ZoneAlarm Antivirus Review (2025): Is it the right choice?

Full Review

ZoneAlarm is a user-friendly antivirus offering solid protection against malware, featuring a fast scanner, advanced firewall, real-time defense, anti-phishing tools, and anti-ransomware capabilities.

ZoneAlarm offers a free plan and two premium packages: Pro Antivirus + Firewall and Extreme Security NextGen. The latter is pricier but provides better value with more comprehensive features. Both plans allow coverage for up to 50 devices, though costs increase with more devices.

Key Features:

• Anti-malware: ZoneAlarm’s scanner detected all malware samples during our tests, using behavioral scanning and hourly database updates. Full scans took around 50 minutes, comparable to top competitors like Norton.
• Firewall: The two-way firewall offers robust protection, blocking unauthorized access and malware. Though not the best on the market, it enhances security by hiding your PC from hackers.
• Anti-phishing: The Safe Browsing tool effectively blocked all phishing sites we tested, ensuring safe web navigation.
• Anti-ransomware: Advanced AI prevents ransomware attacks and encryptions. It even restores data affected by ransomware.
• Anti-keylogger: This tool successfully blocked all keylogging attempts during our tests, safeguarding personal information from theft.
• Threat Emulation: This feature examines suspicious files in a sandbox, adding extra protection against zero-day threats.

Conclusion:

ZoneAlarm offers strong security features but lacks some extras like a VPN, parental controls, and a password manager. Despite this, it remains a solid choice with affordable pricing and effective malware protection.

Test score comparison

We conduct in-house anti-malware tests and review the results from AV-Test, a German lab renowned for its objective evaluations. Below is the average of the last 10 AV-Test results for Windows. Their scoring criteria are:

• Protection (1-6): Effectiveness in blocking malware.
• Performance (1-6): Impact on system speed.
• Usability (1-6): Frequency of errors like false alarms.

We calculate a final score using this formula:

Final Score = 60% Protection + 20% Performance + 20% Usability.

While these results influence our choice of the best antivirus for Windows 11, other factors like privacy and identity protection also play a key role. For a similar analysis for Android or macOS, visit our other comparisons:

• The best antivirus for Android.
• The best antivirus for Mac.

Note: Brands not listed in the table either do not participate in AV-Test trials or are tested too infrequently, such as Surfshark Antivirus.

Source: AV-Test (Last updated: December 2024).

Price comparison

We’ve compared the prices of the top antivirus products for Windows. To make it a fair comparison, we looked at what it would cost us, to protect a  single Windows PC with the most essential features:

• Anti-malware
• Anti-phishing (web protection)
• Firewall
• Password manager
• Unlimited VPN (no data limit)

A few notes:

• Some brands are missing features, lowering their value for money.
• Prices are second-year prices in the USA, without first-year discounts.
• Prices are rounded up for readability (e.g., $99.99 becomes $100).

Brands have different prices outside the USA. See those on their website.

User reviews

We’ve compared the user reviews of all antivirus brands. We’ve used the scores and review count of TrustPilot, a leading user review platform. 

We consider scores above 4.0 very good. Lower scores indicate that the brand might have a poor product or customer service. McAfee’s scores, for instance, are worrying.

Source: TrustPilot. Last Update: December 2024.