Design: Attractive, Intuitive, but Alarmist
Scanguard’s client is quite an attractive one, with blues, grays, and whites used to great effect and intuitive menus that are well-labeled and, in some cases, color-coded to help the user to understand the importance of certain information. However, there is a lot of unneeded information, too. This includes graphs and bar charts that look impressive at a glance, but are overblown and unnecessary. It also goes out of its way right from the beginning to make it clear there are problems with your system. This appears to be a core component of the way Scanguard operates.
Type of Protection: Where’s the Antivirus?
Scanguard is supposed to be an antivirus tool, with the creators claiming it can block worms, Trojans, viruses, adware, and ransomware. However, in practice, it didn’t appear to pick up any legitimate threats at all. In our first major scan on a brand new Windows 10 install, it discovered dozens of “threats,” most of which were said to be Trojans. On closer inspection, however, all of these files were legitimate Windows applications or services. One was related to how Windows handles dial-up Internet connections. We confirmed that these files weren’t a threat with multiple other anti-malware tools, which did not discover any problems with the system. To make matters worse, when we deliberately downloaded viruses to test the effectiveness of Scanguard, and it didn’t detect any of them. In fact, it didn’t find them when using real-time protection or with a remedial scan afterward. Windows Defender noticed them, though, as did our other anti-malware suites. We actually had to disable those just to test Scanguard antivirus, and it still failed to notice the nefarious software.
Scan Locations: Everything You Give it Access To
We only placed a single drive in our test system and Scanguard appeared to dig through everything on it in its search of (allegedly) infected files and applications. Introducing additional drives would give it more to scan and you can customize what you give it access to in the settings menu.
Types of Malware: Everything and Nothing
Although Scanguard claims to detect every type of malware and offers comprehensive protection against all manner of threats, we didn’t discover a single legitimate threat that it could detect. While that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some viruses it could detect and block, as far as we’ve seen, it doesn’t protect against anything and goes out of its way to point the finger at otherwise legitimate files.
Ease of Use: Simple Enough
Scanguard antivirus starts a scan the moment you open it for the first time, giving you no chance to customize what it’s looking for or how it’s doing it. But it’s only a quick scan, so if you were pleased to see a scan taking place immediately, you might think that your system is protected when you resolve any issues the scan finds. But it barely scans anything on that initial run. To conduct a proper, full scan, you have to trigger it manually. When it finishes, you’ll be given the option to resolve threats by quarantining or deleting them. It’s all relatively straightforward and well labeled, but we wouldn’t recommend following through on any of its suggestions.
Update Frequency: Daily
Scanguard claims to perform regular updates to its virus definitions—even though it failed to detect a virus from 2003.
Performance: Slow Scans, Deliberate Phone Detections
Scanguard real-time protection is turned off by default for some reason, but even with it enabled, Scanguard failed to notice any of the threats we put in front of it, despite Windows Defender picking them up immediately. When it came to scanning for threats, Scanguard was all too willing to recommend quarantining legitimate Windows files that it erroneously claimed had been infected with a Trojan. After confirming that these files were not infected, there were only two options for why this might have happened: Not only that, but the whole scanning process takes an inordinately long time compared to other anti-malware applications. This is a damning indictment of Scanguard and suggests it isn’t remotely adequate to perform its core task: protecting the users who paid for it.
Additional Tools: Comprehensive, But Dubious
Scanguard offers a number of additional functions beyond antivirus detection. It has System Tune-Up Optimization Tools, which claim to find problematic software and files which might slow your system down. For us, this boiled down to removing cookies from our browser, which Scanguard did without informing us that this would cause a need to log back into websites, or potentially lose form data or other on-site information. It also offers disc cleaning and web-security protections. The former will clean out junk files but found none on our new Windows install, which isn’t particularly surprising. The web security function didn’t prevent us from actively downloading viruses, even though Windows Defender attempted to do so (we blocked its protections for the purpose of this review). At best, these tools are basic and ineffective, but at worst, like the antivirus, they may maliciously look for problems in order to appear more useful than they are. We were skeptical of it finding more than 300 cookies in Chrome immediately after installing it, for example.
Type of Support: Varied, But Inaccessible
Scanguard’s official website appeared completely inaccessible for days surrounding our review, as well.
Price: Reasonable, But at What Cost?
At $25 for the year, the Essential Anti-Virus protection package is reasonably priced compared to the competition. Considering the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of Scanguard, though, there is almost no bang for your buck here, no matter the price.
Competition: Scanguard vs. Malwarebytes
Malwarebytes has been our gold standard for antivirus protection, so how does Scanguard measure up against it? The difference is night and day. Where Malwarebytes offers a fast, transparent, effective, and comprehensive anti-malware solution, Scanguard appears to go out of its way to scare its users and give them misinformation, failing to protect them when it matters. Do yourself a favor—go with Malwarebytes. The fact that we had to disable our antivirus software on the test machine just to access the Scanguard website and again to install it should tell you everything you need to know; other antivirus applications do not trust Scanguard. Not only is it ineffective as an antivirus application and a failure at blocking viruses that are nearly two decades old, but it claimed that legitimate files had been infected when they hadn’t been. That could lead to a system that functions poorly, while remaining unprotected. We’re giving this one a hard pass.
