McAfee+ Premium review

McAfee+ Premium is an easy-to-use security suite with some very welcome features. There’s supremely accurate antivirus for unlimited mobile or desktop devices, for instance; a full and unlimited VPN (no missing features, no data limits); a password manager; powerful data breach monitoring for email addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, bank accounts and more; mobile apps include a scam detector to spot and block links in dangerous texts, and privacy tools  help you lock down your social media settings, find and remove your personal data from web brokers, and locate and close down old and unused web accounts.

It’s an appealing feature set, and in this review we’ll take a closer look at McAfee+ Premium to see just how well it performs in real world use, and whether it might be one of the best antivirus software.

McAfee+ Premium: Pricing

McAfee+ Premium is available in two flavors.

McAfee+ Premium Individual includes antivirus for unlimited devices, a password manager, unlimited VPN for up to five devices, and online account cleanup and data management tools for one person. It’s priced at $49.99 in year one, $149.99 on renewal.

McAfee+ Premium Family extends the package with online account cleanup and data management tools for two people, and throws in parental controls, too. It’s a little more expensive at $69.99 in year one, $169.99 on renewal.

If you only need the security basics, McAfee Total Protection Essential offers antivirus, a password manager and unlimited VPN for up to five devices, and is priced at a low $35.99 in year one, $119.99 on renewal.

Alternatively, upgrading to McAfee+ Advanced gets you identity theft protection, credit monitoring, identity theft insurance and more. Prices start at $89.99 in year one, $199.99 on renewal.

These are extremely low first year prices, especially if you could use the VPN or have a lot of devices to protect. But if you don’t need unlimited devices then you might save a little money elsewhere. Norton 360 Deluxe has antivirus and a VPN for five devices, parental controls and 50GB cloud backup, for example, and it’s good value at $49.99 in year one, $119.99 on renewal.

McAfee+ Premium: Getting Started

McAfee+ Premium looks similar to many Windows security suites, with a dashboard showing your security status, and common tasks like running an antivirus scan or activating the VPN just a couple of clicks away.

While this seems straightforward, we noticed that some of the status information didn’t match the details we saw elsewhere. The app warned us that its ID monitoring had detected ‘100 breaches’, for instance; we clicked the ID monitoring button, McAfee’s website loaded, and it listed 216 breaches.

Some important features require extra setup steps before they’re working properly. McAfee’s web protection is based on its WebAdvisor browser extension, for instance, which must be activated before it can protect you. The McAfee+ app does its best to help, though, warning you about key features which aren’t enabled, and pointing you to the right places (like the WebAdvisor app store download page) when necessary.

McAfee+ Premium keeps its dashboard relatively straightforward by tucking the more advanced features away in a left-hand ‘My Protection’ sidebar. We sometimes had to go searching for features (we expected the list of excluded files to appear on the main scanning page as it applies to every scan type, but McAfee placed it under Real-Time Protection), but after a few minutes exploring we began to find our way around.

McAfee+ Premium: Protection

McAfee currently has great protection results in independent testing. As we write the company is currently equal third with Avira in AV-Comparatives Real-World Protection Test, just behind Avast and AVG, and it scored full marks in both AV-Test’s last Windows report and SE Labs’ consumer endpoint protection test,

We calculate an overall score covering nine of the most important reports across four different labs. Right now that places Avast in first and Bitdefender second, but McAfee is an excellent third, outperforming both Norton and Avira.

We began our own tests by attempting to access 50 brand new phishing sites, and logging what happened. McAfee WebAdvisor blocked a well below average 32%. It’s better than nothing - some VPNs who claim to shield you from malicious URLs don’t block a single site - but it’s also far behind even free antivirus from providers including Bitdefender (64%), Avira (90%) and Avast (94%.)

There’s a second problem. McAfee WebAdvisor is a browser extension, which means it can’t protect non-standard browsers or other apps. We use a custom browser for testing, and it was able to freely access every one of our phishing sites without McAfee even noticing.

Moving to our malware test, we tried downloading dangerous files from 50 malicious sites. McAfee blocked a solid 88%, but was still a little behind Avira (90% in its last test), Avast (94%) and Bitdefender (an excellent 100%.)

Finally, we matched McAfee against our own custom ransomware simulator. McAfee got off to a great start, immediately killing the threat before it could touch a single file. But when we modified our file just a little, it got past McAfee and managed to encrypt thousands of documents.

