Bitdefender Total Security review

Bitdefender Total Security is ‘only’ Bitdefender’s mid-range antivirus software suite, but it still includes more features than many top competitors: real-time malware protection, anti-phishing, tracker blocking, cryptominer detection, secure browser, webcam and microphone monitoring, a spam filter, parental controls, and apps for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS: it’s all here.

That’s a lot to explore, but we’ve dug into every area, poked, prodded and tested every feature to get an in-depth look at Bitdefender Total Security and find out if it’s the ideal security suite for you.

Bitdefender Total Security: Pricing

Bitdefender Total Security is priced from $59.99 to protect up to five Windows, Mac, Android or iOS devices for a year ($99.99 on renewal.)

You can protect more devices for only a very small premium. Upgrade to a ten device license and you’ll still only pay $65.99 in year one, $109.99 on renewal.

The key issue with Bitdefender Total Security is that it doesn’t include a full VPN. If that’s an issue, consider Bitdefender Premium Security. It adds an unlimited VPN to the feature mix, and is extremely cheap at only $79.99 in year one for a ten device license (that’s the full VPN for only an extra $1.25 a month), although the price does renew at a less impressive $159.99 a year on renewal.

These are fair prices, and compete well with most of the big security names. Norton 360 Deluxe has a similar feature set, for instance, and although it’s a little cheaper at $49.99 to protect 5 devices in year one, it’s a more expensive $119.99 on renewal.

Bitdefender Total Security: Ease of use

If you’re looking for an antivirus you can install and forget, Bitdefender Total Security has a lot of appeal. The app installed easily for us, then moved to the background and made most of its decisions entirely automatically, keeping any technical hassles to a minimum.

Other providers often have a very different user experience. Present Avast One with an app it doesn’t recognize, for instance, and it’ll launch a scan and leave you waiting for up to 15-20 seconds before you can continue. By comparison, Bitdefender might ask if you trust the app, but mostly it sorts out the issue for itself.

Try Avira antivirus and you’ll get notified with pop-up alerts for every threat, which can become annoying (a malicious web page opens lots of dangerous links, for instance.) Bitdefender displays the first alert, but doesn’t bother you with the rest. The information is still available in a Notifications page, but you don’t have to look at it unless you’re interested.

Bitdefender Total Security: Interface

Bitdefender Total Security opens with a simple dashboard offering one-click access to its most useful features: quick scan, system scan, the VPN and the secure browser, Safepay.

In theory you can customize the dashboard with your own shortcuts. But in practice, there are only two other items you can add, in the Password Manager (only a trial) and the Data Shredder. The dashboard would benefit from more flexibility, such as the ability to pin your own custom scans (more on those below.)

There are plenty of other tools and options available, and Bitdefender organizes those with icons in a left-hand sidebar: Protection, Privacy, Utilities, Notifications, Settings. If you need to control the Anti-Tracker, for instance, click Privacy, and you can edit its settings, or turn it on and off with a click.

Bitdefender hasn’t changed the core of its interface for a very long time. That’s a pity, because there is room for improvement. But at its heart the interface is generally easy to use, and it’s likely you’ll find the functions and features you need without any difficulty.

Bitdefender Total Security: Antivirus scanning

Bitdefender offers a strong range of scan types covering all kinds of situations.

Quick Scan runs a brief check which inspects the most commonly-infected areas only. This took a reasonably short 8:14 on our test system, falling just a little to 7:36 on the second scan.

System Scan is a deeper analysis which crawls your entire storage device and explores everything it finds. That takes much longer for the first scan, but drops hugely afterwards as Bitdefender only scans new or changed files.

To test this, we scanned 50GB of application files. The first run took 37:44, a little behind Avast (35:40) and Norton (32:01.) The story changes on subsequent scans, though, with Avast taking 34:53, Norton falling to 3:48, but Bitdefender completing in just 90 seconds.

