Webroot SecureAnywhere Complete review

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Webroot’s latest anti-malware package is a complete revamp of the company’s previous products, with a new interface, new name and new set of features. As the name suggests, SecureAnywhere Complete is the most comprehensive of Webroot’s current range. It also costs significantly more than SecureAnywhere Essentials, the next edition down in the range.

Their core anti-malware features are the same, with real-time protection and on-demand scanning, a browser defence tool and firewall. SecureAnywhere Complete adds to this with a password locker, mobile phone and mobile protection for up to three Android or iOS devices and 10GB of online storage for each of three users (as compared to the 2GB provided by Essentials). The online storage is worth a look, as Webroot has rebranded SugarSync, one of our favourite online syncing services, although it’s worth noting that a 30GB account on SugarSync costs £32 a year and doesn’t require you to divide it between three users.

A few features are conspicuously missing. SecureAnywhere doesn’t have a spam prevention module, nor does it have a dedicated email scanner for malicious attachments. The company says that this is because popular providers such as Yahoo and GMail have their own excellent spam and anti-malware defences in place. That’s true, but doesn’t do anything to benefit those who run or use any other kind of mail server. The software also lacks the parental controls that are popular freebies with many other security suites, although this isn’t likely to be a major loss as far as the majority of users are concerned.

Unfortunately, a non-standard feature set is the least of SecureAnywhere Complete’s problems. In our tests, it defended against just 59 per cent of the malware threats we exposed it to. That’s a 41 per cent compromise rate (11 test viruses). Despite failing to pick up a large number of legitimate threats, it nonetheless blocked 10 per cent (two applications) of the benign programs in our false positive tests.

On top of this generally poor performance, SecureAnywhere Complete is also rather expensive. A three-user licence version costs £36. We were unable to find a single-user version, but you can get a single-user copy of the more limited SecureAnywhere Essentials for around £23. we recommend BitDefender Internet Security 2012 instead.

For straightforward advice on getting the best anti-malware deal, and keeping your software up-to-date year-on-year, then read Avoiding the anti-malware trap now.