The Bitdefender Antivirus sets the gold standard in the free antivirus space! For starters, it is easy to use, and offers solid protection without any restrictions and no charge at all. The icing on the cake is its real time protection, which blocks threats as they appear, and simultaneously identifies new and undiscovered threats. For a free antivirus download, Bitdefender threat protection surprisingly even comes with web filtering capabilities, which is a premium feature that monitors your browsing activity, and blocks access to malicious, phishing and fraudulent websites.

Key Features of Bitdefender Antivirus

• Award winning protection for existing or new threats
• Easy to use and blazingly fast
• Real time threat protection
• Virus scanning and malware removal
• Anti-fishing and Anti-fraud protection

The Bitdefender free antivirus is powered by a traditional scanning engine that searches for the digital signatures of known malware. Additionally, its onsite heuristic monitor watches out for suspicious malware behavior in an effort to identify brand new attacks. These suspicious codes when detected are uploaded to the Bitdefender Cloud Center to be perused by the experts, who then release countermeasures for the potential threats to over 500 million systems protected by the software.

The downside of the Bitdefender free antivirus for Windows is that it does collect data about your system to analyze different types of malware, but this is an option that can be unchecked during the installation process. In terms of ease of use, the Bitdefender free antivirus offers a barebones user interface that features a button to launch a full system scan, a settings button and a dedicated area for you to drop a file or folder to be scanned.

The Settings area of the Bitdefender Antivirus follows suit with an Events tab that serves as a program log, an exclusion tab to exclude falsely flagged files from detection, and a quarantine section that lists the quarantined files. There’s even a Protection tab to temporarily turn the Bitdefender antivirus off, and a system tray that keeps things simple with a single menu item—“Show”.

Other features you miss out with the Bitdefender free antivirus include File Shredder, Vulnerability Scan, Safe Files, Firewall, File Encryption, Parental Advisor, Webcam Protection, Password Manager and Online Banking Protection. If you do however feel the need for the aforementioned features, upgrading to the class leading Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2018 is always an option.

The Bitdefender Antivirus Plus edition is possibly the best antivirus for Windows but has a few limitations. This slightly stripped down version does not offer few features like Webcam Protection, Firewall, File Encryption etc.,

For an accurate and reliable antivirus that offers industry leading protection against threats and one that is easy to use at no cost, the Bitdefender free antivirus won’t disappoint.