Rescue Environment is a bootable scanner which lives on your hard drive and removes even the most stubborn of threats. It’s a great tool and the ability to launch it from your Bitdefender app is a major usability plus (Avira and many other vendors expect you to download, set up and run their boot scanners separately.)

This is all very configurable, too, with options including the ability to build your own custom scans and schedule them to run automatically, perhaps overnight or whenever you’re not around.

Bitdefender Total Security: Antivirus lab results

Although we put every antivirus app we review through our own series of tests, we also pay close attention to results from the big antivirus testing labs.

We follow nine tests from labs including AV-Comparatives (Real-World Protection, Malware Protection, Android, Anti-Phishing, Performance), AV-Test (Windows, Android), MRG Effitas (360° Protection Testing) and SE Labs (Endpoint Security Home).

Bitdefender appears in the latest reports for eight out of our nine tests, making this a strong all-round test of its abilities. But Bitdefender’s combined score was a little disappointing at 9.92 out of 10, earning the company seventh place in our charts behind the likes of Avast (9.97), ESET (9.95) and F-Secure (9.95.)

Looking at the individual tests, Bitdefender was a little below par in both the AV-Comparatives and AV-Test’s Windows reports. The differences are small, though, and not always about protection; AV-Test found Bitdefender blocked 100% of test threats, for instance, but marked the company down for reducing device speeds a little and falsely flagging 5 legitimate apps. 

Bitdefender isn’t leading the way with the independent labs right at this moment, but the margins between providers are tiny, and it’s not far behind. Where Bitdefender has scored in the past is for its consistency over the long term - it won 2023’s ‘Outstanding Product’ at AV-Comparatives but the sheer number of awards won across all its tests - and we’ll be watching to see if its normal market-leading performance returns soon.

Bitdefender Total Security: Anti-ransomware

Defeating ransomware isn’t just about spotting known threats as they’re downloaded. A good antivirus needs multiple other layers of protection, such as using behavior monitoring to detect even brand new threats before they can do any harm.

We tested Bitdefender by running our own custom ransomware simulator. This defeated Avira, but Bitdefender killed our simulator before it could damage a single file.

The latest MRG Effitas Ransomware tests also brought positive news. Bitdefender, ESET, Microsoft and ThreatDown all blocked 100% of test threats, earning them an equal first place. That’s another great result, and more confirmation that Bitdefender is one of the best vendors around for battling ransomware.

Bitdefender Total Security: Anti-phishing

The best security tools don’t just detect and block web threats as they appear: they prevent you ever reaching them in the first place. That’s why we’re always very interested in an app’s ability to keep you safe from phishing and other malicious websites.

Bitdefender led the way in AV-Comparatives’ last antiphishing test with an excellent 96% protection rate, just ahead of Avast (94%), AVG (94%), ESET (92%) and Avira (88%.)

We tested Bitdefender’s web protection by seeing how it performed when faced with 100 brand new malicious URLs from phishing experts OpenPhish. Bitdefender blocked 96%, which is a great result, but not quite the best we’ve seen. The company was just a touch ahead of Norton’s 95%, for instance, but Avast blocked 100% of our test URLs in its last test, for instance, while Avira blocked a full 100%.

Bitdefender Total Security: Performance impact

We expect a quality antivirus to offer reliable and accurate malware protection, but that’s not all. The best apps deliver their protection without slowing down your device, raising endless false alarms or otherwise causing daily hassles.

AV-Comparatives’ Performance Test found Bitdefender had some impact on application launch times, but didn’t significantly affect other tasks, and Bitdefender received AV-Comparatives top Advanced+ award.

Our own tests with the excellent PCMark 10 benchmark found barely any performance impact from Bitdefender beyond a nineteen second increase in the time it took to fully load Windows and our startup apps, but that’s quicker than many (Avast added 21 seconds.)

Overall, our tests suggest that although Bitdefender isn’t quite the most lightweight of antivirus apps, it has less performance impact than most, and didn’t cause us any significant speed issues.

