Meet Maggie, PCMag'sMore than half of the security suites I track have the word “Security” right in their names, but it’s clearly not required. Panda’s Dome product line simply suggests security, like a protective dome over your computers. Panda Dome Advanced gives you antivirus, firewall, VPN, and more. It fits the suite category more closely than the lower-tier Panda Dome Essential, which adds parental controls and enhanced ransomware protection. However, it scored poorly in tests for protection against malware and phishing, and it doesn’t add all that much to what you get from Panda Dome Essential. In the realm of entry-level security suites, our Editors’ Choice winner is Bitdefender Total Security, with excellent scores from the antivirus labs and a wealth of effective security features.
This suite is the entry-level security suite in Panda's somewhat unusual lineup. Its starting price of $59.99 per year for a single license is right in the middle, with roughly as many higher prices as lower. ZoneAlarm Extreme Security NextGen costs about the same, while ESET Home Security Essential, F-Secure Internet Security, and G Data Internet Security run $10 less for their entry-level equivalents.
You pay $79.99 per year for a three-license Panda Dome Advanced subscription, roughly the same as F-Secure Total and Trend Micro Internet Security. Here, too, there are about as many competitors with higher prices as there are with lower ones.
More security suites offer a five-license pack than a three-license or single license. Panda’s $89.99 price at this tier looks good. Bitdefender runs $20 more at this tier, as does McAfee Total Protection. Many competitors cost more, some quite a bit more. At the 10-license tier, Panda’s $124.99 price is once more in the middle.
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There’s one more licensing level for Panda: the unlimited subscription. For $135.99 per year, you can install Panda on as many devices as you want, running Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS. The similar subscription for McAfee+, which adds ChromeOS to the mix, costs a bit more: $149.99 per year. Norton 360 With LifeLock has an unlimited tier that also gets you maximal identity theft protection and 500MB of online storage for your backups, but that will cost you $349.99 per year.
When you install Panda Dome Advanced, you’ll create or log into your online Panda account. If you’ve already activated your subscription, you can just log into the account and download the appropriate installer for your device running Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS. This review focuses on the Windows edition, as the other platforms don’t gain any new features beyond what you get in Panda Dome Essential.
Panda’s security programs stand out visually from their competition. Instead of the usual white or gray background marked off by buttons and panels, all Panda programs use an inspiring nature scene as a background. You can choose one of eight backgrounds or set it to change automatically from time to time. Combined with the minimalist icons that represent security features, it’s a pretty and relaxing look.
When you open the program, you see five icons arrayed along the bottom of the screen. Scrolling down reveals another dozen, for a total of 17. If the simple images don't immediately bring an icon's function to mind, just point at it to see its label. A handy button at the bottom right puts all the labels in view at once.
The 15 icons in Panda Dome Essential lined up nicely in three rows of five. Panda Dome Advanced sacrifices a little symmetry to make room for Anti-Ransomware and Parental Control.
Panda Dome Advanced includes all the same features as Panda Dome Essential, naturally. I'll keep my summary here to a minimum; for more details, please read the earlier review.
Lab Tests: Scores From Perfect to Pitiful
I follow five testing labs around the world, closely tracking their reports on the effectiveness of antivirus utilities. Panda appears in the latest results from two such labs, which is good. About a quarter of the antiviruses I track have no lab scores, and another fifth of them appear in just one report.
In the latest report from SE Labs, Panda earns AAA certification, a feat accomplished by all the programs tested. With AV-Comparatives, Panda doesn’t do nearly as well. Out of the three tests I follow from this lab, it utterly failed two. I’ve devised an algorithm that maps all the lab results onto a 10-point scale and derives an aggregate lab score. Panda’s score is 6.3 out of 10, which is among the lowest. Norton 360 Deluxe is the lab champ, with perfect scores from all five labs. Avast One Premium, tested by five labs, comes close with a 9.8-point aggregate score. ESET also rated 9.8 points, based on tests by four labs.
Malware Protection: Test Scores Both Perfect and Otherwise
In my hands-on malware protection test, Panda detected 84% of the samples and scored 8.3 points, a poor showing. Sophos Home Premium and Malwarebytes Premium both detected 99% of the same set of samples and scored 9.9 and 9.8, respectively.
Panda also missed two-thirds of my hand-modified malware samples, including almost half of the ransomware items. When I launched those tweaked ransomware samples, all but one ran to completion without Panda’s free antivirus blinking an eye, encrypting from dozens to thousands of files.
