I’ve been using Bitdefender antivirus for about the past 6 years. Generally speaking, I don’t have too many problems with viruses. Most of the people I know have enough sense to stay away from sites containing viruses, and they don’t as a rule forward email wily nilly.
There have been some emails over the past few years that were infected but generally speaking I maintain antivirus only as a safety precaution.
I started using Bitdefender because a couple of companies I worked at used it and it seemed pretty robust while not sucking up tons of system resources. Many of you may know of the product because it’s marketed mostly as a Windows solution. However they also have a Mac version of the software.
You have to buy their Total Premium package to get it, but that didn’t bother me because I also had Windows and that package gave me 5 licenses.
I just got the renewal notice telling me that another 3 years was going to cost $200. “Whoa!” That’s a lot of money. Not really a lot over the course of 3 years but I got to thinking about what I was really using.
I’ve not been doing a whole lot with Windows, so I didn’t need the Windows license anymore. I don’t use Bitdefender’s VPN, Parental Controls, or in fact any of their products except the Mac Antivirus.
I’d become disenchanted with even that product because it seemed to be really busy all the dang time. There wasn’t enough file activity, downloads, and email attachments, to justify the application constantly checking (something… I don’t know what). Don’t even get me started on what a royal pain in the ass Bitdefender was every single time Apple updated the OS. Uninstalling and reinstalling the application became a really common event.
That was an annoyance. But the bigger question was that the Bitdefender dashboard only showed that one license was in use, when I knew for a fact that there were 3 of the 5 available in use. This raised the question, did they really have as much of a handle on things as they said they did.
This led me to investigating alternatives.
To The Internet Boy Wonder!
There were tons of reviews of various antivirus products. Bitdefender was always in the top 3, even on the Mac side of things. Norton was another and well, to be honest, I didn’t even read the Norton reviews. Norton and I have a really bad history. So admittedly I’m biased. One other product popped up on the Mac side of things frequently.
It’s a Mac only product from a company called Intego. I’d used their product in the past until they got too expensive and honestly bloated beyond all reason. If I recall correctly I stopped using them about 8-10 years ago. In great part because they were sucking up all kinds of system resources on my Mac OS 9 system. Then they got super expensive and I was done.
I think they learned their lesson. Their current product reviews stated that the product had a light footprint and did what it was asked to do. Their suite of applications was nicely integrated and during installation the user had the option to install only those apps from the suite that were wanted.
Very unlike Bitdefender which installs everything and then forces the user to execute uninstallation utilities for applications that aren’t desired.
Intego is a Mac only solution. They’ve been Mac only right from the start. That means that their solution isn’t a reworked hack job converting a primarily Windows application to a Mac compatible version. It’s Mac to its foundations.
I read a ton of reviews, the only “Dings” I found were that some years Intego didn’t submit the product for “Professional Evaluation & Review” to various publications.
Also noted was that the installation process was a bit iterative. Meaning that if you install their entire suite of applications, you have to authorize each application for access when you bring it online.
I understand why some reviewers might be annoyed with this, but I see it as a plus. It forces a conscious choice on the part of the user to allow a product access to their system or not. I like having a touch more control over what applications have access to my entire disk, or my network traffic. Many other suites issue a blanket pass for such things and that has always made me uncomfortable.
Really, does a network utility need access to my contacts? I think not.
Goodbye Bitdefender
I also found a coupon that got me a substantial discount. So I purchased 3 licenses for 2 years. Uninstalling Bitdefender took forever, installing the Intego suite took a little while, but it went very smoothly.
An interesting side note is that Bitdefender offered me half off the subscription price when I turned off “Auto Renew” I guess they thought if after 6 years this guy is turning off Auto Renewal we’re going to lose him.
They weren’t wrong… Trouble is, it was too little too late.
I’m going to be running Intego for about 30 days on my system, then I’ll put it on the other half’s.
Thus far, I’m liking what I see.
The various interfaces in the applications are clean and well laid out. I like the net barrier application’s visual firewall. I could see where net barrier could be annoying if you have a lot of applications that want to phone home. That being said, once authorized the application doesn’t ask again.
The Washing Machine application is a bit slow, but it wiped 4 GB of crap from my system. I haven’t even run its duplicate scan yet. I’m hoping that it’s as intelligent and informative about what it plans to do as the cleaning cycle.
The antivirus portion of the application is clean and simple. Some reviews said that it was a a bit slow, but my experience was on par with doing a full scan in Bitdefender. Yeah… it’s going to take a while.
If I find any weirdnesses or annoyances, I’m planning on updating this post. I’d recommend that everyone take a look at your subscriptions when they come up for renewal. Rather than just clicking on the Pay Now button, give it some thought. Do. You really like the application or service, or can you do better?
Have a great weekend.