Customer Ratings & Reviews

This is one item you hope to never have to need, but you're glad to have if you do. I ordered the Bitdefender product online. Soon after, got the key code and instructions on downloading it onto my tech. We are an android house, so I started with my Surface Pro, which is Windows. If this went smoothly, I was pretty sure everything else would too. And it did. Install steps through the setup you decide what you want to have covered. Putting it on my phone was somewhat different. It needs access to everything i.e text messages, contacts, emails etc. OK, so of course to protect my phone it does need that freedom but for now, I don't feel comfortable with that just yet as this is my first interaction with this company. I'll more than likely update my permissions a bit later. You'll also have the option to set up a VPN, I haven't gotten that far, but it's a great option to have. I just started seeing the acknowledgements of nothing wrong with my account after a scan. That always a good…yay!

I installed the Bitdefender cybersecurity software from the Bitdefender website using a keycode. The package I installed is for up to 5 devices and consists of 3 parts - Bitdefender Security, SecurePass and Bitdefender VPN. They are installed separately and one can be used without the other. I had no initial problems with the security section. I installed it on 2 computers and a phone. Installation on multiple devices was simple because an email link for the next device was sent to me after each device was set up. The security package includes a full system scan that can be run on demand. The full scan took almost 20 minutes on one PC and 10 on the other, but it can be run in the background. There is also a Quick Scan and a Vulnerability Scan. One of the 3 can be pinned to the dashboard. No issues were found, so I can’t say how good the software is at resolving problems. Scam protection is available to alert the user to suspicious emails, websites, and phone calls. It includes the AI scan assistant named Scamio. With the email feature activated, each email has a green Bitdefender Safe banner at the beginning. The bright green 1.5 inch line next to 100 emails is annoying and the placement pushes the email summary off the screen. I would much rather only get a notification when an email is suspicious or blocked. There is a file shredder to completely remove deleted files and an optimizer to find and remove junk files. The optimizer was very useful. It found and removed almost 2 GB of junk between the 2 PCs. However, be aware that it includes the recycle bin in the junk files, with an option to exclude it. There is a lot more to this software than it appears on the surface. Details can be found in the 282 page user guide. SecurePass is used to handle and share passwords. I didn’t set up that option because I don’t know how long I will be using the Bitdefender package. The component I had the most problems with is the VPN. To install the VPN I was told to disable the Chrome Secure DNS and use the Bitdefender ad blocker and tracker instead. Once I followed the instructions, sponsored videos started showing up on Facebook Marketplace that were blocked before. For my hobby I download pictures and then edit them. Each picture took an additional 5 seconds to download. The wheel would spin for 5 seconds before a picture would open in the photo editor. Everything I typed when creating a listing had a noticeable lag. I couldn’t reach some bookmarked pages, even when I typed in the web address. To see what exactly was causing the issues, I first turned the VPN off and turned the Chrome Secure DNS back on and then turned the VPN on, to include the ad blocker and tracker option. This time the VPN connected without any error message or warning about disabling the Chrome Secure DNS. I did, however, get a pop-up telling me that my browser might interfere with Bitdefender. There was a link to instructions to disable the Secure DNS, where it was worded as a suggestion and not a requirement. It appears that the 2 can run simultaneously. However, all the VPN issues I noted before were still there, so I had to disable the VPN and use my restored Chrome DNS settings. I did get some annoying Bitdefender notifications on Facebook. Every time I opened Facebook I got a pop up about a data breach that happened a long time ago. The pop up took me to a page to sign up for digital identity protection - for $3.33/month with a 12 month contract or $7.99 a month otherwise. Once I looked at that page, the pop ups stopped. I also get a pop up to activate Securepay that doesn't like to go away whenever I go to a credit card website. Phone features include the ability to block spam calls and Anti-Theft if the phone is misplaced. Anti-Theft will play a loud sound to help find the phone, should it be nearby. It will show the location of the device on a map, remotely lock it with a PIN, remotely erase sensitive data, and take a picture of anyone trying to tamper with the phone. Spam block didn’t seem to extend to text messages. My android phone had difficulty reading the QR codes that came up on the computer monitor during set up. I had to get where I needed to go a different way. The oddest thing happened on the 3rd day of testing. I installed Bitdefender on 2 different HP PC models. I use one, and my husband uses the other one. They are synced, so they are very similar. My husband uses Facebook more than I do, and he noticed that some of the group pages would start to load, and then go blank. They worked fine on my computer with identical Chrome DNS and Bitdefender settings. I tried reversing the Chrome settings I had changed, without any luck. I tried turning off the Bitdefender VPN with its ad and tracking package, and the pages still wouldn’t load. The only thing that fixed the problem was totally removing Bitdefender from that PC using the add/remove program function. Now everything works the way it used to. I can’t explain why that is, but it is something to keep in mind if a user has similar issues. I started with the Bitdefender Security package and VPN on 3 devices and am now running the Security package only on one PC and on a phone. The other features either made the computer partially inoperable or slowed things down too much. The Spam detecting seems to be hit and miss. The Antivirus system scans will be useful and I will continue to use them.