. We went with Internet Security like we did last year, but TotalAV offers three options:

Note that prices on TotalAV’s website are introductory prices, a common industry practice. After the first year, the renewal price will be higher. Since we tested Internet Security around the same time last year, we paid $129 to renew our TotalAV license.

We paid a fair price though, even with the higher renewal rate. It has features similar to a McAfee Essential five-device license ($39 the first year, $119.99 for renewals) but protects one additional device. See our TotalAV vs. McAfee comparison, or read our page on McAfee antivirus pricing to learn more.

There are other services that are more affordable in the long run. For example, Surfshark One combines antivirus, VPN and personal data safety tools for $47.85 in the first year ($8 more than TotalAV Internet Security) but then barely increases the yearly price to $79 for renewals. See our Surfshark antivirus review; it ranks second to TotalAV in our antivirus ranking. While its VPN supports unlimited devices, the antivirus is limited to five.

Why We Didn’t Choose TotalAV Free

TotalAV offers a free antivirus, but we don’t recommend it. It’s not that it’s bad at removing malware. It can do as well as the premium software in that regard. But the free antivirus doesn’t offer additional value if your device already has a built-in antivirus.

We briefly tested the free software and were impressed at first. It let us:

• Use real-time protection (more on this later).
• Perform manual quick and full scans.
• Scan our devices for cookies and trackers.

Sadly, on the third day, it took away the premium features, offering to give them back if we signed up for a premium plan. In the end, we were left with a piece of software that can scan our computers when prompted. That’s it. It’s nothing Windows Defender can’t do, and if we had kept it, it would have just taken up storage space.

TotalAV still offers one of the best free antivirus software solutions, so if your device doesn’t come with built-in antivirus software and you’d rather not pay for one, try TotalAV. Just watch out for marketing banners trying to get you to buy a premium license.

What We Got From TotalAV Internet Security

TotalAV is one of the best antivirus and VPN bundles, and Internet Security is a great example of why it made that list. It offers the following:

• Real-time protection
• Full, quick and scheduled scans
• System tune-up tools
• VPN
• WebShield
• Password manager

Real-Time Protection

You may be used to software that scans on schedule or when prompted, but modern antivirus software offers better. Real-time protection automatically scans files and programs as you download, open or create them. In theory, that leaves no room for malware to enter and execute on your device. As long as you don’t turn off your antivirus software, your device is safe.

We use a malware test file from EICAR1 to test how well real-time protection runs on different software. We were slightly disappointed with TotalAV. We downloaded the file first with Windows Defender on, and it blocked the download. When it was TotalAV’s turn, the download pushed through. We got the same results after five more tries.

Fortunately, downloading malware isn’t harmful. You need to access and execute the file for malware to run. When we tried to open the EICAR file, TotalAV blocked it, and a prompt (see image below) appeared.

So, in the end, TotalAV protected us. It wasn’t as watertight as Windows Defender, so still exercise caution, and don’t download from unknown sources.

TotalAV Malware Scans

Despite offering real-time protection, malware scans are a staple feature for most antivirus software.

TotalAV offers several types of scans, typical for antivirus software.

• Quick scan: A quick scan looks at critical locations, new files and processes to find malware where it usually hides. TotalAV’s quick scan took four minutes and scanned more than 15,000 files and 78 folders. It found six threats — those EICAR files we downloaded.
• System scan: Other antiviruses call this a full scan; it looks at every file on the computer. We timed TotalAV, and the scan lasted 25 minutes. It scanned 300,000 files and 15,000 folders. It found one other threat that evaded the quick scan — a VPN app marked as a PUP.
• Scheduled scan: You can schedule scans to run daily, weekly, every two weeks or monthly. You can choose to run a quick scan, system scan or smart scan (more on this later). We recommend a system scan every week or two. Unfortunately, you can’t specify when these scans take place, unlike McAfee that lets you set a start day and time (see our McAfee review). Instead, you set your active hours and TotalAV scans outside those times.
• Custom scan: Lastly, you can do a custom scan to make TotalAV look for malware in selected files and folders. If you want to scan one folder, you can also right-click on the folder and select “Scan with TotalAV.”

Those are the options for antivirus scans, but as an all-around cybersecurity tool, TotalAV also offers smart scans. With one click, TotalAV runs the following:

• Quick scan: To look for malware
• Security and privacy scan: To find settings and programs like spyware and adware that compromise your security and privacy
• Performance scan: To look for apps or files that take too much storage space or resources
• System junk and duplicate scan: To look for unnecessary files you can remove to free up storage space

Our smart scan lasted just six minutes, but returned impressive results. It found more than 30 GB of junk files, cookies and cache from our browsers, and six duplicate files. We ran the smart scan after doing a system scan though, so it found no malware or PUPs.

System Tune-Up

Real-time protection and malware scans are the core anti-malware features of TotalAV. Let’s talk about the included additional protections, starting with the system tune-up tools.

• Junk cleaner: This scans the computer for junk files, like cached update files, .temp files and items in the recycle bin. It saved us more than 30 GB of memory when we used it.
• Duplicate file finder: This looks for duplicate files with similar names and sizes. It doesn’t delete duplicate files automatically, which is good because it sometimes finds false positives. For example, it mistakenly marked three different files as duplicates (see image below).