That’s not bad, but others have done better. Norton spotted and killed our simulator after it encrypted six files, and Bitdefender stopped the threat before it could cause any damage at all.

Put it all together and we think our results broadly confirm the lab reports: McAfee does offer very strong protection, but it’s not quite leading edge, and Avast and Bitdefender score fractionally higher.

McAfee+ Premium: Secure VPN

McAfee+ Premium comes with an unlimited version of McAfee Safe Connect VPN, which itself uses the popular TunnelBear VPN underneath.

The VPN is built into the McAfee+ app, making it very convenient to access. The app dashboard has a ‘Secure VPN’ panel which shows whether you’re connected or not, and if you need browsing protection, you can turn it on in a couple of clicks.

(Well, that’s the idea. During our review, the VPN once hung on ‘Connecting’ for several minutes. The app has no way to cancel a connection, a very basic design flaw, so all we could do was reboot.)

McAfee’s VPN has a marginally above average choice of 48 countries. Unlike TunnelBear, there’s no choice of city or regional locations (McAfee has one US location, TunnelBear has 13.) 

McAfee’s location list doesn’t include five of the countries most commonly supported by VPNs: Hong Kong, India, Israel, Russia and Turkey. But it has servers everywhere else we would expect, and delivers more coverage than usual in Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa) and South America.(Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia and Peru.)

Connection times could be slow on our test Windows system, sometimes ten seconds or more. If you’re used to faster services (ExpressVPN typically takes less than a second), that can become frustrating.

McAfee VPN has very few settings. There’s a kill switch (called Safe Reconnect) to protect your traffic if the VPN drops, and some Automatic Connect options to automatically connect when using untrusted or specific networks, but  no choice of protocol, no split tunneling or anything more advanced.

Testing revealed an issue with the ‘Safe Reconnect’ kill switch. It performed well in most cases, but we noticed that if the VPN’s driver failed, then the kill switch wasn’t able to fully activate, and our now-unprotected web traffic continued to flow. 

This isn’t an issue you’re likely to see in real world use, but if privacy is a priority then it has to be a concern, and most specialist VPN providers do much better. When we put NordVPN through the same test, it didn’t just block our internet correctly, it also quickly diagnosed the problem, restored the driver, and automatically reconnected.

We test VPN download speeds by connecting to a number of speed test sites from a cloud PC with a fast 1Gbps connection. McAfee Safe Connect managed a best average speed across multiple sessions of 270Mbps, well behind the performance champions (Surfshark and others reach 950Mbps+), but enough for browsing, streaming and most other tasks.

McAfee sells Secure Connect VPN for its privacy and security, and doesn’t mention unblocking streaming sites at all. We ran unblocking tests for Netflix and a number of other streaming sites anyway, but with poor results. McAfee got us into ITV and Channel 4 in the UK, and 9Now in Australia, but it couldn’t unblock Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus or BBC iPlayer.

McAfee+ Premium: True Key Password Manager

True Key is a basic password manager which allows users to create secure logins, store and share them across all their devices. With Android and iOS apps for mobile devices, and browser extensions for Chrome, Edge and Firefox covering everything else, you can run it almost everywhere.

We imported existing logins from Dashlane without any issues. True Key can also import stored passwords from Edge, Chrome, LastPass, and generic CSV support might allow True Key to read logins from elsewhere.

True Key also has a Wallet where you can store personal details - names, addresses, phone numbers, date of birth and more. But the app can’t use this information to fill forms, unlike Dashlane and other top password managers.

In terms of the password management basics, though, True Key works reasonably well. Usernames and passwords are captured automatically as you enter them. When you’re creating an account, it can generate and enter a secure password in a couple of clicks. When we opened a login page, True Key displayed any matching profile (that could include multiple usernames if you’ve several accounts on the site), and clicking the profile logged us in successfully.

There’s not much in the way of advanced functionality. True Key doesn’t have secure password sharing, for instance, and there’s no ‘Password Health’-type feature to warn you about reused or weak passwords.

True Key does a great job of protecting your account with its excellent two factor authentication support. You can still log in with a master password alone, but for extra safety you can optionally choose a second factor, including a known trusted device, a second device, your Windows Hello PIN or biometric authentication.

Overall, True Key is a basic but decent tool which handles simple login tasks with ease. It’s better than the typical password managers we see in security suites, but if you need form filling or other advanced features, you’re still much better off with Dashlane, LassPass or the best of the competition.