Bitdefender Total Security: Safepay

Bitdefender Safepay is a secure web browser which is isolated from other processes in your system. Even if your device is infected by malware, it can’t capture your keystrokes or record screenshots of what you’re doing (we tried with commercial and custom tools of our own), and the virtual keyboard prevents even hardware keyloggers from recording your activities.

Bitdefender looks out for you accessing a banking or other sensitive site, and prompts you to open the website in Safepay (it can automatically connect to the VPN, too.) Sounds like a small point, but that one idea reduces the chance that you’ll forget to turn Safepay on.

Put it all together and Safepay offers way more protection than other privacy browsers, making it one of the highlights of Bitdefender’s range.

Bitdefender Total Security: Limited VPN

Bitdefender Total Security includes the free version of Bitdefender VPN. The paid edition is an excellent service with quality apps using the Hotspot Shield network, but, unfortunately, the freebie is so restricted that many will find it unusable.

You only get 200MB of data a day, for instance. We opened desktop Outlook and a few other applications on a Windows laptop, but just left them running without doing anything ourselves on the device, and the background traffic alone used 70MB of data over the next hour. The free Bitdefender VPN is only suitable for light use.

The other big issue is you can’t choose your location. Hit Connect and Bitdefender VPN automatically selects whatever it thinks is the best server for you (the closest or the fastest, most likely.). That means there’s little hope of unblocking anything, and, if the VPN chooses a location in a neighboring country to you, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Still, if you only need a VPN very occasionally, perhaps to securely access your email on public Wi-Fi, the free Bitdefender VPN just might be enough. And, if you can live with the data and location limits, there’s a lot to like here.

The app supports the best protocols, including WireGuard, OpenVPN and Hotspot Shield’s Hydra. Quality ad and tracker blocking enhances your privacy online, and we found the effective kill switch immediately blocks your internet access if the VPN drops.

Split tunneling support allows you to select apps which bypass the VPN and use the internet directly. That could help cut your VPN data usage and stretch that 200MB a day just a little further.

A very clever Auto-Connect option can automatically connect to the VPN when your device connects to unsecured Wi-Fi, when you access specific domains (your business network, say), even if you visit a particular category of website: banking, online payments, health, and more.

Bitdefender Total Security: Webcam and microphone protection

Bitdefender Total Security for Windows includes video and audio protection, a feature which can prevent apps accessing your webcam or microphone without your permission.

Bitdefender says the suite blocks untrusted apps by default. We tested this by running our own custom webcam hijacker app, and Bitdefender realised there was a problem, displayed a notification, and our app couldn’t access the webcam until we clicked ‘Allow.’ 

We ran a safe but little-known command line tool to record microphone audio. Once again, Bitdefender handled the situation well, allowing the app to access our microphone but using a notification to keep us informed.

Although most top suites have similar tools, they don’t always work as well. If Avast One asks permission for an app to access your webcam, for instance, and you close that dialog box without giving an answer, Avast allows access anyway. Bitdefender is more secure because it blocks dubious apps until you specifically hit the Allow button.

If you don’t like the default settings, Bitdefender provides various ways to customise your protection. You can turn notifications on or off, for instance; block browsers from accessing your webcam, or even block webcam access entirely if you’re sure you’ll never need it.

Bitdefender Total Security: Firewall

Bitdefender’s firewall watches the network connections made by your apps, decides which apps can get online and which can’t, and works to protect you from network scans and attacks.

If you’re a networking novice and that’s already more than you want to know, that’s fine: the firewall makes all its decisions automatically, so you can safely leave it alone (or forget it even exists.) 

But if you’re the more technical type, you can view details such as processes which have accessed the internet recently, or add custom rules to block specific apps from connecting to the web, or allow others. There’s far more configurability here than we see with Norton or Avast, good news if you’d like to fine-tune your security setup.

Bitdefender Total Security: Antispam

Bitdefender’s Antispam tool is a simple spam filter that works for local email clients only. Forget Gmail or Outlook on the web; this is just for local email apps and accounts which handle email via SMTP and POP3.

