Is it a good idea to drop Windows Defender?

Having an antivirus on your Windows computer is so important that, since 2006, Microsoft has integrated antispyware into Windows Vista, which will become an antivirus, under the name Windows Defender.


From now on, competition in the antivirus market will be fierce. What's the point of buying an antivirus when Windows Defender comes bundled with Windows? Free and 100% compatible with Windows, since it was developed by Microsoft, Windows Defender has a big advantage over some of its competitors. Some of them, such as PC Tools and F-Prot, which were very popular in the 90s and 2000s, will disappear altogether. In 2025, the question remains. Should we blindly trust Microsoft Windows Defender for our cybersecurity? Are there free alternatives to Microsoft's antivirus? And are these alternatives better than Windows Defender? That's what we're going to find out through a full-scale test.

Details of our antivirus comparison in 2025

• The comparison is not sponsored. We have absolutely nothing to gain by saying that one antivirus is less good than another. If you're familiar with SecuriteInfo.com, you'll know that we don't resell any hardware or software products, in order to maintain our independence. We sell our own products, and we don't care about other brands.
• We used 100,000 pieces of malware, in all formats, extracted directly from our malware collection. What these 100,000 pieces of malware have in common is that they were all collected in 2024. So they're fairly recent malware, not 20-year-old antiques.
• Our comparison focuses solely on malware detection. All other functions are ignored, such as firewall, network detection, obsolete file cleanup, software updates, etc. The aim of our test is not to give you the most complete solution, but the one that detects as much malware as possible.
• We ran the tests on Windows 11, with the malware on a network drive in read-only mode over a 2.5 Gb/s network.
• As we ourselves sell our “additional signatures for ClamAV anvirus” product, we didn't include ourselves in the comparison. And with good reason: since we supply the malware, we have a de facto 100% detection rate with our additional signatures.

Antivirus comparison results in 2025

Here are the results of our tests:

• 1st: Avast One 24.12.9725.2387: 86822 malwares / 100000 or 86.8% detection rate
• 2nd  : Bitdefender antivirus : 78010 malwares / 100000 or 78,0 % detection rate
• 3rd  : Windows Defender : 60026 malwares / 100000 or 60.0 % detection rate
• 4th  : Panda Dome 22.03 : 44358 malwares / 100000 or 44.3 % detection rate

The losers

Here are the antivirus products we tested, but found unsatisfactory:

• Avira Security : stopped at 33412 files out of 100000. Detected 26512 malwares out of 33412. So about 79% detection.
• Comodo Antivirus : Comodo Antivirus: crashed after 2h30, 10% of scan performed, 1431 detections at time of crash. So about 14% detection.
• Kaspersky : impossible to test, it took a monstrous amount of time to scan every file on the network drive. According to the scan estimate, it would have taken several weeks to scan all the files.
• Trend Micro HouseCall can't scan a network drive. It's 2025 and Trend still doesn't know how to scan a network drive - what the hell!

Conclusion

Virus protection is the most important protection for your computer. The variety of malware is incredibly wide: viruses, ransomware, exploits, spyware, information leakage software, remote control software... The detection rate of these threats is therefore the top priority. We don't care if your antivirus doesn't act as a firewall, or clean up your obsolete files, as long as it detects as many malicious programs as possible!
But now we can say that on Windows it's better to install Avast One, even without upgrading to Premium, than to keep Windows Defender.
We also note that Avast One is the only one to exceed the 80% detection mark.
Our comparison has its limits, however, not least the fact that results can vary from month to month, and even from week to week. However, we've decided to repeat the antivirus test next year, which will allow us to see the evolution of each product. Let's hope that the competition will give Avast a run for its money, and that the overall malware detection rate will be higher in all products. See you in January 2026 for an update of our antivirus comparison.

Tags

ANTIVIRUS GRATUIT WINDOWS MALWARE CYBERSÉCURITÉ OUTIL D'ADMINISTRATION

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