(If you’re unsure and would like to try before you buy, download True Key’s Freemium version. It only supports 15 logins, but that’s enough to sample the service and get a feel for how the app works for you.)

McAfee+ Premium: Online Account Cleanup

McAfee Online Account Cleanup (OAC) is an interesting web-based tool which discovers and helps you remove old web accounts which you no longer need or use.

The service identifies old accounts by scanning your email Inbox for keywords, finding old account reminders or other messages you might have forgotten. That’s a clever idea, but has a few problems.

The first is that you might not want to give McAfee permission to regularly read your Inbox. We don’t see this as a major risk (McAfee tries to reassure by saying ‘We only review the sender’s name, subject line, timestamp, and a few words of each email…’), but it may be a step too far for some.

The second is that OAC can only scan inboxes for Microsoft, Google or Yahoo email accounts. If you use another service, Online Account Cleanup won’t work.

The third issue is that you can only choose one of these email addresses. If you set up web accounts using more than one email, OAC won’t be able to cover everything.

If these aren’t concerns for you, OAC works very well. The service can automatically access your email, scanning is fairly quick, and when it’s complete, you get to see a very long list of your current accounts.

If you’ve 50 or more accounts to explore, then that could be intimidating. OAC does its best to point you in the right direction, though, by highlighting accounts which hold financial information (bank account or credit card details), other sensitive information (passport number, social security numbers), or you perhaps don’t use any more (they’re very, very old.)

While that’s helpful in identifying accounts you really should remove, you mostly have to sort out the actual removal process for yourself. OAC gives you a link to the service website, but it’s up to you to figure out how each account can be closed.

McAfee Online Account Cleanup is an unusual service which could be very helpful for some users. It won’t help others at all, though, and if you’re really keen on closing old web accounts, spend an afternoon browsing your inbox and you can probably get almost as much done for free.

McAfee+ Premium: Personal Data Cleanup

McAfee Personal Data Cleanup scans data brokers to see if your name, date of birth and home address are being sold on data broker sites. Sounds good, but McAfee+ Premium scans for data only, and won’t ask browsers to remove your information unless you upgrade to the top-of-the-range McAfee Total Protection Ultimate plan.

We ran a check anyway, and within a few minutes McAfee reported that it had found three data brokers which ‘may’ have ‘some’ of our personal data. We looked at the report for each broker, but these simply said: ‘this data broker collects a wide range of personal data in your country, but they don't provide a way to search for specific individuals, so we're unable to access their records to confirm if they're collected yours.’ In other words: they might have our data, they might, but there’s no way to help.

The advice the report offered was even less helpful, just 'we recommend visiting the broker's site to request the removal of any info they may have collected about you' (without even giving us a link to the site), or that, if we upgraded our plan, 'removal requests will automatically be sent.'

We can’t judge Personal Data Cleanup on a single search, and you may get much better results. But as most plans don’t help you remove data, and doing it manually can be complex (you’ll need to verify your identity and repeat the process regularly), we don’t think the feature adds any real value to McAfee+ Premium.

McAfee+ Premium: Social Privacy Manager

McAfee Social Privacy Manager (SPM) is a browser extension which can scan your Facebook, X/ Twitter, YouTube, Google, Instagram, TikTok and Linkedin accounts for weak privacy settings, then recommend improvements and update your settings itself with a click.

Some products of this type give the same advice to everyone, but McAfee is smarter than that. It asks what sort of social media user you are - do you explore other posts, say, or share content, but rarely post yourself - and then tailors its recommendations to your needs.

Scanning your accounts can be surprisingly simple. If your browser is already logged into Facebook, say, then just choose Facebook on the McAfee site and SPM scans your settings and delivers its advice in seconds.

SPM organizes its recommendations into four sensibly-chosen categories. Content Visibility is all about controlling who can see your profile and content; Ad Preferences controls how the platform uses your data to choose ads; Social Interactions controls how others find and interact with you, and Platform Experience is all about general personalisations.

The amount of guidance we received varied widely, with YouTube (3 tips) and Google (6) a little disappointing, but the Facebook (21 recommendations) and LinkedIn (26) reports giving us far more to explore.

SPM gave us some useful advice. By default, LinkedIn uses all kinds of data to personalize ads, but SPM recommended we turn off 16 ad-related settings, and allowed us to do that with a single click. If you’re not the type to spend an age exploring the darker corners of your account dashboard, looking for important settings, this will save you time and improve your privacy.

