McAfee Total Protection Essential review

McAfee Total Protection Essential may be McAfee’s starter security suite, but don’t give up on it just yet. There’s antivirus and browsing protection for up to five desktop or mobile devices; 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 while Avast and Bitdefender include very restricted VPNs in their starter suites, McAfee’s VPN is the full and unlimited service.

If that’s still not enough, the McAfee+ antivirus software suites extend the range with antivirus for unlimited devices, comprehensive identity theft protection, and online tools to optimize your social media privacy settings, and detect and remove your personal information held by data brokers or in your old online accounts. Check out our McAfee+ Premium review if that sounds like what you need.

We think McAfee Total Protection Essential has the core features most users need, though, and in this review we’ll take a look at how they perform, and whether this could be the ideal security suite for you.

McAfee Total Protection Essential: Protection

McAfee hasn’t always had great results in testing, but recently it’s scoring very well. McAfee 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 take the results from nine of the most important lab tests, then use a custom algorithm to generate a single overall score between 0 and 10. Right now that places Avast in first and Bitdefender second, but McAfee is an excellent third, outperforming both Norton and Avira.

The big labs carry out more detailed testing than anyone else around, but we think it’s still important to run further checks of our own, as they often turn up useful extra information.

We began 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 complaining.

Moving to our malware test, we tried to download very dangerous files from 50 malicious sites. 

McAfee managed 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 a bad performance, but again, others have done better. Norton spotted what our simulator was doing and killed it 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 strong protection, but it’s not quite as capable as Avast or Bitdefender.

McAfee Total Protection Essential: Safe Connect VPN

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

The VPN is built into the Total Protection app, making it very convenient to access. The Total Protection dashboard has a ‘Secure VPN’ 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. Why didn’t we click Cancel? The app has no way to cancel a connection, 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 some of the much faster competition (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, and that’s about it.

There’s no choice of protocol, but that’s not quite the issue it is with some VPNs. McAfee VPN supports both WireGuard and OpenVPN, automatically choosing the best option for the initial connection and switching if the first try doesn’t work. We would still like the option to choose manually, but that’s because we like to have some control, and that may not have any benefit in real-world use.

The ‘Safe Reconnect’ kill switch is more of a concern. It performed well in most cases, but we noticed that if the VPN’s driver failed, then the kill switch closed active connections but couldn’t stop any that followed afterwards. If a web page is downloading when the driver fails, for instance, the download would break with an error, but click Refresh and you can resume as normal.

This is a very tough test, but most specialist VPN providers do 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 more than 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 Total Protection Essential: 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. (And 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.)

Getting started is relatively easy. True Key can import stored passwords directly from Edge and Chrome, a couple of top password managers in LastPass and Dashlane, and generic CSV support might allow True Key to read logins from elsewhere. We tried importing 600+ Dashlane logins and it appeared to handle everything correctly, including multiple logins for the same site.

True Key also has a Wallet where you can store personal details - names, addresses, phone numbers, date of birth and more. This is only useful as a form of secure storage, though. True Key can’t use this kind of 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 have one unusual highlight in its excellent multi-factor authentication support. There’s nothing more important to protect than your password manager account, so it’s great to see that True Key doesn’t solely rely on a master password. You can optionally choose a second factor - a known trusted device, a second device, your Windows Hello PIN or biometric authentication - to protect your logins from snoopers.

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 Total Protection Essential: 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, so you can prevent identity theft. 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.

That’s impressive, but 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 outperforms most of the competition.

McAfee Total Protection Essential: ‘Advanced’ Firewall

McAfee Total Protection claims to include an advanced firewall, but the reality is a little different.

McAfee doesn’t protect you from incoming connections, for instance: it leaves Windows Firewall to do that.

McAfee Total Protection does monitor outgoing connections, and blocks anything that looks risky, but most paid security suites do something similar.

The firewall has no configuration options beyond the ability to manually allow a connection it’s blocked, or block a connection the firewall has allowed.

Put it all together and while we’re glad it’s here, the firewall really doesn’t do very much, or add much value to the suite beyond the web protection we’ve already described.

McAfee Total Protection Essential: File Shredder

Delete documents with sensitive information and you might feel more secure, but if someone else gets access to your device, they may be able to undelete the files. 

McAfee File Shredder addresses this problem by overwriting the files multiple times before they’re deleted, for example by filling each document with zeroes. Even if someone can undelete a file, the original contents will have disappeared.

Using File Shredder is easy. You can overwrite the contents of the Recycle Bin, choose some other target folder in the McAfee app, or select multiple items in Explorer, right-click and choose the Shred option. But while this worked most of the time, occasionally File Shredder simply told us that the files couldn’t be deleted, with no further explanation.

File Shredder is a decent example of a secure deletion tool. It goes a little further than Bitdefender’s version by overwriting every file at least twice, and giving you the option to overwrite up to five times. 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. 

McAfee Total Protection Essential: Tracker Remover

Tracker Remover can protect your privacy by deleting tracker and all other browser cookies, as well as browser history, and is able to free up storage space by deleting temporary files and the contents of the Recycle Bin, too.

There’s nothing here you can’t do elsewhere, and Tracker Remover isn’t configurable enough to make itself genuinely useful. Avast’s similar cleaner is at least able to delete tracker cookies but keep your other cookies, for instance, so it’s less likely to be a nuisance. 

Tracker Blocker can also take a long time to run - more than two minutes on our test system - and may not delete everything you’ve requested. (If a file needs admin rights to be deleted, Tracker Blocker will leave it up to you.) You can set a scheduler to run Tracker Blocker automatically when you’re not around, but if you still have to manually check and delete files yourself, that doesn’t have a lot of value.

McAfee Total Protection Essential: Final verdict

The McAfee Total Protection Essential 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: $35.99 for an antivirus this good and a full VPN 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 McAfee+ for its web privacy tools and unlimited antivirus, or competing suites such as Avast One Gold or Bitdefender Total Security for extra features and even better protection.

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