Today's best ESET NOD32 Antivirus 2016 deals
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Aug 21, 2019 Antivirus software is critical for every PC. Without it, you risk losing your personal information, your files, and even the cash from your bank account. No one tests antivirus software like we do. Get ratings, pricing, and performance on the ESET Internet Security - 2019 antivirus software based on the features you care about.
With one of the simplest and most straightforward interfaces of all antivirus products and a very light impact upon Windows PCs, ESET NOD32 Antivirus is a joy to use. But it provides only mediocre protection against malware, and has few useful extra features.
Costs and What's Covered
For those unusual people who have just one computer, a single-PC ESET NOD32 Antivirus license costs $40 a year. For three PCs, it's $60 per year, though discounts can sometimes be found online. These are standard prices for no-frills antivirus products, although BullGuard Antivirus costs $30 for a single-user yearly license, and F-Secure Anti-Virus has a three-for-one deal at $40.
ESET has two higher-tier Windows products that offer the same malware protection as NOD32 Antivirus, but with extra features. Smart Security adds a secure web browser, parental controls, a personal firewall and the company's anti-spam filter, and also lets you track a lost or stolen device. It costs $60 to protect one PC for a year, or $80 to protect three.
ESET Multi-Device Security doesn't add many features, but covers up to 10 Windows, Mac or Android devices with a single license. It gives you an online account to manage the security settings of all your devices. Multi-Device Security costs $85 per year for six devices, or $100 for 10 devices. As with the other packages, there's a discount for two-year subscriptions.
ESET takes cybersecurity seriously, and has a nice series of educational and instructional videos for paid subscribers that show you how to create safe passwords, use the Internet safely, protect your data and so on. These should be required viewing for children and parents alike. You're meant to log in with an ESET product key to see the videos, but we found and viewed them with a simple Google search.
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Antivirus Protection
ESET NOD32 Antivirus offers the standard three layers of malware protection: signature matching, behavioral monitoring and online analysis of new files. The company touts additional defenses, including an anti-phishing feature to block dodgy websites, an exploit blocker to ferret out hard-to-detect malware and a memory scanner, but most good Windows antivirus programs have similar features.
For more advanced users, there's a built-in host-based intrusion prevention system (HIPS), a feature commonly found in enterprise security software. It's sort of a supercharged behavioral and signature-based malware scanner, and will train itself to learn about your PC and its users to optimize protection. The HIPS can be turned on or off, but be forewarned that it will give you a lot of alerts, at least for the first few weeks.
LiveGrid is an online malware-analysis system to which ESET's 100-million users send up suspect code, and that quickly sends back updates. You can opt out of LiveGrid if you'd rather not share system information.
ESET NOD32 Antivirus' main window lets you get to a scan in two clicks, and you can customize the scanner to target specific drives and set it up to automatically scan inserted USB thumb drives or SD cards. You can set ESET's Smart Optimization to ignore items considered safe in previous scans.
The program examines email attachments, but there's no sandbox to try out a suspicious program without endangering the rest of the system. However, it does scan files while they're still downloading.
The next time you fire up League of Legends, you can flip on NOD32 Antivirus' Gamer Mode, which reduces user interruptions by delaying all non-essential alerts and updates.
NOD32 Antivirus lets you schedule daily or weekly scans of the system or a single drive, but you'll have to set up the scans as tasks. This lends a lot of flexibility and power, but the process's complexity may turn off many users.
Like many other basic antivirus products, ESET NOD32 Antivirus lacks its own firewall. It uses Microsoft's instead, but you can't manage that from the ESET interface.
Antivirus Performance
Overall ESET's anti-malware engine provided, at best, only mediocre defense against malware. Based on thorough tests by the European independent evaluation labs AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives, the software was better at dealing with widespread, known malware than it was at detecting previously unseen zero-day malware.
In the charts below, we've compared ESET's malware protection against those of two brands that frequently top our rankings.
AV-TEST found that ESET Smart Security (which uses the same malware engine as NOD32 Antivirus) stopped only 95.1 percent of zero-day attacks in Windows 10 tests conducted in September 2015. ESET redeemed itself with a perfect 100-percent score against zero-day malware in October.
Against widespread malware, ESET did much better, achieving respectable 99.4- and 99.8-percent effectiveness scores in the same two months of Windows 10 tests. In each month, it registered one false positive, or benign file mistakenly identified as malware, which is not unusual.
ESET's performance in AV-TEST's most recent Windows 8.1 evaluations was worse. It stopped 92.5 percent of zero-day malware in November 2015, and 98.3 percent in December. Its 99.5- and 99.7-percent scores against widespread malware in those same months were better, and similar to the Windows 8.1 average of 99 percent. It racked up five false positives over both months — not great, but apparently the category average.
Only in Windows 7 tests run by AV-TEST in January and February 2016 did ESET rise above average in all categories, though it was never quite perfect. It stopped 97.3 percent of zero-day malware in the first month, and 97.1 percent in the second. Against widespread malware, it was 99.8- and 99.9-percent effective. There were no false positives in either month.
