ESET NOD32 Antivirus Review

Our Verdict

ESET NOD32 Antivirus has a clean, easy-to-employ interface and a light organisation load. Too bad its malware protection is average at all-time.

For

Low-cal system touch on
Clean, straightforward user interface
Quick setup

Against

Subpar malware protection

Tom's Guide Verdict

ESET NOD32 Antivirus has a clean, easy-to-utilize interface and a light system load. Besides bad its malware protection is average at best.

Pros

+
Light system impact
+
Clean, straightforward user interface
+
Quick setup

Cons

-
Subpar malware protection

With one of the simplest and most straightforward interfaces of all antivirus products and a very lite impact upon Windows PCs, ESET NOD32 Antivirus is a joy to use. Only it provides only mediocre protection against malware, and has few useful extra features.

Costs and What'south Covered

For those unusual people who take simply one computer, a unmarried-PC ESET NOD32 Antivirus license costs $twoscore a year. For three PCs, it's $60 per year, though discounts tin can sometimes be plant online. These are standard prices for no-frills antivirus products, although BullGuard Antivirus costs $xxx for a unmarried-user yearly license, and F-Secure Anti-Virus has a three-for-one deal at $40.

ESET has two college-tier Windows products that offer the same malware protection every bit NOD32 Antivirus, but with actress features. Smart Security adds a secure web browser, parental controls, a personal firewall and the company's anti-spam filter, and as well lets yous track a lost or stolen device. It costs $60 to protect one PC for a year, or $80 to protect three.

ESET Multi-Device Security doesn't add together many features, but covers up to 10 Windows, Mac or Android devices with a single license. Information technology gives you an online account to manage the security settings of all your devices. Multi-Device Security costs $85 per year for six devices, or $100 for 10 devices. As with the other packages, there's a discount for two-year subscriptions.

ESET takes cybersecurity seriously, and has a nice series of educational and instructional videos for paid subscribers that show y'all how to create prophylactic passwords, use the Internet safely, protect your data and so on. These should be required viewing for children and parents akin. Yous're meant to log in with an ESET production key to meet the videos, simply we found and viewed them with a simple Google search.

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Antivirus Protection

ESET NOD32 Antivirus offers the standard three layers of malware protection: signature matching, behavioral monitoring and online analysis of new files. The visitor touts additional defenses, including an anti-phishing characteristic to block dodgy websites, an exploit blocker to ferret out difficult-to-detect malware and a memory scanner, but almost skillful Windows antivirus programs take similar features.

For more advanced users, there's a congenital-in host-based intrusion prevention organisation (HIPS), a feature commonly found in enterprise security software. Information technology'due south sort of a supercharged behavioral and signature-based malware scanner, and volition train itself to acquire about your PC and its users to optimize protection. The HIPS can be turned on or off, simply be forewarned that it will requite you lot a lot of alerts, at least for the first few weeks.

LiveGrid is an online malware-analysis organisation to which ESET's 100-million users ship up suspect lawmaking, and that quickly sends back updates. You tin opt out of LiveGrid if you'd rather not share arrangement data.

ESET NOD32 Antivirus' main window lets you get to a scan in 2 clicks, and you tin can customize the scanner to target specific drives and prepare information technology up to automatically scan inserted USB thumb drives or SD cards. Yous can set ESET'southward Smart Optimization to ignore items considered safe in previous scans.

The program examines email attachments, but there'due south no sandbox to attempt out a suspicious program without endangering the balance of the system. Withal, it does browse files while they're all the same downloading.

The next time you burn up League of Legends, you can flip on NOD32 Antivirus' Gamer Mode, which reduces user interruptions by delaying all non-essential alerts and updates.

NOD32 Antivirus lets y'all schedule daily or weekly scans of the system or a single bulldoze, just you'll take to gear up the scans as tasks. This lends a lot of flexibility and power, but the process'due south complexity may turn off many users.

Like many other basic antivirus products, ESET NOD32 Antivirus lacks its own firewall. Information technology uses Microsoft's instead, but y'all can't manage that from the ESET interface.

Antivirus Performance

Overall ESET'south anti-malware engine provided, at all-time, only mediocre defense force against malware. Based on thorough tests by the European independent evaluation labs AV-Test and AV-Comparatives, the software was amend at dealing with widespread, known malware than it was at detecting previously unseen zero-day malware.

In the charts below, nosotros've compared ESET'southward malware protection against those of 2 brands that oft top our rankings.

AV-Exam constitute that ESET Smart Security (which uses the same malware engine as NOD32 Antivirus) stopped only 95.1 percent of zero-day attacks in Windows x tests conducted in September 2015. ESET redeemed itself with a perfect 100-percentage score against zip-twenty-four hours malware in October.