I also test each antivirus by launching a hundred URLs discovered to be hosting malware, giving equal credit if the antivirus blocks access to the dangerous page or eliminates the malware download. Safe Browsing, the Panda component that aims to fend off dangerous and fraudulent websites, isn't part of Panda Free Antivirus, so I was pleasantly surprised when the free edition scored 100% in this test by solely recognizing and deleting malware payloads. When I repeated this test in Panda Dome Essential, the total score was still 100%, but Safe Browsing handled 10% of the dangerous URLs. Avira Prime also managed 100% in its latest test, while Emsisoft, Norton, Sophos, and UltraAV all reached 99%.
Detecting Phishing Frauds: Improved, But Still Not Good
Safe Browsing also aims to steer users away from phishing websites—fraudulent pages that attempt to steal login credentials by masquerading as legitimate sites. Over the last few years, Panda’s phishing protection scores have been bouncing like a yo-yo with a long string. It detected just 87% of the real-world phishing pages in my latest test, but its three previous scores were 45%, 71%, and 46%. It did manage to beat the phishing protection built into Chrome, Edge, and Firefox this time.
Lest you imagine this test is super-difficult, let me point out that 10 competitors scored 100% in their latest phishing protection tests. Among these winners were AVG Internet Security, Guardio, Surfshark One, and Webroot Premium.
Free Goodies: This Suite Owns All the Free Bonuses
The free antivirus includes a few other security-related bonus features. USB Vaccination makes your USB drives invulnerable to autoplay malware infestation. The Dark Web Scanner scours the internet for any evidence that your email addresses have been compromised. For paying customers, this scanner goes on to monitor any new exposures.
All programs in the current Panda line come with a VPN component that works on Windows, macOS, and Android. However, for all except the top-tier suite, the VPN comes with some serious limits. Specifically, users can't choose a VPN server location, and VPN usage is limited to 150MB per day.
Paid Enhancements: Paying for Panda Gets You More
Panda Dome Essential adds quite a few security features beyond what you get for free. It comes with a simple firewall that proved mostly resistant to direct attack (though not entirely). The Application Control allowlist system works much like PC Matic Home—once you enable it, no new programs, good or bad, can launch without your permission. Wi-Fi Protection goes beyond merely reporting that you've connected to a poorly secured hotspot and can identify other security flaws in the connection. It also lists all devices connected to your Wi-Fi network, with an option to ban any of them from communicating with your PC. A virtual keyboard helps foil attempts by keyloggers, whether hardware- or software-based, to capture your passwords.
Not every consumer has children, and not every parent feels the need to monitor or control their children’s online activities. In fact, we at PCMag no longer recommend that parents install third-party parental control and monitoring systems, instead suggesting that you rely on free offerings from Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
Not everyone will agree with this advice, of course. For those who do want a degree of control, getting it as part of a security suite is convenient. Parental control is one of the features you get by upgrading from Panda Dome Essential to Advanced.
To get started, simply turn on Parental Control for each child’s Windows user account. Doing so initiates monitoring of the websites visited by that account and the categories those websites match. If you want to limit access using content filtering, click the settings gear. You can now choose to allow or block any of about 120 website categories for each user.
That's a lot of categories to think about, so Panda offers predefined filters: Kids, Teen, and Employee. You can also select No Filtering, which means Panda simply monitors the account, or choose Custom to make your own choices. Note that filtering happens below the browser level. I confirmed this by testing with a totally off-brand browser that I wrote myself.
If you do make your own custom collection of categories, be sure to leave the Information Technology – Proxy Avoidance category blocked. If you don’t, a web-savvy kid could completely evade parental control using a secure anonymizing proxy. You can also set it to block uncategorized sites, add specific domains to a blocklist or allowlist, or allow all sites.
I chose the Teen filter, logged into the corresponding account, and put the content filter through its paces. It successfully blocked every raunchy site I tried to visit. But it did even more, blocking access to shopping sites such as Victoria's Secret (flagged for Adult Material – Lingerie and Swimsuit), Amazon (flagged for Shopping), and various Google tracking pages (flagged for Productivity – Advertisements). In most cases, it replaced the inappropriate page with a warning, much like Safe Browsing warns about phishing pages.
When Panda blocks secure HTTPS porn pages, it uses a pop-up notification, leaving the browser to display an error message. In either case, it clearly indicates the reason the page was blocked.
Back in the main Panda app, you can see a summary of activity for each user, including most visited websites, most visited categories, denied websites, and denied categories. Digging in, you can see all the pages and categories that were allowed and denied.
That's it for parental control. It doesn’t include time scheduling, cross-platform coverage, social media tracking, or any other parental monitoring features. Panda’s parental control is strictly a content filter.
Different security companies take different approaches to ransomware protection. Some add a layer of behavior-based detection aimed specifically at the encryption activities used by ransomware. Others, Panda among them, prevent ransomware damage by controlling access to sensitive files. Panda can also deploy what it calls decoy files to help detect ransomware attacks and will optionally make shadow copies of important files to aid in recovery if ransomware breaks through. Both decoy files and shadow copies are disabled by default; if you want them, you must flip their switches.
