Avira

Avira

Avira is another tool that ranked among the top of AV Comparatives' list of great antivirus tools as well as AV-Test's rankings, and offers a suite of features beyond traditional on-access and on-demand scanning, completely for free. It also offers anti-malware protection, anti-spyware protection, and browser protection. It's not brimming with features, but the important ones are there, and they perform well. Avira also prides itself on its cloud-based scanning, meaning instead of waiting for updates to the application, the program can upload suspicious files to Avira for scanning against more recent threats.

Avira earned some solid praise in the nominations thread, with a few people noting they've used it for ages (back when it was called Avira AntiVir) without issue, and the general note being that if you want something a bit more complicated than BitDefender but don't care for Avast! for some reason, this is a great bet. Like many others on the list, it's also cross-platform, and if you upgrade to the paid version, you get even more features. Read more in its nomination thread here.