Avast Review 2026

Avast Review: Excellent Detection, a Documented Privacy Failure

Avast is one of the largest consumer antivirus vendors in the world. Reviewing it honestly requires holding two facts side by side, because both are true and neither cancels the other: the detection engine is among the best independently measured, and the company was penalised by a regulator for selling the browsing data of the people it was protecting.

Detection: independently excellent

AV-TEST, the German independent testing lab, scores home antivirus products out of 6 in each of three categories — protection, performance and usability — for 18 total. In the June 2026 Windows 11 round, Avast Free Antivirus scored 6.0 / 6.0 / 6.0. That is not an outlier: the same perfect 6/6/6 appears in the December 2025, February 2026 and April 2026 rounds. A product needs 17.5 to earn AV-TEST's "TOP PRODUCT" award; Avast has been clearing it repeatedly.

The performance score matters as much as the protection one. A 6.0 there means the scanner is not measurably slowing the machine — historically the main reason people disable antivirus altogether, which is a worse outcome than any detection-rate difference between the leading products.

The privacy record, stated plainly

In February 2024 the US Federal Trade Commission ordered Avast to pay $16.5 million and banned it from selling or licensing web browsing data for advertising purposes. The order was finalised in June 2024. The FTC's allegation was that Avast collected consumers' browsing information through its browser extensions and antivirus software, stored it indefinitely, and sold it without adequate notice or consent — via its subsidiary Jumpshot, to more than 100 third parties, from 2014 to 2020.

The data was not anonymous in any meaningful sense. The FTC described it as revealing religious beliefs, health concerns, political leanings, location, financial status and visits to child-directed content. The aggravating fact is what the product claimed at the time: Avast marketed these tools as protecting users from online tracking.

In December 2025 the FTC distributed nearly $15.3 million to 103,152 affected customers who filed valid claims.

We are not going to soften this into a footnote. If you are choosing security software, the vendor's own handling of your data is part of the product, and a regulator has made a finding here that no marketing copy displaces.

What has changed since

Jumpshot was shut down in January 2020, and the FTC order now legally bars the conduct. Those are real constraints, and a company operating under a consent order is in a different position from one that has never been examined. Whether that is sufficient is a judgement about trust rather than a technical question, and it is yours to make — our job is to make sure you are making it with the facts in front of you.

Pricing

Avast's free tier is a real product, not a crippled trial — the 6/6/6 scores above are for Avast Free Antivirus. Paid tiers add a firewall, ransomware shield hardening, and other extras. Avast Premium Security lists a renewal price of $77.99/year, with a discounted first-year rate that varies by promotion and region. As always in this category, the number that matters is the renewal, not the introductory offer. Checked August 2026.

Verdict

On pure detection, Avast is as good as anything in this comparison and better than most, and the free tier is unusually capable. If your threat model is malware and you weigh a 2014–2020 data-selling operation as historic and now legally constrained, it is a strong pick. If you regard how a security company treated its users' browsing history as the single most telling thing you can know about it, that is a coherent reason to choose Bitdefender or Kaspersky instead — and we would not argue you out of it.