Bitdefender Total Security, the company's entry-level security suite, includes all the features you expect and protects your devices across multiple platforms. The biggest reason for upgrading to Bitdefender Premium Security, reviewed here, is that doing so removes all limits from the VPN component—you’re not confined to 200MB of VPN traffic per day, and you can connect through whatever country you want. We still consider Total Security a better overall pick, given that some users don't want a VPN and, for those that do, Bitdefender isn't our top choice. So while Premium Security boasts a prime collection of effective features and is easy to recommend, Total Security is our Editors’ Choice, sharing the honor with Norton 360 Deluxe, a cross-platform suite with its own no-limits VPN.

How Much Does Bitdefender Premium Security Cost?

Many security suites offer pricing tiers for one, three, five, 10, or even 20 licenses, with the per-device price decreasing as the number of licenses increases. Bitdefender’s current pricing model is much simpler. For any of its security suites, you can purchase a five-device individual subscription or a 25-device family subscription. With the family subscription, you get parental control, but otherwise, it’s just a difference in the number of devices covered.

An individual subscription for Bitdefender Premium Security costs $129.99 per year, $20 more than Bitdefender Total Security. If you opt for the family subscription, you pay $169.99 per year, $30 more than the corresponding Total Security family subscription. Bitdefender’s VPN costs $69.99 per year on its own, so getting it as part of your security suite is a bargain.

Compared with other top-tier suites, this one’s price is on the high side. A few are even higher—Avast One Gold and Webroot Total Protection cost $179.99 per year at the five-license tier, and both include full-powered VPN protection. However, most competitors range from a bit less to a lot less. For example, a five-license subscription to Trend Micro Maximum Security costs $99.95 per year, while both ESET Home Security Premium and F-Secure Internet Security cost just $69.99 per year at the five-license level.

The suite most comparable to Bitdefender Premium is Norton 360 Deluxe, which also offers five powerful security suite licenses and five VPN licenses. Norton 360 costs $119.99 per year, just slightly less than Bitdefender Premium’s price. That same price gets you a five-license subscription for McAfee Total Protection.

McAfee fans should note that Total Protection isn’t the most economical McAfee choice. Paying $149.99 per year gets you unlimited licenses to install McAfee+ protection on your Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and even ChromeOS devices. That’s $20 less than Bitdefender’s price for a 25-license family pack. Of course, if you have fewer than 25 devices to protect, there’s no appreciable difference from an unlimited subscription.

Getting Started With Bitdefender Premium Security

As with most modern security services, you manage Bitdefender through an online portal—Bitdefender Central, in this case. Once you’ve activated your license in Bitdefender Central, you can immediately install the security suite and VPN on the current device or send a link for installation on another device.

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Bitdefender Central also lets you track all the devices you’ve installed protection on and see any problems that need attention. It’s easy to see how many licenses you have left and to send installation links to any unprotected devices. You can even remotely launch a malware scan or run a performance optimization pass.

Bitdefender Total Security Provides Device Protection

When you install device-level security from Bitdefender Central, what you get is precisely Bitdefender Total Security. That being the case, there’s no need to reprise my review of that suite here. I advise you to click the link and read all about it. I’ll summarize here very briefly.

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As noted earlier, Bitdefender Total Security is an Editors’ Choice winner. At its core is Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, also an Editors’ Choice winner. The antivirus boasts a cornucopia of features that beat out many security suites.

With the departure of Bitdefender Internet Security, Bitdefender Total Security is now Bitdefender’s entry-level suite. It also qualifies as a cross-platform, multi-device suite, as it provides protection for devices running Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Admittedly, the Windows edition owns the lion’s share of features, but Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac receives top marks from independent testing labs, and the Android app is a comprehensive mobile protection suite. Again, you can learn more by reading my separate review of Total Protection.

Email Protection in the Cloud

If you’re one of those rare people whose email provider doesn’t already attempt to filter out spam, Bitdefender’s antispam component can do that. And a malicious attachment that comes in with a shady email will never get to launch—the antivirus will terminate it. When you see the Autopilot panel’s advice to turn on Email protection, you may reasonably wonder just what more protection is needed. Here’s how it works.

