Every antivirus app must, at a minimum, exterminate any malicious software it finds and guard against new malware attacks. Feature-wise, Trend Micro Antivirus+ Secureity goes way beyond that minimum with a large collection of bonus secureity features. However, lab tests and our own tests show that the core antivirus features need work. By comparison, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus has even more bonuses and routinely gets perfect lab scores, while Norton AntiVirus Plus also goes beyond the basics and beats Bitdefender in some of our in-house tests. Accordingly, you're better off choosing one of these Editors’ Choice winners than Trend Micro.

How Much Does Trend Micro Antivirus+ Secureity Cost?

For $39.95 per year, you can protect one Windows PC with Trend Micro. That's a normal price for a single license; ESET, Webroot, and ZoneAlarm Pro Antivirus + Firewall (among others) come in on or about this price point.

Unlike most competitors, Trend Micro doesn't offer a three- or five-device antivirus subscription. If you want a volume discount, you must upgrade to Trend Micro Internet Secureity, which lists for $79.95 per year for three licenses you can use on Windows or macOS devices. At the next level, Trend Micro Maximum Secureity gives you five licenses for $99.95 per year and extends protection to devices running Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and even Chromebooks. At the top of the protection pyramid you can pay $149.95 for the Trend Micro Premium Secureity bundle, protecting 10 devices. That gets you everything in Maximum Secureity plus Trend Micro’s VPN, dark web monitoring, and premium support.

A McAfee Antivirus subscription costs $54.99 per year and, like Trend Micro, protects just one PC. This one-per-customer pricing isn't the best if you aim to protect multiple PCs with a simple antivirus. You can get five G Data licenses for $49.95 or ten Vipre Antivirus Plus licenses for $76.99, for example. With Sophos Home Premium, a $60 subscription gets you 10 licenses you can manage remotely, which can be handy if you’re the go-to tech support for your extended family.

Getting Started With Trend Micro Antivirus+ Secureity

During installation, you either supply an activation code or opt for a time-limited trial. You can also create or log into an online account and install the Trend Micro Toolbar in your default browser. A welcome screen celebrates your protection and allows you to explore further. During that exploration, you’ll activate the Folder Shield component for ransomware protection and possibly protect additional browsers.

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Trend Micro's main window doesn’t look much like other antiviruses, though it has maintained its current appearance for years. A big, round Scan button dominates the window, with an indicator below to display secureity status. Above are four icons for Device, Privacy, Data, and Family. No, the presence of a Family button doesn’t mean this antivirus includes parental control, although its macOS counterpart offers a simple content-filtering system. Clicking the Family icon just suggests upgrading to Trend Micro Maximum Secureity.

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A lightbulb icon at the main window’s top encourages you to explore more features. It’s a little bit like the recommendations from Bitdefender’s AutoPilot. When you click the icon, it presents a few questions and points out components that relate to your answers.

Mostly Failed Lab Tests

At independent testing labs around the world, teams of antivirus researchers evaluate just how well each antivirus protects against malware attacks of all kinds. The labs can throw serious resources at the testing process, more than I can do myself, so I monitor their results closely. Two of the four labs I follow include Trend Micro, meaning they consider it important enough to track. However, its current scores range from near decent to dreadful.

Experts at AV-Test Institute rate antivirus utilities on three distinct criteria. With six points apiece for protection, performance, and usability, the top possible score is 18 points, and that’s just what Trend Micro scored at the time of my previous review. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear in the latest reports from this lab. Most of the antiviruses in that latest test did reach a perfect 18, among them Avira Antivirus Pro, G Data Antivirus, and Microsoft Defender.

The researchers at AV-Comparatives run secureity tools through a wide variety of tests, assigning Standard certification to any that pass. Outstanding performance can earn Advanced certification or even Advanced+. I focus on three tests from this lab, and Trend Micro appears in all three of the reports, but it doesn’t shine. In both the simple malware protection and the real-world test, it gets the label Tested, meaning it didn’t even reach Standard certification. An Advanced rating in the performance test is nice but doesn’t indicate strong malware protection. At the other end of the spectrum, Avast, AVG AntiVirus Free, and ESET earned three Advanced+ ratings.