• Application uninstaller: This lets you select multiple apps to uninstall. It’s faster than Windows’ uninstaller, which uninstalls one app at a time. It was also able to remove a broken program we couldn’t uninstall with Windows’ uninstaller.
• Startup manager: TotalAV showed our startup apps and let us turn them on and off. We recommend keeping your startup apps to a minimum if your computer starts up slow. On that note, we prefer Windows’ built-in startup manager because it shows the impact of each app to your device’s boot time (low, medium, high).
• Browser cleanup: This scans your browsers and shows you items you can remove to improve speed, like cookies, cached items, download history and saved passwords.

While system tune-up tools serve the purpose of keeping your device running smoothly, it can also help find malicious programs. For example, a computer worm creates multiple copies of itself and spreads throughout your device, causing performance issues. Duplicate file finder can help you track down where the worm has spread.

WebShield

WebShield is TotalAV’s primary way to keep online threats at bay. When turned on, it prevents you from visiting potentially malicious websites, including phishing sites that steal personal data and cryptomining sites that use your device’s resources without permission.

WebShield is an effective way to avoid phishing. We ran a study on phishing and found that only five percent of the American population can accurately tell legitimate and phishing emails apart. Phishing is a complex online scam, so if you can’t trust your intuition to protect you, WebShield comes in handy.

Privacy Protections

Last but not least, TotalAV can help protect your privacy through two tools:

• VPN: The primary tool is a VPN, which encrypts your online traffic and changes the IP address seen by the websites you use. TotalAV offers a full-featured VPN complete with a kill switch, and we talk more about its performance and features in our separate TotalAV VPN review. We rated it 8.7 out of 10 and it almost made our list of the best VPNs if not for the limited server network.
• Password Vault: While not included in our Internet Security subscription, TotalAV has a password manager if you sign up for the Total Security package. We tested it a couple of years ago, and it worked — you create a master PIN, which you’ll use to access all stored login credentials. It’s compatible with Chrome, Edge and Safari. You can also install the Total Password app on your Android or iOS device.

The TotalAV User Experience

That’s it for the features. As you can see, TotalAV doesn’t disappoint. It covers malware, privacy and online protections, eclipsing Windows Defender.

The thing about feature-rich antivirus software, though, is that they are rarely as user-friendly as we’d want them to be. Let’s see if TotalAV breaks the mold.

Setup

TotalAV was surprisingly quick and easy to set up. We didn’t need to restart our device after installing the app. Most antivirus software requires a reboot after installation, like Kasperksy and Norton.

Unlike those antiviruses, TotalAV didn’t offer to do an initial scan after installation, however. A lot of the features were also off by default, which we had to turn on one by one. Those include the following:

• Real-time protection
• WebShield
• Automatic scan for removable devices

We also had to heavily customize the settings to get TotalAV running up to spec. For example, it didn’t initially look into .zip archives when scanning. Trojan viruses like to hide in .zip archives, especially when downloaded as a part of a malicious package. That’s risky if you didn’t know to check those features and assumed TotalAV would detect all threats fresh off installation.

Using TotalAV

After checking all the settings, TotalAV didn’t require much attention from us. It kept our devices safe in the background with real-time protection, WebShield and weekly system scans.

That said, you can set up only one type of scheduled scan. We recommend system scans because they check the entire computer for malware. While smart scan checks for other threats and performance issues, it only performs a quick scan of malware. We suggest manually running a smart scan every two weeks.

We also like that TotalAV didn’t constantly send us notifications. That can be distracting, and one of the problems we had when we tested ESET. TotalAV only sends notifications when necessary.

TotalAV on Mobile

Besides our Windows PC, we installed TotalAV on an iPad, iPhone and Android smartphone. The mobile apps were similar to the Windows app with a richer interface and animated graphics. We liked it. Most antivirus mobile apps are oversimplified versions of their desktop apps — like the AVG Android app that doesn’t offer a lot of customizations. With TotalAV, we got desktop-level antivirus software on our smartphones and tablets. That’s why we named TotalAV the best Android antivirus app.

Virus Database Updates

One of the downsides of TotalAV is the lack of behavior-based detection, which means it can only recognize malware that is in TotalAV’s database of known threats.

TotalAV doesn’t say how often it releases database updates, and the app didn’t notify us about such. But in the settings, we set the app to check for updates hourly. We also noticed that the app checks for updates at the start of every malware scan, which is something we liked that most antiviruses don’t do.

Overall Performance

Using antivirus software can impact your device’s performance. When we tested McAfee’s real-time protection, we noticed a two- to five-second lag when opening programs, most likely as a result of the real-time scanning. There were no such lags with TotalAV.

However, there was one time that we noticed a significant performance drop. It was when we turned on real-time protection for the first time. Our computer froze for about 30 seconds, but went back to normal after that. It never happened again, fortunately.

Summary and Verdict on TotalAV

There were some holes in TotalAV’s protection, but we were overall satisfied. The real-time protection worked, and the scans ran efficiently and reliably. While Windows Defender did better in preventing us from downloading potential malware, TotalAV made up for it by stopping us from opening the malware file.

And remember, the reason we recommend using third-party software over Windows Defender are the extra protection features. TotalAV shined in that area. All plans come with a VPN, system tune-up tools and WebShield. Smart scan put the system tune-up tools to use and cleaned up over 30 GB from our computer.

There were a couple of features missing from TotalAV. The first is behavior-based detection, which detects malware by observing how it behaves. It’s effective for detecting new malware that isn’t on the virus database yet. The second missing feature is a firewall. While WebShield does a great job, it can’t protect your device from threats coming from your network. It’s not effective in preventing hackers. If those are things you’re particularly worried about, check out our Norton 360 review. It’s pricier and less user-friendly than TotalAV, but it offers all-around protection for those who need it.