Email protection is specific to Google and Outlook accounts. If your email is from another source, well, I did mention there’s plenty of protection in place already.

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Presuming you have a supported account type, you start by giving Bitdefender full access to that account. Going through the process, you’ll get warnings that Bitdefender can read all your messages and even send messages on your behalf. Note that you must give the same permissions when you allow Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection to check your email archive for possible data exposure.

Once you’ve set up this feature, there’s nothing more to do. As new messages come in, it checks them for dangerous and fraudulent links and adds its warning to any suspect messages. This all happens in the cloud, so it doesn’t matter where you look at the messages.

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I didn’t see results immediately because Bitdefender only analyzes messages that come in after email protection is configured. However, it didn’t take too long before all the visible messages were flagged with their status. Almost all got a green marker saying “Bitdefender: Safe.” Messages sent to the spam folder apparently weren’t checked, as they had no good or bad markings. With some difficulty, I managed to send an as-if dangerous message (one containing the EICAR test string), and indeed Bitdefender marked it in red as dangerous.

Bitdefender does its work at the server level, so you’ll see its markup wherever you log in, but there’s a catch. The colored banners only appear when you connect to your inbox in a browser. If you use the email app on your mobile device, as almost everyone does, you won’t see them.

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I don’t know how many will use this feature. It only works with Gmail and Outlook accounts, requires you to give Bitdefender full access to your email account, and you don’t get its benefits if you use a mail app on your smartphone or tablet. Even without email protection, if you visit a dangerous link the Bitdefender extension in your browser should catch it, and if you try to save or launch a dangerous attachment, the antivirus should spring into action. Email protection is clever but not necessary.

Scam Protection Pro Promotes Security Smarts

Sharp-eyed users may notice a small difference in the main screen of this suite’s Bitdefender Total Protection. Both include a Quick Actions area with five user-configurable panels for common tasks. But in the Premium version, the first panel changes from Quick Scan to Scam Protection Pro (formerly Scam Copilot). What’s that?

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Bitdefender Total Security’s mobile editions already include a feature called Scam Protection. This component watches the links in incoming text messages and flags any suspicious ones. On Android, it also checks messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Discord) for sketchy links. When it finds a dangerous link, it advises you to avoid clicking it, delete the message, and consider blocking the sender.

Scam Protection Pro expands on that simple feature. It detects scams in email, browsers, messages, and apps, and provides an AI chatbot, Scamio Pro, that analyzes messages and answers questions, much like the Norton Genie app.

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If you get a suspicious text or other message on your phone, you can just copy the link to Scamio Pro for analysis. It will also handle screenshots of suspicious communications, and you can even just give it a verbal description of a possible problem. You can also chat with Scamio Pro on your PC. Just don’t try to converse about anything other than security and scams.

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Even when there’s no immediate scam threat, you can ask Scamio Pro for tips on avoiding scams and converse with it to make sure you understand all the tips. AI and chatbots are everywhere these days, and people seem to like interacting with them. If Scam Protection Pro inspires users to learn more about online safety, that’s fine.

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Bitdefender Premium VPN

Bitdefender's many layers of antivirus, web, and network protection keep you, your devices, and your data safe. However, when you connect to the internet, your data in transit could be at risk. To protect your data, you need a VPN (virtual private network). When you connect using a VPN, nobody, not even the owner of the shady Wi-Fi network you've connected to, can access your network traffic, and you'll be harder to track as you move across the web.

Some years ago, Bitdefender’s VPN wasn't available as a standalone offering. That’s changed—you can now purchase Bitdefender Premium VPN just like any other VPN, even if Bitdefender isn’t your mainstay of security protection. Since our last review, Bitdefender has selected a different technology partner to support its VPN network, but the VPN app itself hasn’t changed much.

User Interface Features World Map

Bitdefender’s VPN appears as a full-size window with a world map in the background. Simple buttons let you automatically connect to the optimal location or choose a location from around the world. Your recent location choices get their own buttons for easy return. Panels on the right-hand side offer stats such as connection time, ads blocked, traffic secured, and the VPN-supplied IP address you’re using. The map also moves to put your server’s continent in the middle.