If there’s a problem here it’s that SPM often has the most basic privacy settings only. We scanned our Google account, for instance, and SPM gave us a single Yes/ No option to prevent Google logging any of our web activity. Google’s own settings give you so much more control, allowing you to choose custom options for Search, Chrome, Ads, Maps, Google Play and more. 

There’s no doubt that SPM is far simpler than the standard account dashboards, and if you’re just looking for a quick way to turn everything off, it could be all you need. But if you’re more about fine-tuning your privacy settings for the best results, Social Privacy Monitor won’t help you very much.

McAfee+ Premium: Dark Web Monitoring

Many antivirus apps now include some form of dark web monitoring, where they raise an alert if your personal details show up in a data breach. But often they’ll only search for email addresses, something you can already do for free at sites like haveibeenpwned.com. 

McAfee tramples all over these vendors with the ability to monitor up to 10 email addresses, 10 phone numbers, your date of birth, 10 usernames, two passports, two national IDs, two health IDs, 10 credit cards, 10 bank accounts and two tax IDs. Enter whatever details you like, launch a scan, and McAfee+ Premium displays the total number of breaches discovered both in its web dashboard and in the app. 

As usual with this kind of service, the information you get may not be very helpful. For example, McAfee told us that our email address showed up in a breach which contained ‘birthdays, names, email addresses, physical addresses and other personal information.’ Interesting, but we don’t know which account our email came from, or whether the breach included any of those extra details. It’s telling us what we know already - some of our data is available online - but there’s no action we can take to address any of that.

If you’d like data breach monitoring anyway, there are similar (and maybe better) services around. Norton Identity Protection can’t match McAfee everywhere (no health IDs, no national IDs, no tax IDs, only supports five email addresses), but it does watch for a couple of important extra items in your real-world addresses and your mother’s maiden name.

Norton makes it easier to add some items, too. Add a phone number to McAfee and it sends a verification code by SMS to confirm that you own it; great for privacy, not so welcome if it’s a landline or can’t receive SMS. Norton doesn’t require verification, so it works with any number.

McAfee does have some welcome advantages, though. In particular, the web dashboard highlights especially important breaches which include a password; Norton just lists breach names, forcing you to open each one in turn to see what it contains.

Put it all together and while McAfee Identity Monitoring isn’t ground breaking in any way (and we really wish it looked out for addresses), it’s still a capable service which tracks more details than most of the competition.

McAfee+ Premium: More Features

McAfee+ Premium includes a basic firewall which prevents untrusted applications from making connections to the outside world. That’s useful, but it doesn’t do much else. The firewall has no significant configuration options, and McAfee+ doesn’t look at incoming connections at all (it leaves Windows Firewall to do that.) Bitdefender and Norton’s suites have far more capable firewalls.

McAfee File Shredder securely wipes files containing confidential data to make sure they can’t be recovered. Even if someone steals your laptop and manages to undelete some sensitive documents, they’ll only see the wiped and empty versions.

File Shredder is convenient to use. Delete private documents as usual, open File Shredder, and you can have it securely wipe the contents of the Recycle Bin in a click: done. We had an odd issue during testing - occasionally File Shredder simply told us that the files couldn’t be deleted, without any explanation - but mostly it worked very well. If you’re an experienced Windows user who would like more,, though, tools like Eraser or Microsoft’s command line SDelete give you many more expert-level secure deletion features for free.

Tracker Remover protects your privacy by deleting tracker and other browser cookies, browser history, temporary files and the contents of the Recycle Bin. It works as advertised, but there’s nothing here that you can’t do elsewhere. And as with File Shredder, you can get similar but far more capable cleanup tools - like Avast’s CCleaner, for free. 

McAfee+ Premium: Final verdict

The McAfee+ Premium highlight is its antivirus engine, which does more to keep you safe than most. The dark web monitoring tracks way more personal data than the rest of the competition, too, but the browsing protection and the underpowered VPN let the suite down.

If price is your top priority then it might still be worth signing up for the first year deal: $49.99 for an antivirus this good covering unlimited devices, and a full VPN thrown in, is as good a deal as you’ll get anywhere. (A one year TunnelBear account costs $59.88 all on its own.)

If you expect more from a security suite, though, consider competing suites such as Avast One Gold or Bitdefender Total Security for extra features and even better protection.

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