Worldwide AntiVirus Market Share – Free antivirus products lead!

Good and interesting article from The Windows Club. July 13, 2010

Oesis OK has released a report on the world-wide market share of the antivirus security software currently available in the market.
It is important to note that the free antivirus products Avast, Avira, AVG & Microsoft Security Essentials have captured the top 4 spots.

Microsoft, not typically associated with antivirus application success, has captured a significant share with their recent anti-virus solutions.

Inspite of their massive brand awareness, Symantec and McAfee have not not been able to translate this into number of installs, vis a vis the free antivirus software!

Also worth noting is that Kaspersky’s Internet Security product suite is more popular than its individual anti virus application. Kaspersky is unique in this regard.

Symantec’s success on the vendor chart is explained by the appearance of 5 different Symantec products on this graph: Norton AntiVirus, Norton Internet Security, Symantec AntiVirus, Symantec Endpoint Protection and Norton 360.

A PDF version of the report is available for download here.

Oesis OK is part of the OPSWAT Group which also offer the freeware AppRemover.

A great article! But how did AVG free ever reach that third spot, with all of the problems their product causes? MSE will, if it hasn't already, knock them out of that spot soon.

But the interesting aspect of this is, many users have come to expect free AV protection, and there are good free ones out there, you just have to test out the one you're interested in. It was just a few months ago that I was using MSE on XP Pro only, had been a Avast free user for at least two years. After only a month, all of my Windows installs has MSE, except Win 2K, which still uses Avast. Actually, on that notebook, I have the best of both worlds, when I scan with Avast, I scan everything, and when on XP, Win 2K gets scanned by MSE.

The bottom line is, some things in life are still free, and that's good for all of us these days.

That big piece, the 14.38%, that's the malware companies that infect your machine and then sell a worthless solution. They have the biggest share! j/k

I hear AVG works great with Windows XP. I'm sure this is where the percentage comes from. This is not a Windows 7 specific chart, don't forget about the other OS's when it comes to software comparisons.

It does work with XP, but it also over time slows it down badly. It took me over three hours to clean out the mess it left behind in my mother-in-law's computer, as soon as MSE was installed, before I had the chance to scan, it went to cleaning, and finally it stopped long enough for me to scan. It took two sweeps with MSE and one with Malwarebytes to clean it up. Then it ran like it was nearly new again.

Not having "real time" protection is not the best way to keep viruses, malware & spyware from your computer. And what got me about it was, she took it to the shop for a warranty repair, and the technician there installed AVG. She was running Avast, like I was, but they convinced her that AVG was better. The only thing that shop owner wanted was more business down the road.

With all of the computers that people have these days, you would not think a shop would have to stoop that low to deceive a 70 year old lady, just to get another computer in the door. I would guarantee that Veedaz would never do like that, and he has his own shop. Honest businesses prosper in the long run.

Cat

Avg has been fine on my XP machine and ran trouble free for a long time.
I think there is an unquantifiable factor concerning the interaction of various software, plus as there are almost endless hardware configurations you cold have with the same operating system that it's almost amazing that problems can be diagnosed at all. So many variables.