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By the end of 2021, Avira phased out some of its business offerings, transitioning to Avira Prime as the main solution for its endpoint protection. It’s basically a suite that contains all of Avira’s free and paid solutions, with the promise that all upcoming solutions will be contained under the Prime umbrella.
We can’t fault the logic behind this, as most modern security offerings usually bundle everything on offer into one premium plan that caters to businesses and security-conscious users. With Avira Prime, you get antivirus, antimalware, and web protection for mobiles and desktops, an unlimited VPN, a password manager, and desktop cleanup tools.
Features
The fun with Avira starts with your online Avira account, which you fill out when making the Prime purchase. From there, you download the app and let it install, finalizing the installation by adding the Avira browser extension (Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Opera). Once done, you will be greeted by a familiar UI, since the free version of Avira and Prime share the same UI. The only difference being that in Prime, all of the features are unlocked and there are no upsell pop-ups.
Smart scan kicks things off, a quick, comprehensive scan that covers privacy, performance, malware, update, and network issues all-in-one. If you’re in a hurry and don’t want to do manual or custom scans, this option can be handy as it tackles most of the issues with one go.
Antivirus and malware protection features are quite good, with Avira finishing in the top in independent lab tests (more on that later). The same can be said about its anti-phishing protection, however, this level of protection is also available with Avira free, and in combination with Windows Firewall an average user could struggle to see a need to upgrade to Prime.
Speaking about firewalls, Prime comes with its own firewall (according to reputable reviewers it’s not available for Mac), but as usual the one that comes with Windows is more than enough. Avira further enhances its offer with a VPN and a password manager. The VPN is an unlimited VPN and depending on the number of licenses you bought, you can connect up to 25 devices on it. There are around 50 locations to choose from, with over 1400 servers available. You also get a kill switch and other advanced options such as auto launch as soon as you connect to Wi-Fi. The speeds leave a lot to be desired, especially if you compare it to the likes of NordVPN.
The password manager adds security analysis for your passwords, a password generation option as well as auto-fill options through the aforementioned browser extension. If you struggle with the number of passwords you’re juggling, a password manager can make your life easier, but it would be hard to recommend Avira’s solution over something like 1Password.
We can’t fault Avira’s update manager, which can help less experienced users keep their system up to date with the most critical security patches. However, if you know how to perform updates yourself, then this tool is completely useless.
System Speedup offered by Avira will analyze and automatically fix all of your junk files, storage and registry issues as well as adjust startup apps to speed up your system. It’s a solid solution, yet, if compared to Norton’s or Bitdefender’s solution, Avira’s features and logic behind some features simply doesn’t seem like a premium solution.
Finally, the identity assistant component you have, among other things, dark web monitoring but only if you’re a customer located in Germany (only for German customers). Other users simply get their Avira account email address monitored across the dark web, a disappointing showing from Avira.
On Android, you can pretty much get the same level of protection you get on a Windows machine. However, if you’re in Apple’s ecosystem (Mac, iOS), the feature set is different, which is attributed to the fact that Apple’s products don’t need the same protection features required by Windows. In our opinion, Apple users can easily skip over Avira and look elsewhere if they need additional protection features.
Pricing
Avira has a simple pricing strategy offering only two options for Prime which is distinguished by the number of devices you want to protect, either five or 25. If you go for five devices then Prime will cost €9.95 monthly or €109.95 for one year or €203.95 for two years. If you need up to 25 devices protected then the prices rise to €12.95 for monthly payments and €134.95 or €258.95 for annual or two year subscriptions, respectively.
Protection
The latest testing of Avira was done by AV-test in January/February 2025, where Avira scored a maximum 6 out 6 across all of their tests. What stood out during these tests is that Avira doesn’t affect performance as much as other industry standard AVs, and that there were no false positives reported during system scans.
Final Verdict
In terms of security features Avira does a great job for Windows users but everything else it offers in its suite simply isn’t a premium product. Worst of all, the security features are available in the free version so there is simply no incentive to go to Prime. For us the price seems quite steep for what you’re getting and it is hard to recommend it over the more premium offers coming from their direct competitors like Norton or Bitdefender.
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