Comodo Antivirus 5.8 review

To understand how we go about the UK’s most accurate and realistic anti-virus testing, read How We Test: Anti-virus software.

We’ve not included any of Comodo’s extensive range of free security products in our previous real-world anti-virus tests. This year, we’ve increased the number of products we’ve testing and have included it for the first time.

It’s got lots of features, including the ability to run suspicious files in a sandboxed virtual environment to assess their threat potential, a cloud-based database, free use of Comodo’s own SecureDNS servers to help avoid the risk of your own ISP’s servers being affected by DNS cache poisoning, and cloud-based analysis of little-known programs based on the experiences of other Comodo users.

During testing, we found that Comodo is more chatty than most of its rivals, producing pop-ups and asking for interaction on a large number of files and processes. It warned us about a staggering 30 per cent of our false positive tests, blocking four per cent outright. If potential infection is detected, Comodo suggests contacting one of their Geekbuddy technicians rather than cleaning it yourself. Not only is this a tad patronising, but it’s also a service that the company charges for.

Although Comodo Antivirus sticks to the basics, without extra features such as browser-based link scanner, you can control it in precise detail. Advanced settings allow you to easily modify Comodo’s lists of trusted files, and add new trusted software vendors as well as highly specific policies and access rights for different programs.

All this involves spending more time getting intimate with the guts of your anti-virus suite than most users either want or need to, but it’s nice to have the option, particularly if you use a lot of software from uncommon vendors.

A more user-friendly set of controls allows you to switch Comodo into various modes, using a slider to control its level of paranoia. You can even configure the program to work under instruction from Comodo’s Endpoint Security Manager running elsewhere on your network – again, not of great use to most home users, but a real benefit to small businesses.

All these finely granulated controls are brilliant for those that need them, but the most impressive thing about Comodo AntiVirus is its performance. Only one of the 50 viruses it was exposed to compromised the system (two per cent), meaning it defended against 98 per cent of our attacks.

Comodo’s defence against malware is extremely impressive, but it’s very chatty and warned us about a high percentage of our non-malicious files. Given that AVG Technologies Anti-Virus Free 2012 has the same level of protection, more features and was less chatty, it’s the better choice.