Against widespread malware, ESET did much ameliorate, achieving respectable 99.iv- and 99.eight-percent effectiveness scores in the aforementioned ii months of Windows ten tests. In each month, it registered ane imitation positive, or benign file mistakenly identified every bit malware, which is not unusual.

ESET'due south performance in AV-TEST's most contempo Windows 8.1 evaluations was worse. It stopped 92.5 percent of zero-day malware in November 2015, and 98.iii percent in December. Its 99.5- and 99.seven-percent scores against widespread malware in those same months were better, and similar to the Windows 8.1 average of 99 percent. It racked up v false positives over both months — non great, but obviously the category boilerplate.

Only in Windows 7 tests run by AV-Test in January and February 2016 did ESET rise higher up average in all categories, though it was never quite perfect. It stopped 97.3 percent of nix-24-hour interval malware in the outset month, and 97.1 percent in the 2nd. Against widespread malware, information technology was 99.8- and 99.9-percentage constructive. There were no simulated positives in either month.

Finally, in AV-Comparatives' most recent "existent-world" tests involving the latest online malware, ESET plant 97.5 percent of malware in February 2016, and 99.iii percentage in March. In each month, it turned up a unmarried false positive — much better than most of the other antivirus products nosotros tested.

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Operation and System Impact

We tested the performance of ESET NOD32 Antivirus on an Asus X555LA notebook with an Intel Core i3-4005U processor, 6GB of RAM and a 500GB hard bulldoze belongings 36GB of data. The machine had been upgraded from Windows 8.1 to Windows x.

Overall, NOD32 Antivirus is a lightweight program that didn't bear on our organisation'due south functioning in any major way. Afterwards installing the program, but with no scans running, it took 7 minutes and 5 seconds to run our custom OpenOffice functioning examination, which matches 20,000 names and addresses on a spreadsheet.

That completion time was simply 14 seconds longer than the baseline we established for the test before installation of whatever antivirus software, and indicates a very minimal passive system touch of only 3.4 percent. (Modern antivirus software is ever actively checking files backside the scenes.)

While actively scanning, NOD32 Antivirus also had a minor impact on performance. The OpenOffice test finished in 7:25, or eight.iii per centum slower, during a total scan, and 7:21, or 7.3 percent slower, during a quick scan. These are among the best active-scan system-performance scores we've seen.

ESET NOD32 Antivirus took its time scanning, taking 43 minutes and 25 seconds to go through our entire system. Merely because it has such a light system bear upon, most users won't notice. On the other hand, ESET's 40-second quick browse was quite fast.

Interface

If you're into robots, ESET is for you. The company's handsome android mascot is accompanied by a condition-indicator bar on the chief page of the interface. The bar is green with a checkmark if everything is OK, but turns xanthous or red when y'all need to intervene.

From NOD32 Antivirus's Dwelling screen, all adjustments are at most two clicks abroad. There are links on the left to other pages: Computer Scan, Update, Tools and Setup, as well as Help and Support.

NOD32 Antivirus' Tools section is a cornucopia holding everything from log files and statistics to the Scheduler and a place to ship in suspect files. It includes the SysInspector, which shows running processes with an appraisal of how unsafe they might exist, as well as a rolling bar graph of file activity, which can be an early indicator of an assail.

If your system is cluttered with all sorts of malware, NOD32 Antivirus provides an onscreen link to download and install ESET's SysRescue Live bootable disk epitome. It tin can exist loaded onto a CD or thumb drive to refresh your system.

Installation and Support

ESET NOD32 Antivirus gets going speedily. It took us only iii minutes and fifty seconds to download and install the plan. You'll demand to determine whether to participate in the company's LiveGrid online malware-sample-collection program; don't worry, you tin can opt out later on.

The company has email, online and phone support, merely you lot can speak to a technician only Mon through Friday from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific time, and the back up line is not a toll-free number. You can as well search or scroll through the database or consult the forum.

Bottom Line

ESET NOD32 Antivirus may not be the best at catching rogue software, simply it does provide a bones level of protection while beingness like shooting fish in a barrel to use and having a minimal impact on organisation performance. But in this price range, we recommend Bitdefender Antivirus Plus or Avira Antivirus Pro, which combine light arrangement loads with top-notch malware protection.

Brian Nadel is a freelance author and editor who specializes in technology reporting and reviewing. He works out of the suburban New York City area and has covered topics from nuclear power plants and Wi-Fi routers to cars and tablets. The sometime editor-in-chief of Mobile Calculating and Communications, Nadel is the recipient of the TransPacific Writing Award.