Panda Free Antivirus is a free product from a Spanish company that offers basic protection and a minimum of extra features. Antivirus has its own VPN, but unfortunately in the free version, it has no value. Panda Antivirus definitely has paid plans in which it offers quality and uses additional security features and more features, but in this article, we will only look at the free version to see if it is suitable for protecting your system.
Customizability and ease of use
The company’s official website doesn’t provide too much information about its free product, but you can easily understand everything yourself by downloading and installing Panda Free Antivirus in a few clicks. After that, the antivirus needs to be activated, which involves sending an email to create your free account. This is common practice for many antivirus programs such as Bitdefender or Kaspersky.
After successful registration, Panda Antivirus will perform its first scan of your system, and then it will be ready for further use.
The antivirus installation package is surprisingly light, taking up only about 250 MB of memory. The application runs practically in the background, leaving only a few processes active, and they use as few resources as possible.
The program protects its own code decently, the chance that the antivirus will be affected by malware is almost zero.
Main functions
The first thing that catches your attention when you enter the antivirus is its unusual interface which is made in the style of beautiful landscapes, reminiscent of a desktop picture. You can even change the picture to a different one.
When we go to the scan button and click on it, we have access to different types of scans. However, the customizability is a bit limited, with selective scanning you can’t select multiple file types, just one. Otherwise, the scanning is fast and all the necessary information is archived for a long time after it is finished.
The Antivirus tab gives you a bit more options including scheduling automatic scans, adjusting some basic settings, and scanning specific locations in your system, but it’s still a long way from the free Avast antivirus.
Other features:
- Real-time protection – scans a file for threats in about 30 seconds
- Rescue Kit – helps you remove more complex threats
- Process Monitor – provides all the information you need about the files, showing their status, security, the source of their download, etc.
But this is not the only thing that limits Process Monitor. It also allows you to filter displays to see the history of all running programs on your system for that day, week, or even month. In this way, you can easily monitor the trends of your applications and in case of danger find suspicious files and get rid of them.
Protection level
AV-Comparative evaluates all known anti-viruses and scans them all to make sure they can cope with various kinds of viruses of different complexity. In its last check, Panda Antivirus does not cope at a level to make the list of leaders, its protection is far from 100% and in terms of performance, it is also struggling. As for Panda Free Antivirus, it provides good protection against primitive virus software Trojans, worms, etc., but it hardly manages to protect against ransomware, especially the most sophisticated ones.