What is the BEST antivirus? Without a doubt that this question is being asked very frequently and it is a very debatable topic. This question has been asked a few times in forum and also I can’t even remember how many emails I got regarding this question. All this while I’ve been telling people that Kaspersky is the BEST, and I think I am wrong. I should be saying Kaspersky is one of the TOP antivirus, not best because many criteria needs to be evaluated and there is no single antivirus brand that performs the best in every area.

According to Anti-Virus Software Review 2008, these criteria should be used to evaluate an Anti-Virus and determine which is the TOP antivirus.

Ease of Use – Exceptional anti-virus software is simple to use, regardless of a person’s computer experience or knowledge of viruses.

Effective at Identifying Viruses and Worms – The best anti-virus products identify infected files quickly through real-time scanning, searching for viruses in a multitude of sources, including email, instant message applications, web browsing and so on.

Effective at Cleaning or Isolating Infected Files – Truly capable anti-virus software thoroughly cleans, deletes or quarantines infected files—keeping them from spreading throughout the hard drive or network.

Activity Reporting – Anti-virus programs should give immediate notification of viruses found by real-time scanners and should provide an easy-to-read report of scan results, including what it found and what it did with infected files.

Feature Set – A well-rounded feature set allows anti-virus software to provide absolute protection. The best programs are those that offer a wide variety of tools, from basic real-time scanning to more advanced, heuristic scanning and script blocking—when it comes to virus protection, the more options the better.

Ease of Installation and Setup – Anti-virus programs should be a breeze to install, making it easy to go from installation to initial scan in just a couple clicks of the mouse.

Help Documentation – High-end anti-virus software come with plenty of help, including support via email, online chat or over the telephone. There should also be online resources, such as knowledge bases and FAQs available for quick and convenient help.

I can honestly tell you that there is no way for an individual to compare all antivirus simply because lack of resources. We’ll need thousands of virus samples in order to test the effectiveness in detecting and removing virus. The easiest way is to leave it to professionals to do the test and we’ll just have a look at their report to determine which we would choose to use.

Anti-Malware Test Lab use the following methodologies to test an antivirus product.

# Polymorphic virus protection test
# Proactive antivirus protection test
# Antivirus product self-protection test
# Active infections treatment test
# Anti-rootkit test
# Packers support test
From their report, I can see that Kaspersky is the only brand that didn’t fail or get poor results in any of the test. I am surprised to see that BitDefender performs so badly in all tests.

We can’t depend on single report to determine which is the top antivirus. Here’s another popular website (AV-Comparatives) that compare antivirus software.

Every year they will perform On-demand comparative and Retrospective/ProActive Test twice. Products that got the “standard”-level can be understood as products that based on AV-Comparatives tests have a good on-demand detection rate, “advanced” a very good on-demand detection rate and “advanced+” an excellent on-demand detection rate. From their tests report, NOD32 has won AV product of the year twice in a row for year 2006 and 2007. Kaspersky won AV product of the year twice in a row for year 2004 and 2005. Kaspersky did pretty well in year 2006 and 2007 although it did not win AV of the year.

Next is antivirus comparison provided by LightSpeed Systems.

They’ve tested 12 antivirus products with 5861 sample viruses. LightSpeed Antivirus scored a 100% in detecting the 5861 virus. I don’t think it’s fair to include LightSpeed Antivirus in the test because they have the virus in hand, definitely they’ll make sure that their antivirus is able to detect the virus. Again, we see that Kaspersky has the second highest percent in detecting 5861 virus. NOD32 didn’t do that well…

Another test site we can take a look at is AV-Test.org.

Independent testing body AV-Test.org has released its latest set of results, with a large group of products tested against a number of criteria including proactive detection, spotting and removing active infections, and outbreak response times, as well as simple detection rates. Their latest test report shows that AntiVir, NOD32 and Norton scoring very well in all criteria. Kaspersky only did average in this test.

Final website that compares the features in antivirus software is TopTenREVIEWS.

This time we see that BitDefender takes the first place, Kaspersky second and NOD32 third.

Update: I found another website called virus.gr that collects virus and test them with antivirus. They currently have 246705 virus samples and tested them with 41 types of antivirus.

The latest report which released on June shows that G DATA has the best detection rate, followed by F-Secure, Trustport. Kaspersky 2009 is at number 4 and can detect 97.95% from the virus sample. Not bad for being at number 4 out of 41.

If I had to make a decision for myself to use which antivirus, I’d choose Kaspersky because it is able to maintain its top position in all tests except only 1 test that it only performed averagely. I noticed that Avira AntiVir does pretty well in the tests… So, after checking out all 5 reports, which antivirus software do you think is the top antivirus?