Malwarebytes Premium antivirus review: A simple, lightweight security solution

Malwarebytes offers online security in two forms: a basic free virus scanner, and this more advanced offering, which promises active, all-round protection. The suite covers the important bases without slowing down your computer, but the price is comparatively steep and, in testing, it couldn’t quite match the protection scores offered by many competing antivirus packages.

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Malwarebytes Premium review: What do you get for the money?

The free edition of Malwarebytes only performs on-demand scanning, so frankly it’s not much use – it won’t step in to prevent a malware attack. The Premium package is much more capable, adding real-time analysis of files as they download and run. There’s also a web protection feature that runs behind the scenes and blocks dangerous executables and scam sites, as well as a module that watches over your Windows system and prevents attackers from taking advantage of known OS vulnerabilities. 

If you’re looking for lots of features and settings to play with, however, you’ll be disappointed. The Malwarebytes software performs all of its checks automatically in the background and the only control you get is a set of switches enabling you to turn individual detection types on and off. If you delve deep into the settings you can find some cryptic technical options, but they’re not intended for regular users to mess with.  There’s also a switch for ransomware protection, which is just a subset of regular malware detection. The program doesn’t let you lock down access to specific folders as you can with Kaspersky Premium or Trend Micro Internet Security.  Arguably, you don’t need more protection than this. Indeed, there’s a certain appeal to the simplicity of Malwarebytes. However, the basic feature set makes it hard to justify the price. You’ll pay £30 per year to protect a single device, or £80 for five devices. Sneakily, the website presents this as a per-month cost, but subscriptions are only offered on an annual basis.

Malwarebytes Premium review: Will it keep you safe?

Malwarebytes really only does one thing, so you would expect it to do it well. In the latest malware protection tests carried out by independent antivirus lab AV-Test.org, Malwarebytes Premium was pitted against 11,876 widespread malware samples – and it successfully intercepted 100% of them.

The software didn’t fare quite so well against unknown threats, however. When tested against 363 zero-day attacks, Malwarebytes achieved only a 98.9% protection rate in January 2023, and 97.8% for the following month. Those are still very high numbers, but as you can see below, almost every other contender achieved a clean sheet.

We can’t criticise Malwarebytes too heavily for a near-perfect performance, but it’s hard to overlook the fact that it fared worse than the free Defender tool that’s built into Windows.