Setup was a hassle for us. Antispam should have added a toolbar to our Outlook, but we didn’t see it. Investigating, we found Outlook had disabled Antispam because it was taking too long to load. 

Fortunately, the filter was easy to re-enable. We found it then worked as advertised, scanning  incoming emails,moving anything sufficiently spam-like into the Junk folder. You can customise the results by building block and allow lists, or enabling one or two generic junk-blocking tricks (stop all emails encoded with Asian characters, for instance.)

Overall, Bitdefender Antispam could be handy for some users. If you really need a local spam filter, though, MailWasher gives you more features with even its free version. 

Bitdefender Total Security: Parental controls

Bitdefender Total Security comes with a built-in parental control system to keep your kids safe from the worst of the web.

A decent feature set includes content filtering, screen time limits, device usage scheduling, location monitoring and more.

The service is managed from the company’s Bitdefender Central web dashboard, where you’re able to set up protection and monitor what’s happening on each of your kid’s devices (Windows, Mac, Android and iOS are supported.)

Installation varies depending on the device. Desktops are relatively simple, mobile devices more complex, as you have to set up various permissions.

Apps installed, the next step is to create a profile for each child. This is quick and easy - enter your child’s name and birth date, and choose an icon - and Bitdefender then saves more time by using your child’s age to automatically configure which web content they’re allowed to view. You can fine-tune these default settings to best suit your own children, though, and there are plenty of interesting options to choose from.

Content filtering

Bitdefender’s Content Filtering allows you to block web content by an impressive 43 categories, covering inappropriate topics (porn, drugs, guns), social media, online shopping and more. We tested this and it worked correctly, blocking the specified types in all browsers. (We also noticed a way to bypass content filtering on Windows, but it’s not straightforward, and young kids won’t find it by accident.)

This approach often blocks at least some sites you’ll feel are safe, but it’s easy to add exceptions so you can block YouTube and TikTok, say, but allow your child to watch their favorite Netflix kids shows.

Bonus features include the ability to enforce safe search at search engines and YouTube, reducing the chance that your child can find inappropriate content. Visit the Bitdefender Central web dashboard and you can browse detailed reports to see if any when your kids have tried to break the rules, and the sites they wanted to access.

Screen time limits

Bitdefender’s Parental Control provides several ways to define just how long your kids can use your devices.

You can set times when a device can’t be used, such as at bedtime. You’re able to set a total device usage time for each day of the week, and set a homework-oriented Focus Time where your kids are only able to use their devices for web search or educational apps.

This isn’t as configurable as we’d like. For instance, you can only set one Focus Time and two ‘no device usage allowed’ blocks per day, and time limits must be set in 30 minute increments. But there’s real flexibility in an option for your kids to request extra time from their device if they need it, and overall the system works well.

Location monitoring

The Parental Control system allows you to view the current location of your child’s mobile device (there’s no location support on Windows or Mac.) Just open the Bitdefender Central web dashboard, choose your child’s profile and click Locate to see the device location on a map.

What you don’t get is even the most limited form of geofencing (the ability to raise an alert if your child leaves or arrives at a particular area.) Some security suites deliver far more. Norton 360 Deluxe, for instance, can create multiple Favorite Locations - home, school, grandma, the local park - and display notifications as your kids move from one to the other.

Will parental control work for you?

Bitdefender Parental Control has a lot of features, but these aren’t always available on every platform. Sometimes this is understandable (location monitoring is on mobile devices only), but others are a surprise: kids can only request more time on Android and iOS, for some reason. 

The system isn’t as powerful as the top specialist parental controls applications, either, which are typically more configurable, with better content filtering tools and the ability to raise location alerts when your child arrives at (or leaves) key places.

If your needs are relatively simple then Parental Control could still be useful. That’s especially true if you’ve devices on several platforms, as you can manage them all from the Bitdefender Central web dashboard.

If your devices are all on a single platform, though, especially iOS, we would recommend checking out the built-in parental controls options first. Or if you need lots of functionality, browse our Best Parental Control guide to the top competition.  

