Norton 360

Description

Norton 360 — The Antivirus Your Dad has had Since Windows 95 and Doesn’t Want to Switch From

My father has been paying for Norton since I didn’t even know what a virus was. He began somewhere around 1998 and every year without fail he renews, installs the latest version and tells me his computer is “fully protected.” I once asked him if he had ever compared it to anything else. He looked at me as if I had suggested that he cheat on his wife. That type of blind loyalty is either a testimony to how good Norton is or a case study in brand lock-in. After using Norton 360 myself for the past two years, I believe the answer is uncomfortably both.

Norton 360 is Gen Digital’s flagship security suite, which is the maker of Avast, AVG, Avira, and LifeLock. The brand has been around since 1991, making it one of the oldest brands in the consumer antivirus space. The “360” in the name is intended to indicate all-around protection and to be fair, they deliver on that promise more than most competitors.

Even the cheapest Norton 360 Standard plan comes with real-time malware protection, a firewall, anti-phishing, password manager, 2 GB of cloud backup, a VPN with unlimited data, and what they call a Virus Protection Promise — basically, a money-back guarantee if Norton cannot get rid of a threat on your system. The Deluxe plan upgrades you to 5 devices and comes with parental controls and dark web monitoring. The Premium covers 10 devices and has more cloud storage.

The malware engine is where Norton really gets its rep. Independent labs consistently rank it at or near the top of the pack. AV-Comparatives gave it a 99.98% protection rate in their September 2025 test with only 8 false positives — that is borderline perfect. AV-Test gave it a score of 6 out of 6 for protection, performance, and usability.

In my own experience, the real-time scanner picked up everything suspicious that I came across over the course of two years of using it daily on three machines. I once accidentally downloaded a cracked font pack off a sketchy design forum – Norton flagged and quarantined two embedded trojans before the download even finished. That kind of speed is not something that I take for granted after years of watching other antivirus tools react five seconds too late.

The VPN is superior to what most antivirus companies package. Unlimited data on all plans, WireGuard protocol, 256-bit encryption, no-logs policy and servers in 29 countries. It is not going to replace a dedicated VPN like ExpressVPN or Mullvad if you need serious privacy or streaming access but for securing your connection on public Wi-Fi at a coffee shop, it does the job. I used it for about six months at airport lounges and hotel networks and did not have an issue. Speed dropped maybe 15 to 20 percent on nearby servers, which is acceptable for a bundled feature.

The password manager is fine. It saves credentials, auto-fills login forms, generates strong passwords. It is reliable in syncing across devices. It is not as full featured as Bitwarden or 1Password — no secure notes, no shared vaults, no passkey support last time I checked — but for someone who was previously using the same password for everything, which describes most people I know, it is a meaningful upgrade that comes free with the subscription.

Now here is where Norton begins to earn the complaints that are flooding its Trustpilot page. The pop-ups. I cannot over emphasize how aggressive Norton is about upselling. You pay for a security suite, install it, and within the first week you are getting notifications pushing you to upgrade your plan, buy more cloud storage, try LifeLock identity theft protection, enable features you did not know existed, and sign up for things you did not ask about.

A user on ConsumerAffairs put it perfectly — $119 plan easily turns into $350 with add-ons that arguably should have been included in the first place. I spent the first two days after installation going through settings to silence every non-critical notification and even then, a promotional pop-up would sneak through every few weeks. For software whose whole purpose is to make you feel safe and unbothered, the constant nagging does the exact opposite.

Auto-renewal is the other landmine. Norton defaults to automatic renewal and the renewal price is a whopping increase from the introductory price. I paid approximately $40 for my first year of Norton 360 Deluxe. The renewal was going to cost me $120. That is a three times increase that Norton buries in fine print. Worse, some users have reported that turning off auto-renew voids the Virus Protection Promise – meaning your money-back guarantee disappears if you refuse to let them charge your card automatically next year. I confirmed this in the terms and it is technically true and it’s something that a company should be embarrassed about rather than enforce.

There is inconsistent customer support. I had one contact with them via live chat about a false positive that was blocking a legitimate development tool, and the agent was able to resolve it in about ten minutes. Solid experience. But the ConsumerAffairs and Trustpilot reviews are full of people who waited weeks for call backs, were disconnected in the middle of conversations, or dealt with representatives who could not solve basic account issues. One user wrote about spending more than a month trying to regain access to their account after changing phone numbers. Another was double charged for two Deluxe subscriptions and got hung up when they asked for a refund. My one positive interaction does not negate the volume of negative ones.

The March 2025 update to the interface also rubbed a lot of long-time users the wrong way. Norton redesigned the dashboard and in the process introduced a wave of unnecessary prompts – the app repeatedly asking if your home network is trusted even after you’ve confirmed it was, flagging routine system processes as suspicious, and generally creating noise where there was none before. The Norton Community forum thread relating to that update reads like a support group for people who just want their antivirus to be quiet.

Performance-wise, Norton is lean. System impact during scans is minimal on modern hardware and I never noticed slowdowns during normal use or gaming. The game booster feature, which suppresses notifications and optimizes resource allocation when a full screen game is detected, actually works well — Norton consistently ranks as one of the best antivirus options for gamers, which is not something I expected from software my dad uses.

Should you buy it? If you want the best malware engine available coupled with a VPN, password manager, cloud backup, and dark web monitoring in one subscription, Norton 360 Deluxe at its introductory price is really hard to beat. Just purchase it through Amazon or a retail sale instead of purchasing it directly from Norton, immediately disable auto-renewal, and set a calendar reminder to manually purchase it at the discounted rate next year.

That workaround should not be necessary on a product this expensive, but it is the reality of how Norton’s pricing works. The protection is excellent. The business practices around it are not. And that gap between the quality of the product and the quality of the experience is what keeps Norton from being an easy recommendation despite being, technically, one of the best antivirus suites you can buy.