Review of Bitdefender Internet Security 2020

About a month ago I installed a trial version of Bitdefender Internet Security. This blog post goes over my experience with it, highlighting the features and what I liked and didn't.

Bitdefender Application

Bitdefender is the second antivirus solution I've tried a trial of recently (the first being Kaspersky, as documented here). Having just come from using Kaspersky for a month the differences were quite apparent, especially the UI. I'll go over the features and my opinions further below. Shown below is the application window as seen when you start up Bitdefender Internet Security.

Features and Tools

The application provides a suite of tools broken down by tab and category, with the some default (and frequently used) features available on the "Dashboard" home page (seen in the image above). This includes a useful link to run a "quick scan" and access a few other features such as the VPN and Safepay privacy option. There is a an option to add additional custom actions on the dashboard and, presumably, the ability to further customize the dashboard to your preferences (something I didn't explore). However, one of the more interesting and unique features of the dashboard is the presence of a banner at the top that has daily recommendations. This often includes recommendations to set up and make use of some lesser known features of the app (such as the "Ransomeware Remediation" option shown in the screenshot above) but also appears to cycle through different recommendations that constitute good steps to perform from time to time such as checking for out-dated software.

The second tab, "Protection", is shown below.

Besides the dashboard, this was the tab I found myself using the most, and for obvious reasons. This tab includes access to options to scan the system for malware: either as a full system scan or a quick scan. The firewall is fairly standard fare, but the two feature sets I found myself using a lot was the "Vulnerability Scan" and the "Threat Defense" feature.

Vulnerability scan inspects the computer for applications that may have known vulnerabilities, mostly by virtue of being out-of-date (the most common case) or by having some other issue (personally I didn't see any of these). This seems very similar to the Kaspersky vulnerability scan feature, although I recall Kaspersky picking up several issues for me to address. It's possible Bitdefender didn't flag anything beyond out-of-date applications because I already addressed all major issues thanks to Kaspersky, but I do hope it would have pointed out similar issues (such as overly permissive settings on files/drives) had that not been the case.

As mentioned earlier with my comment about the dashboard tab, the suggestion to run vulnerability scans was offered to me frequently enough and I think that's a great thing for a security app to do.

The other feature set I mentioned was "Threat Defense", and this highlights potential threats that were blocked by the app.

This detailed list of threats blocked is nice but it wasn't very clear what I should be doing about this. This is especially confounding because the applications in question turned out to be Microsoft applications (some component in Visual Studio if I recall). Perhaps Bitdefender is doing the right thing here and stopping unwanted network requests (I certainly never wanted some apps to ping home randomly from time to time), but it's also possible Bitdefender is being overly aggressive and these are just false positives. Probably better to be erring on the side of caution, but I do wish there was some additional guidance here to help decide what to do with these apparent threats.

The "Privacy" tab hosts a set of features I never found myself using: a password manager, file shredder, VPN, encrypted file vault, and webcam access protection. Perhaps some of these are useful in some contexts but I never found myself using them during the trial. The file shredder may have value in the future though. Also listed here is a safepay feature and this seems to be fairly common these days: a protected browser is created when a banking site is visited to ensure transactions are secure. This is quite similar to what I saw with Kaspersky.

The last tab was a "Utilities" tab which looks like it should have useful features such as the ability to optimize the PC and clean up the disk, but none of these were available to me with Bitdefender Internet Security. Instead, I was advised to upgrade to a higher-tier version to get those benefits. This struck me as odd because the similar Kaspersy product (also named Internet Security 2020) had these features as part of the package and I found them to be quite useful additions. I don't think it's a deal-breaker that they're not part of the standard package (this is security software, not disk cleanup software after all) but they're nice extras that would have been great to include.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Convenient, one-stop dashboard with most of the features I'm interested in located in one place.
• I felt the feature was largely consumer friendly. Even though I was using this trial version (for free, of course), I rarely received nag dialogs to remind me my trial was expiring soon and requesting me to purchase/register.
• Helpful recommendations shown front-and-center on the dashboard page.
• Relatively quick system scans.

Cons:

• Safe banking mode takes up the entire screen. This design choice is a bit bizarre to me. While I'm banking I sometimes need to look up other windows or documents and it's a bit disorienting to leave the full-screen experience that the safe banking window takes up to do so. It's not as if the safe banking window is just maximized, it actually takes up an entire desktop of its own. In this respect, the Kaspersky implementation felt much more natural.
• It may just have been my imagination but I sometimes experienced slight system slow downs and I can't think of anything else to attribute this to other than the Bitdefender trial I was running. Added to that, it appeared that Bitdefender took quite some time to fully load at system startup. It seems odd to me than an application as critical as an antivirus application should take so long to get ready for business.
• Fairly minimal set of features compared to Kaspersky, considering this is the same tier of product.

Conclusion

Overall I found Bitdefender to be quite adequate as an application suite and would be happy to recommend this and may consider to use this myself full time in the future. The UI was fairly simple to get used to and I would consider it quite easy of a product to use.

I didn't find myself using all of the features available (Malware Remediation, File Shredder, etc.) but I can imagine myself using some of these in the future.

While using the software I often found myself mentally comparing it to my recent experience with Kaspersky's offering. There's definitely areas I prefer of Kaspersky and some I prefer of Bitdefender. That said, it's clear they're both strong products and fairly easy to recommend.