Which of these security titans has the edge in 2021?

Norton 360 offers powerful protection, but its UI lacks cohesiveness.

© NORTON

ONCE UPON A TIME, this head-to-head would have been billed a clash of the titans. Nowadays, however, both McAfee and Norton find themselves squeezed by an increasingly crowded market. Nevertheless, both continue to hold their own, so for this match-up we’ve paired their premium products—McAfee Total Protection and Norton 360 Deluxe— against each other. We’ll see how their core protection matches up, plus which one delivers the best range of features.

Let’s begin where it matters most, with a close look at each product’s ability to detect, block, and remove malware in all its forms. As always, you’ll find most of what you need with the independent lab reports. Here, the omens are good for both products, with both sweeping the board with top marks from AV-TEST labs. Both also secured the highest triple-A rating from SE Labs, although McAfee came out top here on account of its perfect rating in the false-positive tests (100 percent to Norton’s 96 percent). Both products achieved an “approved” certification from AV-Comparatives, but it’s here you realize that while both perform superbly, they’re no longer best in class (that accolade goes to either Kaspersky or Bitdefender). Only Norton passed the notoriously tricky MRG-Effitas tests with flying colors (McAfee didn’t submit itself for evaluation). It translates into both products catching virtually everything the labs threw at them, including zero-day malware attacks.