Almost Nobody Uses Paid Third-Party Antivirus

Almost nobody cares about third-party antivirus applications, much less pay for them, a surprising set of TechPowerUp Frontpage Poll results show. There was a time when you couldn't have a reliable PC experience without a solid third-party antivirus software, paying protection money each year for subscription to updates. Then Microsoft decided to significantly up the ante with endpoint security. It began with Windows Defender, a free antivirus that's part of Windows that you used if you had nothing else. Over the years, Microsoft hardened Windows with features such as Malware Removal Tool, Secure Boot, BitLocker, TPM-based root of trust, and Virtualization-based Security, which ran the whole user-space in a secure enclave, as a virtual machine, which couldn't let malware break its host. All these mean that endpoints are safer than ever, and this reflects in our poll results. Our poll had a total of 34,316 responses.

A comfortable majority of 60.5% voted for Windows Defender as their AV software of choice. A small but not insignificant percentage of 15.7% says that it has no antivirus software installed whatsoever, which is difficult if not impossible as Windows runs Defender in some limited form. A combined 24% of the responses say they use third-party AV software. The biggest choice is "Other," which includes brands not covered in the poll. A good share of these could include Kaspersky. 6.1% of the total responses say they use Bitdefender. This is followed by Avast at a surprisingly low 2.9% given that it has a free version; and an even more surprising 1% for AVG. Among the known paid-only applications, Bitdefender is followed by Norton at 1.9%, and McAfee at 0.7%.