Data Shield is enabled out of the box, but you should still click the Settings gear to check its coverage. By default, it only protects the contents of the Documents folder for each user. You’ll surely want to protect your Desktop, Music, and Pictures folders at a minimum. Review the file types to make sure they include everything that you care about. For example, text files aren't protected by default, nor are RTF (rich text format) files. In testing, I found that I had to log in to each user account individually to expand its protection.
Using a hand-coded text editor that’s guaranteed not to be on any allowlist, I verified that Panda detects even read-only access to protected files. When I responded to its query by clicking Deny, my text editor couldn’t load the file I selected. Panda also prevented my simple-minded ransomware simulator from making any changes.
In an earlier test with hand-modified ransomware, Panda Dome Essential stopped only one of the samples. The rest rampaged across the system, encrypting anywhere from dozens to thousands of files. To show the more powerful ransomware protection in Panda Dome Advanced, I carefully prepped a test system. I turned on the Decoy Files and Shadow Copies features and turned off regular antivirus protection. I also disabled the anti-exploit component and behavior-based detection. After detaching the test virtual machine from the internet, I launched a collection of original, unmodified ransomware samples.
Two of these samples are the type that act on the whole disk, totally locking up the computer. Those two slipped past Panda’s anti-ransomware system. That makes sense, as the system is designed to protect against the more common file-encrypting ransomware.
Out of a dozen file-encrypting ransomware samples, five took no action and hence weren’t detected. Some deep antivirus elements identified two as suspicious and quarantined them. Panda caught two after they had managed to encrypt a few dozen files, most of them Panda’s own decoy files. It handled another two before they could encrypt a single file, though one did post its ransom note.
If you’re tracking the numbers, you know that’s only 11. The 12th sample completely bamboozled Panda’s Data Shield. It proceeded to encrypt many hundreds of files on the test system.
With the regular real-time antivirus turned off, Panda still fended off all but one of my encrypting ransomware attacks. That’s pretty good, but Sophos and Bitdefender defended against every file-encrypting sample. Bitdefender caught most before they could encrypt any files. One sample managed to turn two files into gibberish, but Bitdefender’s Ransomware Remediation system restored them.
Keep in mind that Data Shield only protects what you tell it to. Do a thorough review of the settings and make sure all your important folders and file types are covered.
You can use your Panda Dome licenses to install Panda protection on Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS devices. With Panda Dome Essential for Mac, you get antivirus and a limited VPN, but little else.
On Android, Panda includes the expected antivirus and anti-theft features. You can lock specific apps behind a passcode, which is handy if you're prone to handing your phone to a fussy child. A privacy audit reports apps that have dangerous permissions. And you can use it as a call blocker. As for the iOS app, it offers a limited VPN and limited anti-theft features.
And here's something else to think about. Upgrading from Panda Dome Essential to Panda Dome Advanced doesn't get you any upgrades on macOS or Android. You just pay 20% to 30% more per license for the same protection.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Panda)
Panda Dome Advanced
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
In addition to the feature set of Panda Dome Essential, Panda Dome Advanced adds ransomware protection and limited parental controls. On non-Windows platforms, it adds nothing at all, just a higher per-license price. The addition of Safe Browsing didn’t improve Panda’s malware-hosting URL protection rate because it was already at 100%. But it did perform better in my phishing detection test than in previous reviews. With Bitdefender Total Security, by contrast, you get an even greater feature set anchored by antivirus protection that earns excellent scores from four independent labs. As our Editors’ Choice for entry-level security suites, Bitdefender is a better choice.
About Our Expert
When the IBM PC was new, I served as the president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years. That’s how I met PCMag’s editorial team, who brought me on board in 1986. In the years since that fateful meeting, I’ve become PCMag’s expert on security, privacy, and identity protection, putting antivirus tools, security suites, and all kinds of security software through their paces.
Before my current security gig, I supplied PCMag readers with tips and solutions on using popular applications, operating systems, and programming languages in my "User to User" and "Ask Neil" columns, which began in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. Along the way, I wrote more than 40 utility articles, as well as Delphi Programming for Dummies and six other books covering DOS, Windows, and programming. I also reviewed thousands of products of all kinds, ranging from early Sierra Online adventure games to AOL’s precursor Q-Link.
In the early 2000s, I turned my focus to security and the growing antivirus industry. After years of working with antivirus, I’m known throughout the security industry as an expert on evaluating antivirus tools. I serve as an advisory board member for the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), an international nonprofit group dedicated to coordinating and improving testing of anti-malware solutions.
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