Bitdefender Total Security: More features

We’ll complete this review by running through some additional features that Bitdefender Total Security shares with Bitdefender’s starter product, Antivirus Plus. We’ve only space for a summary here, but check the full Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review for more details. 

Vulnerability Scan

Bitdefender’s Vulnerability Scan checks your device for various issues which might make it open to attack: missing updates, weak passwords, dubious Windows and browser security settings, and more.

Sounds good, but this didn’t help us much, incorrectly reporting that our Wi-Fi network had no password and highlighting a couple of very minor technical issues. Avast and Avira did a better job of identifying issues on our review system.

Trial Password Manager

Bitdefender includes a password manager on its feature list, but this turns out to be only a three-month trial. That still beats Avast, who dropped its own password manager a few years ago, but it can’t match Norton, who still includes a password manager with even its starter Antivirus Plus package.

We signed up for the trial, and were happy to see Password Manager was available on desktops via Chrome, Edge and Firefox extensions, with mobile apps for Android and iOS.

We noticed some issues in real-world testing, including problems importing all of our Dashlane logins, and occasional difficulties automatically entering our email address on login pages or capturing our credentials from complex forms. 

But there are plus points, including a secure password generator, highlighting of weak or reused passwords, and a check to see if your email address appears in any data breaches.

Bitdefender Password Manager might be suitable if you only need the password basics, especially if you get the full version for free as a part of Bitdefender Ultimate Security or Bitdefender Premium Security. But we wouldn’t pay for it, and if you’re looking for a powerhouse password manager with every possible feature, check our Best Password Manager guide for better ideas.

Anti-Tracker

Bitdefender’s Anti-tracker is a Chrome, Edge and Firefox extension which prevents intrusive trackers from collecting data on your online activities.

The technology blocked an impressive 93% of sample trackers, but it also broke some websites, preventing key features from working. You can tell Anti-tracker not to block anything on these troublesome sites, but you’ll have to realise that the problems are caused by Anti-tracker, first, and that could be more hassle than it’s worth.

Still, Anti-tracker is free, and well worth a try. If it doesn’t work out, no problem, you can disable it with a click.

Bitdefender Total Security: Mac

After exploring the array of features offered by Bitdefender on Windows, Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac seems a little basic, at least initially. There’s no firewall, no Safepay secure browsing, no crypto mining detection, no webcam or microphone monitoring, no file shredder or vulnerability assessment.

As the name suggests, Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac is mostly about antivirus, and it does that very well. The latest Mac reports by AV-Comparatives and AV-Test show Bitdefender blocking 100% of native Mac threats, as well as 100% of Windows malware samples (these can’t infect your Mac, but it’s important they’re detected to ensure you can’t accidentally share them with someone else.)

Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac has the same capable anti-phishing technology as its Windows cousin, which beat Avast, ESET and Avira in AV-Comparatives’ last anti-phishing test. The app also includes an extra layer of protection in its Traffic Light browser extension, which highlights dangerous links in search results to help you avoid clicking them in the first place.

There are a couple of small ransomware-blocking touches. Safe Files prevents unauthorized apps accessing files in the folders you specify, and Time Machine protection looks out for attacks on your Mac backups. You’re unlikely to need either feature as, in our experience, Bitdefender kills ransomware before it can do anything at all, but extra layers of protection are always welcome.

Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac includes the same 200MB a day limited VPN as the other platforms. It’s missing one or two of the more advanced Windows tools - there’s no option to auto-connect if you access a banking site, for instance - but otherwise there’s a strong set of core features: WireGuard and Hydra protocol support, kill switch, ad and tracker blocking, and split tunneling to decide which apps use the tunnel, and which don’t. 

It’s good to see Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac includes Bitdefender’s better-than-some parental controls. Some security vendors have poor Mac support; if your child has a Macbook Pro, for instance, Norton 360 won’t allow you to monitor it. But Bitdefender is different, and you can both control your kids’ Mac usage, and use your own Mac to monitor what the family is doing online.