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VPN Server Choices

For many years, Bitdefender licensed VPN technology from Hotspot Shield, but that has changed. Bitdefender’s current VPN partner is IPVanish, which has a strong global server network. (Editors' Note: IPVanish is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com's parent company. For more, see the ethics policy in our Editorial Mission Statement.)

The VPN network boasts servers in 150 cities across 112 countries, including coverage in Africa and South America, continents that many VPNs shortchange. Server locations matter, partly because a bigger collection of places means more options for spoofing your own location, but mainly because a closer server usually yields better speed and lower latency.

Some VPN services let you dig in to select a specific country, city, and server. With Bitdefender, you make your choice at the country level, though you can fine-tune your location by city for some. You can choose from almost two dozen cities within the US, six cities in the UK, and five in Australia. Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Spain also offer a choice of two or three cities.

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Bitdefender’s promotional materials note that the entire server infrastructure is comprised of RAM-Only servers with 10Gbps connections. This goes beyond mere no-logs policies. When the server powers down, there’s no trace of the VPN remaining. A subpoena to seize the servers won’t reveal a single bit of information about the VPN, its behaviors, or its customers.

When your internet traffic appears to come from a VPN server rather than from your own personal IP address, you gain some serious anonymity. You can enable the VPN’s double-hop feature, which routes your traffic through two distinct servers, for an additional layer of obscurity. The app offers a handful of predefined combos, such as Canada/US and South Korea/Japan. Those using the VPN app on a mobile device can cobble up custom pairs. Take care, though. This double forwarding can slow your connection, especially if you choose two countries far apart.

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Double-hop isn’t unique to Bitdefender and IPVanish. NordVPN’s Double VPN feature works in much the same way as Surfshark’s Dynamic MultiHop. Proton VPN can first route traffic through a specially hardened Secure Core server and then through an ordinary server.

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Straightforward VPN Settings

A toggle for the VPN's kill switch feature is right on the main screen. If the VPN connection drops, the kill switch disconnects from the unprotected internet until the VPN reconnects. This feature ensures that you don’t risk transmitting any data outside the VPN’s protection.

This VPN offers an unusually comprehensive collection of auto-connect options. You can have the VPN connect automatically at startup, when you log in to unsecured Wi-Fi, when you use peer-to-peer sharing, or when you connect to specific apps, domains, or website categories. Auto-connect is most powerful under Windows. On other platforms, you don’t get as many options.

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On the Advanced page in VPN settings, you can enable split tunneling. That means you can exempt certain websites from VPN protection, perhaps sites that are very sensitive to connection speed. You can also opt out of VPN protection for specific apps.

The VPN can filter out domains associated with ads and trackers. A pop-up notification clarifies that the anti-tracking browser extension handles that task in the browser. The VPN blocks non-browser traffic from domains on its blocklist.

The unusual App Traffic Optimizer feature lets you nominate up to three apps to receive priority bandwidth. Bitdefender suggests you might use it for tasks such as streaming or gaming. This feature works by manipulating the browser's multiple TCP connections, assigning additional connections to the specified apps. I haven’t seen it anywhere else—not even in Bitdefender’s own VPN on non-Windows platforms.

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In addition to giving you more country locations, the switch from the previous partner Hotspot Shield to IPVanish broadens your VPN protocol choices. You can select IKEv2, OpenVPN, or WireGuard, or accept the default that lets the VPN choose one of the three. WireGuard and OpenVPN are modern options, and as they’re both open-source projects, they’ve been scrutinized by all interested parties. We like to see VPNs using these two protocols.

Using a VPN Can Impact Connection Speed

A major concern with using a VPN is its impact on your internet connection speed, so we do our best to test it. Using the Ookla speed test tool, we calculate the percent change between speed test results with and without the VPN. (Editors' Note: Speedtest by Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com's parent company. For more, see the ethics policy in our Editorial Mission Statement.)

We haven’t tested Bitdefender’s VPN since the change in VPN technology partners, but IPVanish performed very well in its own speed tests.

It’s important to remember, though, that variations in network traffic can affect speed test results. The fastest VPN today may not be the fastest tomorrow, and the fastest VPN in Azerbaijan may not be the fastest VPN in Zimbabwe. We don’t recommend choosing a VPN based solely on speed.