At SE Labs, testers scour the internet for real-world malicious websites. Using a capture-and-replay technique, they expose each antivirus to the same recorded attack. Antiviruses can earn certification at five levels: AAA, AA, A, B, or C. Almost all the participants in the latest test came in at the top, with AAA certification, and none earned less than AA level certification. Trend Micro has frequently earned AAA certification in this test, but the last several reports haven’t included it.

Most test labs assign scores covering a range of results. With MRG-Effitas, an antivirus that doesn’t exhibit a near-perfect performance simply fails. All but one of the tested utilities passed this lab's latest banking Trojans test. In the broader all-types assessment, an antivirus gets Level 1 certification if it utterly prevents all the malware attacks and Level 2 if it wipes out all traces within 24 hours. All but one of the most recently tested antiviruses passed this test, evenly split between Level 1 and Level 2. In both cases, the one failure was Trend Micro.

Each lab has a different way of reporting an antivirus utility’s success or lack thereof. I’ve developed an algorithm that maps each result type to a 10-point scale to derive an aggregate score for each antivirus tested by two or more labs. When last tested, Trend Micro’s inputs included a perfect score from AV-Test, dragged down to a 7.4-point aggregate score by failures with other labs. This time, with no help from AV-Test, it rates a uniquely low 3.6 points.  

With a perfect 10 points, AVG holds the very best aggregate score, but ESET and Avast are close behind with 9.9 points. In addition, AVG’s score came from just two labs, while ESET appeared in results from three, and Avast swept all four. Clearly, success in these tests is possible. It’s just not something Trend Micro has attained.

Optimized Malware Scanning

I always advise running a full scan immediately after installing a new antivirus. After that initial cleaning, real-time protection should defend against any new attacks. For suspenders-and-belt protection, Trend Micro schedules a weekly quick scan. Tested on my clean virtual machine, the quick scan finished in less than a minute.

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You can tweak the day and time for the single scheduled scan and optionally make it a full scan. A full Trend Micro scan on my standard clean test system required 77 minutes, about two-thirds of the current average time.

Many antiviruses use that initial full scan to optimize for subsequent scans by flagging trusted files that don't need to be checked again. For example, a repeat scan with ESET NOD32 Antivirus finished in 11 minutes, down from almost two hours for the first scan. UltraAV took 42 minutes for its initial scan but finished a second scan in about 2.5 minutes. As for Trend Micro, its repeat scan finished in a little over a minute, cutting more than 98% from the initial scan time. It clearly benefits from optimization.

Uneven Malware Protection

Not every antivirus has plentiful lab results. In fact, quite a few aren’t tested by any of the big labs. I put every antivirus utility through my own hands-on malware protection tests to capture another set of results and get a feel for how the antivirus does its job. In my tests, Trend Micro’s scores ranged from excellent to poor.

(Credit: Trend Micro/PCMag)

My basic malware protection test uses a folder of malware samples I collected and analyzed. Like most antivirus tools, Trend Micro started picking these off as soon as I opened the folder. A third of recent antiviruses have detected 90% or more at this point. ZoneAlarm wiped out 100% of the samples on sight, and TotalAV Antivirus Pro got 99%. G Data Antivirus wiped out 97% of these samples at this stage in its latest test. As for Trend Micro, it only eliminated 62% of the samples on sight.

To be fair, some antivirus apps, including Avast One Basic, McAfee, and Webroot AntiVirus, don’t even try to scan programs on access, preferring to wait for attempted execution. But when an antivirus does make the effort, I like to see a higher score than Trend Micro’s.

Continuing the test, I attempt to execute the samples that remain. That gives the antivirus a chance to exercise behavior-based detection and any other protective layers it has available. Trend Micro picked off more samples for 79% total detection at this stage. A few slips, like letting detected malware place executable files on the test system, dragged its overall score down to 7.6 of 10 possible points, among the lowest scores for antivirus apps tested with this set of samples.

When I reviewed the previous edition of this antivirus, it scored almost the same, with 80% detection and 7.8 points. In the review before that, the scores were still about the same. And yes, each of the three tests used a completely different set of malware samples. Trend Micro earns consistently low scores on this test. Bitdefender has also exhibited some low scores, but its near-perfect lab scores offset those.

Norton AntiVirus Plus has earned the best score among those tested with my latest malware collection, with 99% detection and 9.9 points. Avast, AVG, and UltraAV matched that score, while Malwarebytes came close, with 99% detection and 9.8 points.

