AVG AntiVirus Free

Description

Jan Gritzbach founded Grisoft in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1991 — two years after the Velvet Revolution broke down communist rule and opened the country to private enterprise. The timing mattered. The newly free market created instant demand for personal computers, and personal computers created instant demand for software to protect them. Gritzbach brought in Tomas Hofer as co-founder and together they created a business that began by selling IT hardware and third-party software but later shifted to the product that would define the company: a lightweight antivirus for MS-DOS called Anti-Virus Guard, or AVG. The name stuck.

Today, AVG AntiVirus Free continues that name as one of the most widely downloaded free antivirus programs on Windows. The product runs on the same detection engine as Avast Free Antivirus — its corporate sibling since Avast picked up AVG Technologies for $1.3 billion in 2016. Independent testing labs AV-Comparatives and AV-TEST give both products the same Top-Rated scores. For users deciding between the two, the practical difference between them is the set of features: Avast has more additional features in its free version, while AVG specializes in malware, ransomware, and web threats without other tools that most free users will never use.

HISTORY

The Brno that Gritzbach began his business in had just come out of forty years of centrally managed economy. Consumer computing equipment had been strictly limited under the old regime, and the availability of personal computers suddenly opened up a real gap in the market. Grisoft first filled that gap by distributing hardware and software from other developers while writing its own antivirus on the side.

AVG 1.0 was released in 1992 against MS-DOS systems and the boot-sector viruses that were spread via floppy disks. The software ran through a local signature database and manual scans. Grisoft introduced Windows compatibility as that operating system displaced MS-DOS through the mid-1990s and added heuristic analysis — checking code behavior against known threat patterns rather than relying solely on exact signature matches.

By 1997, Grisoft was selling its first AVG licenses outside of the United States, beginning with Germany and the United Kingdom, followed by the American market in 1998. A Wall Street Journal article that year commented on the company’s ambition to break into the US market and asked if Symantec and McAfee would even notice. Growth remained modest: by 1998, Grisoft employed 13 people.

In 2001, Gritzbach sold Grisoft to venture capital firm Benson Oak Capital. The company also launched a free consumer version around the same time – initially restricted by language and geography, then more broadly. Benson Oak sold a 65 percent stake to Intel Capital and Enterprise Investors in 2005 for $52 million. The capital has funded acquisitions: spyware specialist Ewido Networks in 2006, then browser security company Exploit Prevention Labs in December 2007. Exploit Prevention Labs’ LinkScanner technology — which checked Web links for malicious content before the browser loaded the page — went straight into AVG 8.0, which was released March 2008. That same year, Grisoft changed its name to AVG Technologies N.V. and relocated its corporate headquarters to Amsterdam, while maintaining the Czech development operations.

By 2008, AVG’s active user base had reached 83 million and revenue hit $113.8 million. The company bought behavioral detection developer Sana Security in January 2009 and mobile security startup DroidSecurity in 2010, expanding its reach to Android.

AVG was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in February 2012. Former Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs became the company’s new CEO the same year and released a plain language one-page privacy policy that explicitly stated that AVG collected anonymized search and browsing history data from free users and sold it to advertisers. The transparency was not a coincidence: Kovacs said free software had to be transparent about its revenue model. Coverage was divided between those who liked the candor and those who disliked the practice underlying it regardless.

In September 2015, AVG amended its privacy policy to explicitly allow the collection and monetization of search queries and browsing history from free users. Security researchers pointed out the tension: software that was sold as keeping users private was also making a profit from user behavior data. AVG’s position was that the data was anonymized before being sold; critics argued that anonymization in granular enough datasets can fail under de-identification attacks.

Avast announced its acquisition of AVG in July 2016, for $1.3 billion in cash. At the time, AVG had about 200 million active users and annual revenues of about $155 million. Combined with Avast’s 230 million users, the combined entity had control of about 20 percent of the consumer antivirus market. Both brands continued to operate under separate names with an underlying unified engine.

AVG’s browser extensions came under scrutiny in late 2019 along with Avast’s, when Mozilla, Chrome and Opera removed them from their extension stores after researchers found the extensions collected more user data than their stated purposes required. The stores reinstated the extensions following changes by Avast and AVG to limit data collection. The wider Avast Jumpshot data-selling operation — which also affected AVG users, as AVG’s free product contributed data to Jumpshot’s commercial data feeds — came to an end in January 2020 when Avast shut Jumpshot down after publication of leaked internal documents. The Federal Trade Commission settled its investigation in February 2024, fining Avast $16.5 million and ordering deletion of all browsing data Jumpshot had accumulated. The order from the FTC applied to both the Avast and AVG product lines.

Avast and NortonLifeLock merged in September 2022 to form Gen Digital. Both Avast and AVG are brands of Gen Digital’s portfolio.

FEATURES

AVG AntiVirus Free runs the Avast detection engine — as confirmed by AV-Comparatives, which notes in its test documentation that AVG and Norton both use the Avast engine. The practical consequence is that the malware detection rates are the same for both products. AV-TEST gave AVG a perfect 6.0/6.0 in protection, performance, and usability for January-February 2025 evaluations. AV-Comparatives gave AVG a Top Rated Product for 2024 and 2025.

Real-time protection in the free tier passes through three components, which are similar to Avast’s Core Shields. File Shield scans files when the operating system accesses them — before a potentially malicious program runs. Web Shield monitors traffic from the browser and blocks the connection to known malicious URLs, phishing sites and drive-by download attempts. Email Shield scans email attachments in email clients for malicious content before the user opens them. Together these three shields offer continuous background scanning without the need of manual intervention.

Behavior Shield provides an extra layer above signature-based detection: it tracks running processes for behavioral patterns related to malware, such as file encryption sequences common in ransomware, privilege escalation attempts, and communication with known command and control servers. AVG can block a process based on behavior alone even if the particular file has no existing entry in the threat database, which addresses the detection window that exists between when a new threat appears in the wild and when a signature update reaches user machines.

A Ransomware Shield is used to protect specified folders from modification by untrusted applications. Users specify which folders are to be protected and any application not on the trusted list must be explicitly given permission to write, delete, or encrypt files in these directories. Smart Scan combines malware detection, software vulnerability checks and performance issue identification in a single automated pass. Users who wish to scan a particular file or folder can perform targeted scans instead of waiting for a full system pass.

The free tier does not have a firewall beyond the Windows system firewall, no webcam protection, and no enhanced network monitoring. Those features are available in AVG Internet Security. AVG Ultimate adds a VPN and AVG TuneUp, which manages the startup management, junk file removal and performance optimization.

A notable absence compared to Avast Free: AVG AntiVirus Free doesn’t include Network Inspector (Wi-Fi network scanner included with Avast’s free tier) or the Avast Assistant AI scam detection tool. Users who want those specific additions will find them in Avast and not AVG. The two products are used to serve the same security fundamentals from the same engine; the difference is in the tools that surround them.