Finally, in AV-Comparatives' most recent 'real-world' tests involving the latest online malware, ESET found 97.5 percent of malware in February 2016, and 99.3 percent in March. In each month, it turned up a single false positive — much better than most of the other antivirus products we tested.
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Performance and System Impact
We tested the performance of ESET NOD32 Antivirus on an Asus X555LA notebook with an Intel Core i3-4005U processor, 6GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive holding 36GB of data. The machine had been upgraded from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.
Overall, NOD32 Antivirus is a lightweight program that didn't impact our system's performance in any major way. After installing the program, but with no scans running, it took 7 minutes and 5 seconds to run our custom OpenOffice performance test, which matches 20,000 names and addresses on a spreadsheet.
That completion time was only 14 seconds longer than the baseline we established for the test before installation of any antivirus software, and indicates a very minimal passive system impact of only 3.4 percent. (Modern antivirus software is always actively checking files behind the scenes.)
While actively scanning, NOD32 Antivirus also had a minor impact on performance. The OpenOffice test finished in 7:25, or 8.3 percent slower, during a full scan, and 7:21, or 7.3 percent slower, during a quick scan. These are among the best active-scan system-performance scores we've seen.
ESET NOD32 Antivirus took its time scanning, taking 43 minutes and 25 seconds to go through our entire system. But because it has such a light system impact, most users won't notice. On the other hand, ESET's 40-second quick scan was quite fast.
Interface
If you're into robots, ESET is for you. The company's handsome android mascot is accompanied by a status-indicator bar on the main page of the interface. The bar is green with a checkmark if everything is OK, but turns yellow or red when you need to intervene.
From NOD32 Antivirus's Home screen, all adjustments are at most two clicks away. There are links on the left to other pages: Computer Scan, Update, Tools and Setup, as well as Help and Support.
NOD32 Antivirus' Tools section is a cornucopia holding everything from log files and statistics to the Scheduler and a place to send in suspect files. It includes the SysInspector, which shows running processes with an appraisal of how dangerous they might be, as well as a rolling bar graph of file activity, which can be an early indicator of an attack.
If your system is cluttered with all sorts of malware, NOD32 Antivirus provides an onscreen link to download and install ESET's SysRescue Live bootable disk image. It can be loaded onto a CD or thumb drive to refresh your system.
Installation and Support
ESET NOD32 Antivirus gets going quickly. It took us just 3 minutes and 50 seconds to download and install the program. You'll need to decide whether to participate in the company's LiveGrid online malware-sample-collection program; don't worry, you can opt out later.
The company has email, online and phone support, but you can speak to a technician only Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific time, and the support line is not a toll-free number. You can also search or scroll through the database or consult the forum.
Bottom Line
ESET NOD32 Antivirus may not be the best at catching rogue software, but it does provide a basic level of protection while being easy to use and having a minimal impact on system performance. But in this price range, we recommend Bitdefender Antivirus Plus or Avira Antivirus Pro, which combine light system loads with top-notch malware protection.
Eset Nod32 Antivirus Software Review
Today's best ESET NOD32 Antivirus 2016 deals
Eset Antivirus Software Review Cnet
Bratislava-based ESET was founded by a group of friends some 25 years ago to market their NOD antivirus software. These days it has a broad portfolio of products covering all the major platforms, and is used by 100 million customers all around the world.
ESET NOD32 Antivirus is the company's baseline product. It's far more focused on the core antivirus task than some of the competition – there's no file shredder, password manager or other bonus extras – but that doesn't mean the package is short on features. If anything, it has more than most.
There's real-time malware protection, of course. A cloud-based file reputation service helps you quickly detect the latest malware, while an antiphishing module detects and blocks scam websites.
ESET NOD32 has extra layers to block exploits, protect you from ransomware, and detect attacks using PowerShell and malicious JavaScripts.
A Device Control module limits the risk of infection from other devices by controlling access to USB sticks, external hard drives, optical storage media, even devices connecting by Bluetooth and FireWire.
New features include an UEFI scanner to check for malware in your PC's firmware. There are new tools to manage your ESET licenses, and a referral program gives you an extension in your trial license for everyone they can get to install and run the software.
If all this power somehow isn't enough, you're able to adjust how the package works with the help of more than 150 profile settings.
ESET NOD32 is priced at $39 (£30) for a one PC, one-year license. That's fairly typical for a premium package - Bitdefender's Antivirus Plus costs the same - but there are marginally better deals around. Kaspersky Antivirus is currently $29.25 (£22.50) for the first year, for instance, and $32.50 (£25) on renewal.
If you've several systems to protect, steep discounting makes ESET look much better value. A four computer, three-year license costs only $130 (£100), for instance, or $10.83 (£8.33) per device year.
If you're looking for that kind of multi-system license, though, also consider ESET Internet Security. It adds many security suite features – a firewall, antispam, parental controls, webcam protection, more – but is only fractionally more expensive, with its four computer, three-year license costing $144 (£115), or $12.45 (£9.58) per device year.
Setup
ESET NOD32 is available in a 30-day free trial. We had to provide our email address to activate it, but otherwise the installation ran smoothly, downloading and installing the main ESET NOD32 package, automatically updating itself and running an initial scan.