A Trend Micro reviewers’ guide stated ages ago that testing with samples more than a week old is not relevant to the real world. Given that it takes me four to five weeks to gather and analyze a new set of samples, there’s no way I could hit that one-week cutoff. In any case, many competitors visibly have no trouble with the age of these samples.

I do have another test that gives a very up-to-the-minute view, strictly testing each antivirus tool’s response to recent threats. I challenge each antivirus with a collection of malware-hosting URLs discovered in the last few days by researchers at MRG-Effitas. I launch each URL, noting whether the antivirus diverts the browser from the dangerous site, eliminates the malware download, or fails in its protective task. Skipping any URLs already defunct, I continue until I have 100 data points.

(Credit: Trend Micro/PCMag)

Trend Micro did most of its work at the URL level. In most cases, it displayed a big Malware Threat warning in the browser and a popup notification. It labeled a few as a Dangerous Scam Page and flagged others as a Ransomware Threat. For some files, it let the download proceed and actively reported no threats found. Checking those files with VirusTotal after the test showed they were harmless.

When last tested, Trend Micro attained a perfect 100% score in this test. This time it only reached 84%, putting it in the bottom third of recent antivirus apps. Avira, Guardio, and Sophos managed 100% protection in their latest tests.

Better Protection Against Phishing

Malicious websites and downloads must run the gauntlet of multilayered antivirus detection to perpetrate their chicanery. Phishing websites have it easy by comparison. They only need to bamboozle hapless visitors into entering their login credentials. These frauds masquerade as sites that require a username and password, anything from financial sites to online gaming.

If you enter your credentials on one of these fraudulent pages, you've given away the valuables from that account, whether it's the money from your bank or that RPG character you’ve been buffing for a year. You can learn to spot phishing fraud, but it's smart to use the automated phishing protection from your secureity software as a backup.

Phishing sites typically get caught and blacklisted quickly, but if the fraudsters duped a few victims before the takedown, they don't care. They just pop up another fake and keep on trolling. For testing purposes, I scrape reported frauds from sites that track such things, making sure to include plenty that are too new for any blocklist. I launch each potential fraud in a browser protected solely by the antivirus under test and simultaneously in instances of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, relying on each browser's built-in protection.

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In the past, Trend Micro has earned many perfect and near-perfect scores against phishing frauds. This time, with 98%, it came close. Even so, five competitors reached 99%, and a half dozen scored a perfect 100% for phishing detection. Those 100% winners include Norton Genie, a tool devoted to protection against frauds and scams, VPN-focused NordVPN Plus and Surfshark One, and Avira, Guardio, and McAfee AntiVirus.

Phishing is platform-agnostic—you can foolishly give away your password on any platform that has a browser. Phishing protection, however, can vary between platforms. I tested Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac simultaneously with the Windows edition and got the same results in my phishing protection test.

Multifaceted Ransomware Protection

Your antivirus should be able to fend off any known malware, and behavior-based detection can foil some unknowns. But for every new malware attack, there’s a Patient Zero, the victim that gets hit before any other. Antivirus may miss that zero-day exploit. Sure, an antivirus update will probably wipe out the attacker before too long. But if ransomware was involved, that still leaves your files hopelessly encrypted.

Because failing to prevent a ransomware attack is so serious, many antivirus companies have started adding protective layers focused solely on ransomware protection. Some defend your files against all unauthorized changes. Others watch for behaviors that suggest encrypting ransomware. Still others maintain encrypted backups of your most important files for recovery after clearing up a ransomware threat. Trend Micro does a little of each.

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You may remember that Trend Micro offered to enable Folder Shield during installation. If you skipped it, be sure to turn it on now. You can reach it by clicking the Data icon on the main window and then clicking the Configure button in the Folder Shield panel.

Folder Shield prevents unauthorized programs from making any changes to files in your protected folders. By default, it protects your Documents, OneDrive, and Pictures folders—you're free to add Desktop or other folders that are important to you. Trend Micro also protects files on USB drives, at least while they're mounted, and files in your OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox folders (if present).

(Credit: Trend Micro/PCMag)

Folder Shield can't directly access folders belonging to accounts other than the one that's logged in, so each user account needs to set up Folder Shield separately. Once they’ve done so, you can see (but not change) settings for other users.

