ByteFence Anti-Malware is an anti-malware program developed by Byte Technologies LCC, a relatively young company founded in 2004 and headquartered in the US. It is dedicated to providing anti-malware, antivirus and adware removal tools but is not a fully-functional antivirus program. In this review, we will explore ByteFence’s features and capabilities, analyze its strengths and weaknesses, and determine if it is worth using.
ByteFence Anti-Malware Review – Benefits & Features
In this section, we will take a brief look at some of the key highlights of ByteFence, like its user interface, antivirus capabilities, browser security tools etc.
1. Interface
ByteFence’s well-designed interface is undoubtedly one of its major strengths. It is simple to understand and easy to navigate, without having any overly-complicated settings. And yet, you can still get all the important options that the major PC protection softwares tend to provide, at your fingertips. If you navigate to the Settings tab, the program lets you schedule scans, manage your quarantined files, manage the app’s update status etc.
There is even a Gamer mode that enables you to boost performance as ByteFence runs in the background. On the program’s main screen, you can find five sections/tabs neatly stacked: Home, Scan, Browsers, Settings and Stats. Each of the labels is self-explanatory and will lead you to the desired sub-sections for further actions.
2. Browser Security
ByteFence specializes in dealing with programs such as Adware, Browser Hijackers and other types of common software threats that are usually designed to target the user’s web browser. That is why it is crucial that within the Browsers section, ByteFence provides a very useful evaluation of the components of the web browsers installed on your computer system.
Through this tab, you can see the homepage of your different browsers, their respective search providers and even the extensions that each of them has. Next to these elements, you can also see their security risk level according to ByteFence. This will be helpful as it will enable you to promptly tackle any significant potential threats ― all you would need to do is just check the element that is considered dangerous and then click on the Fix Checked button. ByteFence will then automatically deal with the possible threat and secure your browser from it.
3. Real-Time Protection
ByteFence also equips you with a Real-Time scanning tool in order to detect any threats that might be currently making their way towards your PC. The developers of this program claim that the scans are primarily targeted at Malware and Crapware.
However, they do not mention any kind of protection against Ransomware, which is a less popular but still very significant form of online threat. This is why you cannot rely solely on ByteFence to provide your system with adequate Real-Time protection from all dangers, and should use an additional antivirus program to stop bigger threats like Ransomware.
4. Virus Scanning
As soon as you launch ByteFence after installation, it begins an automatic Quick Scan of your whole PC. This scanning takes approximately 20-30 minutes to finish on the average computer system, and the results dish out a few potential risks. Unfortunately, its malware detection rates seem to be way lower than average. On the other hand, it can come up with some files and executables that it deems suspicious, but which are not actually harmful.
The Quick Scan does use significant amounts of RAM while running (1.5GB on a machine with 4GB RAM), but this isn’t too high when compared with most other products. ByteFence has not yet been tested by any of the leading independent testing labs like AV-TEST or AV-Comparatives, so we cannot yet compare its results.
Customer Support
Byte Technologies, the parent company of ByteFence, provides localized customer service as they have offices and partners all around the world. You can request support by navigating to their homepage and filling out a support form.
ByteFence also has a nice support webpage which includes a huge section of helpful FAQs. Technical support is definitely one of ByteFence’s strongest features. They boast of wait times less than four minutes, and their technicians are always friendly and knowledgeable.
Bytefence Anti-Malware Pricing
ByteFence sports a very competent free version and a very affordable premium upgrade as well. The free software claims to provide all the scanning settings of ByteFence but without the option to remove these detected threats. It does, however, come with a 14-day trial, during which the free app will also let you remove any threats you detect. Going past the 14 day trial period, the user is prompted to buy the full product if they wish to keep using ByteFence.
The paid version, named ByteFence Pro, comes with three kinds of payment plans. For the three years license, it costs $59.95, which comes down to $1.67 per month. For a one year license, the price is $29.95, which is $2.50 per month. And for the cheapest 6 months plan, the total cost is $19.95 that comes down to $3.33 per month.
Pros of ByteFence Anti-Malware
- No bundled installs and no unnecessary browser modifications during setup.
- Clean, organized and easy-to-navigate user interface.
- Light on the system with low resource usage when not scanning.
- Adequate browser protection and monitoring.
- No intrusive ads.
- Offers free scanning.
- Excellent customer support.
- Very affordable paid versions.
Cons of ByteFence Anti-Malware
- Detects many files that are not harmful.
- Can cause slowdown during scanning on older machines without high RAM.
- May not be able to detect all browsers installed on PC and they may not show up on its interface.
- Virus detection rates are lower than average.
- No support from testing by independent labs.
Conclusion – Should you use ByteFence?
ByteFence Anti-Malware can prove to be a very useful tool for anyone looking to add an additional layer of security alongside their default antivirus solutions. It is lightweight and inexpensive but is also limited in its scope. ByteFence can also cause crashes on older systems during scanning, due to high RAM usage, so it is only advisable for users with stronger computer systems.
It provides a very capable set of browser protection tools that can be helpful alongside its scans for Malware and Crapware. Ultimately, ByteFence can be a worthwhile option if you already have a decent antivirus program in place and would like greater security. But it should not be expected to provide complete all-round protection against cyber threats like most leading antivirus programs.