It can’t match the Windows apps for sheer weight of features, then, but Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac still has plenty of malware-beating technology on offer, and it’s more effective than most in keeping you safe from harm.

Bitdefender Total Security: Android

Mobile antivirus apps almost never match their desktop cousins for features, but Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android gets closer than most. Accurate anti-malware, effective anti-phishing, data breach monitoring, an app locker, even a free VPN (though with the same 200MB a day limit as Windows.)

The app has a different interface to the desktop editions, but it’s relatively easy to use. A left-hand sidebar lists various key features (Malware Scanner, Web Protection, VPN, more.) There’s a lot of information on some of the screens, but support for landscape and portrait modes helps you make best use of your device screen space. It’s well-organized, too, and most common functions are just a couple of taps away.

Independent testing shows most of Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android’s features do a great job of keeping you safe. Bitdefender beat all the competition to score first place in AV-Comparatives’ last anti-phishing test, for instance, and AV-Test’s most recent Android report found Bitdefender’s app blocked 100% of test threats.

Unusual extras include decent anti-theft features. You can view your device on a map, lock or wipe it remotely, play a ‘Scream’ alarm, even snap a photo after three failed unlock attempts. These are less useful than they were, as Android has basic anti-theft features for free and Google is busy adding more, but there’s no harm in having both options and we’re happy anti-theft is included with the app.

Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android is a strong security tool with plenty of effective ways to protect you and your device. If you only need to protect an Android device or two, there are better deals around: Avast One Free for Android is just as good at stopping malware and costs nothing at all. But if you’re after security for a number of platforms, or maybe you can make use of Bitdefender’s parental controls, Bitdefender Mobile Security makes a worthwhile addition to your threat protection setup.

Bitdefender Total Security: iOS

Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS is available for free, but this starter version doesn’t do very much. The basic 200MB a day free VPN is included, for instance. A simple scanner looks for device vulnerabilities such as missing iOS updates (and, to be fair, it found one for us), and the Account Privacy feature raises the alert if your email address appears in a data breach.

Buy Bitdefender Total Protection, though, and you also get the option to use Bitdefender’s full web protection feature. As we’ve seen above, this did a good job of blocking malicious and phishing sites during our Windows tests, but the Mobile Security version also has two bonus iOS-specific features. Turn them on and the app uses the same link-blocking technology to scan your calendar events and SMS messages, highlighting potential threats before they even reach the browser.

While there’s not exactly much functionality here, Bitdefender’s iOS offering is similar to apps from many other providers. Norton 360 for iOS also has vulnerability scanning, a limited free VPN, and link scanning for calendar events and SMS, for instance.

Overall, if you’re looking for a security suite mostly to protect several iOS devices, then we wouldn’t recommend Bitdefender Total Security. The mobile security app doesn’t have enough features to justify the price.

If you need something to protect a desktop or two, though, maybe with one or two iDevices as a bonus, it’s a slightly different story. Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS isn’t exactly powerful, but it has a scattering of useful tools, and the web protection feature alone does a good job of blocking online dangers.

Bitdefender Total Security: Final verdict

Bitdefender Total Security is an easy-to-use mid-range security suite with lots of effective threat-blocking features for Windows, Mac and Android devices, and a more basic but still useful iOS app. 

Bitdefender has a lot of suites, and this won’t necessarily be the right one for everyone. If you only need to protect Windows devices, for instance, downgrading to Bitdefender Internet Security gets you most of the key Total Security features for a lower price. But if Bitdefender’s limited 200MB a day VPN isn’t enough for you, consider upgrading to Bitdefender Premium Security, which throws in an unlimited VPN for a relatively low price.

We feature the best internet security suites.

Read more Bitdefender reviews:

• Bitdefender Antivirus Plus review
• Bitdefender Internet Security review
• Bitdefender Total Security review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for Android review
• Bitdefender Mobile Security for iOS review