Checking the installed files revealed no great surprises. They were well-organized and digitally signed, grabbed a reasonable 650MB of hard drive space, and the core of the package added only a couple of processes to our test system, using barely 100MB of RAM in total when idle.
If you're the type who likes to fine-tune your security, you might like to spend some time browsing ESET NOD32's settings, which give you a huge number of tweaks and options.
Another antivirus might allow you to turn email scanning on or off, for instance. ESET allows you to choose which email clients to integrate, which emails to scan (received, sent), which protocols to monitor, what to do when a threat is detected (ignore it, delete it, move it to your choice of folder), and more.
Even if that sounds like the kind of low-level geekiness you'll never use, don't ignore it entirely. If an odd bug or conflict is causing a major ESET NOD32 issue on your system, having the ability to apply system tweaks like this could be key in troubleshooting or even fixing the problem.
Features
ESET NOD32's interface looks a little cluttered, at least initially, with all its status information, buttons, sidebars, links and more. It takes a while to learn the basics, for example that clicking Computer Scan takes you to the Scan page and waits for you to decide what to do, while clicking Scan Your Computer launches a scan immediately.
Once you figure out the rules, though, the program works much the same as any other antivirus. You can launch a general scan with a click, or run quick or removable drive scans. There's also a powerful option to build custom scan types which examine your chosen locations, and use the scanning rules you prefer.
This flexibility continues almost everywhere you look. Right-click a file in Explorer and ESET NOD32, like everyone else, gives you the option to scan it in the usual way. But you can also check the file reputation to find out more about it; scan the file without cleaning it, just to get an immediate verdict; or manually quarantine a file even if it's not been flagged as malware, a very useful way to safely archive a file you're concerned about.
Whatever scan method we chose, scanning times were fast, particularly after the first run when ESET's Smart Scan ensures that only changed or new files are checked. Detection rates were good, too, with the program picking up all our sample threats, and not raising any false alarms.
URL filtering detected only an average number of malicious URLs, as we've seen in previous reviews. There was a major improvement in false alarms, though, with the package again not warning us about a single legitimate site.
A Device Control feature enables defining what happens when users connect a host of device types to the system: external storage, a USB printer, Bluetooth device, scanner, smart card reader, modems and more. Options include making devices read-only, displaying a warning to users or blocking them entirely. Rules can apply to all or specific devices (‘block all USB storage apart from x, y, z’), some or all user accounts, and the system logs all device connections for review later.
This is a very powerful system, but it's not easy to set up. There's no simple library of prebuilt rules, and no user-friendly visual rule creator. Instead you're mostly choosing technical options from lists and hoping you understand them correctly (check the Help page on the feature). It's very much an experts-only feature.
There's better news with the Tools menu. Here, you can view logs, see what the program has blocked, watch running processes, download ESET's bootable SysRescue cleaning tool, and more.
ESET SysInspector is a highlight, an excellent tool which takes a snapshot of your system and highlights interesting items: running processes, network connections, critical files (HOSTS), important Registry entries and more. It's not for beginners, but if you've used tools like Sysinternals' Process Explorer you'll soon feel at home.
Overall, ESET NOD32 has more features than you might expect for a pure antivirus app. Beginners can ignore the more advanced options and allow the program to do its work, but the real value here is for experts, who'll appreciate the Device Control module and ESET's extreme configurability.
Protection
ESET proved accurate in our quick malware detection tests, but to get a full picture of its effectiveness we also checked ESET's ratings with the major testing labs.
AV Comparatives' monthly real-world protection tests generally place ESET in the lower mid-range of its test set: not great, but not bad, just somewhere in between. The September 2018 report ranked ESET as 12th place out of 18, for instance, with a protection rate of 98.5%. The February-June summary of five tests also places ESET 12th, with an average protection rate of 99.1%.
AV-Test has reported similarly low or mid-range results in the past, but the company hasn't tested ESET products since 2017.
SE Labs' July-September 2018 home anti-malware report delivers the best results for ESET, with the company ranking third out of 13, just behind Kaspersky and Norton, but outperforming Avira, Trend Micro, Avast, McAfee and more.
The testing labs clearly have a range of views on ESET - which is no surprise as each lab has its own scoring methods and procedures – but the general picture is that it doesn't offer the best protection, or the worst, but sits somewhere in the middle of the pack.
We suspect that this view may undervalue ESET NOD32's abilities, especially for expert users. The labs largely test antivirus packages with the default settings, but if you're able and willing to set up ESET's more advanced features – like the powerful Device Control – then you should improve your security even further.
It's also important that an antivirus won't slow you down, and in this case, we've good news. PassMark's Security Products Performance Benchmarks 2019 report assesses the performance impact of 14 security suites by using 23 key metrics. ESET trampled over most of the competition to reach second place, just behind Norton Security, with even the supposedly lightweight Windows Defender trailing way back in 6th place. The exact results you'll see will depend on your hardware and how you use it, but in general we think ESET NOD32 Antivirus should have minimal performance impact on most systems.
Final verdict
ESET NOD32 could be used by beginners, but its main value is to experienced users who'll appreciate its advanced features and low-level configurability.
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