Malwarebytes Premium 1D/1Y

The scanning engine remains high quality: During our tests, the app's malware scanner picked up some files and a Registry entry left over from an apparently incomplete uninstallation of a third-party driver management utility that, according to Malwarebytes, may have bundled a potentially unwanted program (PUP). By default, Malwarebytes is set to place these files in quarantine rather than deleting them. This is actually the preferred setting, since PUPs aren't necessarily harmful, and extracting them can disable the program that they came with. Generally speaking, independent testers, such as West Coast Labs and Google’s VirusTotal service, rate Malwarebytes’ scanning tech favorably and it's cultivated a reputation for not bogging down your PC.

Detailed, plain-English explanations: While other security vendors often slather on fancy-sounding terminology, Malwarebytes is good at telling you exactly what a given feature is doing. Take the "Usage and Threat Statistics" toggle, for example. This covers the anonymous usage data that it collects. In the description on its website, Malwarebytes itemizes basic things like, how many people are running the free version, trial version, and subscription versions; where is Malwarebytes being used globally and what malware is being detected the most, and how often.

Its full privacy policy even includes detailed and simplified explanations side-by-side. This kind of transparency about your data - and the deliberately limited extent of it - is good to have, and it's not as common in the security industry as it should be.