Looking for some insight into what everyone is using for antivirus. I have AVG a whirl but I experienced some weird stuttering on my M2 MacBook Air, so obviously I want something that is minimally impactful on performance while still being accurate.
What is a Virus?
A lot of useful replies. Thanks everyone! I’m going to stick with the built in protections and just be a careful browser.
Even on the windows side you are better off with the 1st party defender features these days.
Enterprise use 3rd party AV for central orchestration and control. Theres no reason for this in consumer land.
The threat detection isn’t meaningfully better across any of them (aside from some being “astonishingly bad”) despite what vendors claim.
The best people to know how to protect your OS are the people that made it.
Malwarebytes antimalware tool is all you’ll ever need, but after 30+ years of working with Macs, I’ve never encountered a single piece of Mac malware in the wild. It’s astoundingly rare. Almost any piece of Mac malware you hear about is proof of concept and exists almost entirely in a lab somewhere. Or, if it does get out of the wild, patches are almost immediately released by Apple that close any vulnerability.
Also, avast is garbage. Get rid of it 
I got a few bits of malware when my kids were about 10 and went few a phase of clicking on ‘free game’ links. MalwareBytes always managed to clear up the stuff - classified as annoyances.
The free version is fine.
Frankly, I find that shocking, but not unbelievable if it happened in the mid-aughts when there was a brief spate of web bugs (mostly harmless) and which Apple patched within days with their own malware removal tools at the time.
But, yeah, Malwarebytes is the gold standard, and the free version is all you need.
Been running Malwarebytes on our macs for several years. No detects. Last time I saw a Mac virus was in the days of wdef (late 80s early 90s).
This. Used malwarebytes to clean a user profile that had a bunch of adware installed on it. Was all I ever needed. The whole system was not compromised, just a single user profile that I didn’t want to bother regenerating.
No
Do not install any third-party antivirus software. It’s unnecessary and is itself a massive security risk. You have to literally override the built-in protections in order to allow the antivirus application to scan the other applications and files.
This. And if you really want to install something, I recommend a good adblocker (ads are sometimes a vector for malware distribution)
- Safari: AdGuard (free tier is fine)
- Firefox: uBlock origin
- Chrome: uBlock origin
Ok i’ll answer the question asked first. if i absolutely had to put a consumer endpoint protection on one of my macs. i’d probably do clamxav again. that said.
after 15 yrs in enterprise apple device management, i still reccomend a solid remote backup solution at the consumer level instead. anyone who claims macs cant get viruses is kidding themselves, but honestly we dont bother attempting to clean infected macs. wipe and restore. put your money into protecting your data and for the love of all gods install the updates.
going crazy and jumping into the jamf consumer level ecosystem is an option as well. but way over the top unless you’re really bored with money to burn.
clamxav
ClamAV has a maximum size for files that it will scan, which I believe is 20MB. I can’t tell if clamxav has the same size limit baked in, but it might! So it may not be the best solution if you have large files in your system.
