McAfee is a long-time player in the antivirus market. The company was established in 1988 and is also famous for its firewalls antispam products, encryption of files, and public key infrastructure. It is most well-known, however, for its anti-virus products and has a stronghold on the market. Security suites from the company offer comprehensive protection against viruses and malware, and are backed up with a $1,000,000 guarantee against identity theft.

All of McAfee's plans include a fully-featured malware scanner that can impede the entry of malware into a computer system and kill or eliminate the malware that have already penetrated it. The real-time protection engine of McAfee is designed to stop malware files from downloading and additionally, it reroutes and secures data to ensure that your online activity cannot be intercepted and used against you.

In our tests, McAfee consistently achieved top marks in test virtual data room of AV-Test's 0-day and our malware protection test. It also passed our privacy tests, scoring 100% in all of the categories.

The suite's interface is simple and clean. Accessing features like parental controls and identity theft protections can be somewhat of a challenge, though. They're siloed into distinct menus on the dashboard. Support is also a bit difficult. The McAfee Community Forum is in operation however Techmaster Concierge will be required to assist you with more complicated issues.

McAfee's system scanner did not eliminate some junk files from our test systems. It doesn't permit you to drag and drop a particular file or folder into the suite to scan it as does many competitors. This is a huge no-no for a security software that costs this much.