Heimdal Antivirus Review

Summary

Heimdal uses machine learning and advanced behavioral and real-time cloud-scanning to pick up potential threats before they reach your device. Heimdal has a high success rate at detecting all types of malware, ransomware, Trojans, APTs, exploits, and other viruses, as well as steering you away from fraudulent phishing sites. Heimdal presents 3 paid packages for home users, a free antivirus tool, and antivirus protection for business users.

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Pros:

• Protection from phishing sites
• Advanced behavioral scanning to pick up threats early
• Won’t slow your system down

Cons:

• Customer support can be slow to respond
• Doesn’t clean your system if it’s already been infected

Highlights

Features: Advanced, machine-learning powered malware detection and prevention

Ease of Use: Very easy to use

Reliability: Above average

Value: Average

Money Back Guarantee: 30 days

Best For

• Business users who want extra endpoint protection
• Home users who already have a standard antivirus, and want to increase their online protection to keep viruses from even reaching their system
• Gamers and other users who have heavy system requirements and need a security option that won’t slow them dow

Why Choose Heimdal

The main reason to choose Heimdal is to access a lightweight, yet highly effective added layer of protection for your internet activity, data, and devices. Heimdal is one of the few antivirus companies to use machine learning to detect online threats and prevent them from ever reaching your device. Choose Heimdal for extra safety, to keep your device clean and virus-free, and for advanced AI that doesn’t slow down your system.

What Heimdal Offers 

• A lightweight program that doesn’t slow down your system
• 3 levels of protection for home users
• A solid security package for business users
• Free protection through automatic app updates
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• Customer support via email and live chat
• Full-featured protection against all types of viruses and malware
• Filtering to block suspicious sites

Heimdal offers 3 antivirus packages for the home user, plus a lightweight free version, and a business antivirus package. The free tool provides automatic app updates to ensure that your apps and software don’t have any security holes

Home users can choose Thor Vigilance, an antivirus package that uses machine learning to identify and isolate any type of malware. Thor Foresight provides an extra layer of protection for antivirus users, including real-time internet filtering to steer you away from fraudulent sites. Thor Premium combines these 2 products into one security package. Heimdal’s Thor Enterprise, for business users, takes the same advanced security tools and adds even more endpoint protection for sensitive business data.

Products & Features

- Thor Vigilance Home

Thor Vigilance Home is the basic antivirus package for home users. It offers signature scanning, real-time cloud scanning, and heuristic and behavior-based scanning to spot suspicious behavior before anything malicious approaches your data. Using machine learning technology, Thor Vigilance identifies online threats before they materialize. Thor Vigilance also uses a sandbox system to isolate possible threats, backdoor security to prevent malware from entering your device via a ‘backdoor’ server, and a classic firewall for wraparound protection.

- Thor Foresight Home

Thor Foresight is an additional layer of protection that works alongside your existing antivirus. Thor Foresight uses advanced, next-generation technology to filter your internet traffic to block ransomware, malware, and phishing attempts from reaching your device. It also closes loopholes in your apps by automatically installing vital security updates. Finally, Thor Foresight keeps watch for cyber thieves who try to steal your credit card details.

- Thor Premium Home

Thor Premium Home offers all of the advanced, ongoing antivirus features of Thor Vigilance, combined with the additional protection of Thor Foresight. With Thor Premium, you can keep yourself and your family safe online—malicious sites are blocked, suspicious files are identified, quarantined, and destroyed, plus your sensitive data and precious memories are kept secure against scammers and cyber thieves. Using machine learning, Thor Premium protects your device by closing up all vulnerabilities to lock out malware.

- Thor Free

Thor Free ensures that all of your software is automatically kept up to date so that security loopholes are closed. It also identifies risky downloads that could mask viruses and malware, so you only install safe apps.

- Thor Enterprise

With Thor Enterprise, you'll get advanced traffic filtering, real-time cloud scanning, and threat detection powered by machine learning to protect your business data. Thor Enterprise closes security gaps in your software and uses signature scanning, heuristics analysis, and behavioral analysis to detect and prevent threats from entering your business systems.

Ease of Use

Heimdal is easy to buy and to use. There are no complicated add-ons to choose at checkout—you just pay one price for the entire package. Installation is fast—you download the software, choose a location, and run the install wizard. Heimdal will ask you to make 2 settings tweaks:

• Choose which apps you want to have regularly updated by picking Custom or Autopilot mode. Autopilot automatically installs all relevant updates. Custom lets you choose which apps to update each time.
• Heimdal’s network monitoring service sends you notifications, but you decide which notifications you want to receive.

Once your Thor program is set up, you can control it through the simple interface. You can access a more detailed activity report, or switch to view Traffic Scanning, Malware Engine, or Patching System to see these areas more closely. Thor includes simple on-screen instructions to patch or update software, eliminate quarantined security risks, and approve blocked sites.

Detection Rates and Reliability

There hasn’t been an independent test of Heimdal’s malware-spotting abilities, but judging by experience, it has high success rates in this area. If anything, it can be a little bit too enthusiastic about blocking possibly suspicious sites. It's very effective at spotting out-of-date apps and software and quietly fixes them.

Pricing 

The shortest contract option is for 1 year, and you’ll get a discount if you pay for 2 or 3 years up front. Fortunately, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee so that you aren’t locked into a 1-year contract if you decide that it doesn’t suit your needs.

Value for Money

Heimdal provides great value for money in its enterprise package, but paying for additional protection on top of a standard antivirus might be too expensive for many home users. However, it’s a lower-cost option than other similar packages which are also designed to complement antivirus tools. Thor Premium, in particular, is quite expensive for something that does almost everything a standard antivirus can do, but still doesn’t do the most important job of cleaning up an infected device.

Bottom Line

Heimdal’s 3 home user antivirus packages are easy to use and effective at malware and virus protection. Thor Free provides a useful extra level of protection that can be used to fill in the gaps left by other, paid, antivirus protection, and Thor Enterprise is a valuable high-security tool for protecting business data and systems. Although Heimdal’s Thor products are effective and user-friendly, they don’t remove viruses from your device—the goal is to keep them from appearing to begin with—so if your device does get infected, Heimdal won’t be able to help you clean it up.

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About Heimdal

Heimdal was formed in 2011 to create internet security solutions that combat cyber criminals and prevent data breaches. Its focus is on protecting sensitive business information from leaks and attacks, but it also provides security products for home users.

Amanda Bradley

Amanda Bradley's interests and experience stretch from business to tech, via marketing, hi-tech and travel. Amanda uses her research and writing skills, together with her curiosity about every field and industry, to understand each topic from the inside and share it in an engaging, enticing way.