Comparison - Kaspersky vs. AVG Antivirus Part 2

Kaspersky has been awarded by AV-Comparatives an Advanced+ rating. Also, it received a Silver award as one of the 3 best antivirus programs during 2009. AVG did not score well during 2009 in the testing done by AV-Comparatives and it received an Advanced rating only. The same testing laboratory have checked the performance of AVG and Kaspersky for any false detection and both programs scored 8 false positives but that is not the case when I compared the scanner of AVG vs Kaspersky. See "Memory Usage and Performance" in the part one of this series of article on AVG vs. Kaspersky.

An incremental and daily updates by both programs is available but I find AVG’s product and definition updates fast than of Kaspersky. The support option by AVG is better than Kaspersky because the response time by AVG is faster than Kaspersky. A free support forum is offered to customers of Kaspersky and AVG in the following websites:

• AVG Free Forum – this forum is staffed by volunteers and AVG staff and was created to support end-users of AVG free edition.
• AVG Forum in CNET.com – AVG support employees attends to questions and feedbacks, whether you’re a free user or paid customer.
• Kaspersky Support Forums – this forum is staffed by volunteers and occasionally visited by Kaspersky staff.

A retail version of AVG and Kaspersky is available online and in several resellers and partners of the respective software vendors. A trial version is also available in their respective websites. An e-mail registration or personal information is not required to download the trial version of both programs. Kaspersky antivirus comes with a $39.95 price tag for single PC and a year of subscription while AVG is sold at $34.99 with the same install and subscription terms.

I have run into a problem in using AVG’s Safe Search whenever I run a search using the Bing.com search engine. The Safe Search add-on often crashes the avgxpl.dll file, when using Internet Explorer but this issue does not occur when using Bing.com to search in Firefox browser. I find the security status in AVG as useless for it is not showing correctly that the antivirus definitions are out-of-date which means, I’m not informed via its status center if I have the current protection against malware. I’m not a fan of security software that will bundle (and pre-checked!) any unnecessary third party application. AVG is not a bad product, but not better than Kasperky.

During the installation of Kaspersky, I was annoyed that I have to remove Agnitum’s Outpost Firewall Pro and install it again after installing Kaspersky antivirus. However, Kaspersky is clear winner in Kaspersky vs. AVG comparison because of its advanced protection and ease of use.