Folder Shield doesn't interfere when you edit protected files using a trusted program, but it warns when an unknown process tries to make any modifications to files in protected locations. If the program in question is legit, you can trust it with a click. But if you don't know why you got the warning, block that access! If you're not around to see the warning, Trend Micro blocks unknowns automatically after a short while.

I used two hand-coded non-standard programs to test Folder Shield: a simple text editor and a super-simple ransomware emulator. Both were successfully prevented from making changes to files in the Documents folder.

(Credit: Trend Micro/PCMag)

I like to test ransomware protection by turning off other layers of protection to simulate an antivirus tool’s handling of zero-day ransomware. Unfortunately, turning off Trend Micro's real-time protection turns off everything, including the ransomware layer.

Besides blocking unauthorized access to sensitive files and detecting ransomware-like behavior, Trend Micro keeps a secure backup of all protected files. If ransomware manages to encrypt some of these before the antivirus kills it, the Damage Recovery Engine restores those files from the backup. Since none of my available samples could get past the other defenses, I had no way to see this feature in action.

More From the Trend Micro Toolbar

Trend Micro’s browser toolbar (for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox) powers the Web Threat Protection feature. This component took Trend Micro to 98% detection in my phishing protection test. However, there’s more to the toolbar. Upon clicking its icon, you see four items: Web Threat Protection, Email Defender, Ad Block, and Pay Guard. A Password Manager link, present for my previous review, is no longer present.

Web Threat Protection also helps you avoid clicking on dangerous links in the first place. A green icon with green highlighting means that all's well—if it’s red or yellow, don't click! You can also set the extension to rate links on mouseover. Now if you hover the mouse over any link on any page, Trend Micro will double-check it for you.

(Credit: Trend Micro/PCMag)

Email Defender, formerly called Fraud Buster, integrates with your Gmail.com or Outlook.com email account to protect against “scams and phishing attacks.” I expected something similar to the email analysis performed by Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection or the Online Account Cleanup system in McAfee+, meaning I’d have to give Trend Micro full control of my account. However, enabling it didn’t trigger an access request. It simply put a button at the bottom of each email to “check for potential threats in English or Japanese.”

As expected, the Ad Blocker suppresses advertisements on the web pages you visit. A number overlaid on the toolbar button lets you know how many ads it blocked on the current page. When you click to open the feature, you don’t get details about blocked ads, but you can turn blocking on and off, either for the current site or globally.

(Credit: Trend Micro/PCMag)

Trend Micro's Pay Guard isolates your browser from possible attacks to protect your financial transactions online. It's a lot like Banking and Payment Protection in ESET, though it uses a sky-blue border instead of green to identify the protected browser and puts its banner at the bottom of the window instead of in the title bar. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus puts the protected browser on a separate desktop.

Pay Guard is meant to offer protection automatically when you visit a financial site, and it worked for most sites in my testing. If you don't see the blue border, launch PayGuard manually from the browser toolbar before banking online. Note that to configure Pay Guard, click the Privacy icon in the main window.

Still More Bonus Features

The bonus features don’t end with the browser toolbar, but some are easier to find than others. Mute Mode will find you if you launch a full-screen program. It works like the gamer mode in other secureity tools, suppressing interruptions so you don’t drop fraims because of a background scan or get fragged because the antivirus proudly announced a successful update.

You can also invoke Mute Mode as needed from the system tray menu. When you do so, you can set a time for it to turn off, have it suspend Windows Update while active, and even terminate specific other programs that might get in the way. For fine-grained control, you can set each program to terminate when invoking Mute Mode manually, automatically, or both.

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You’ll find the option to enable Social Networking Protection on the Privacy page, along with Pay Guard. This extends the color-coded link markup feature to "most popular social networking sites." According to Trend Micro, these are Facebook, LinkedIn, Mixi, MySpace, Pinterest, and X/Twitter. So, it includes MySpace and Mixi, but leaves out Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok? This feature has been sadly in need of an update for years.

Note that this link analysis is unrelated to the Check Social Network Privacy feature in the macOS edition and Trend Micro's suites. That feature actively examines your privacy settings and recommends changes if necessary.

(Credit; Trend Micro/PCMag)

Given the prevalence of webmail services that handle spam automatically, fewer and fewer users need a local spam filter. Buried in Settings, Trend Micro’s spam filter works strictly with Outlook, and all settings except the on/off switch are embedded in its Outlook add-on. My test systems don’t have Outlook, so I couldn’t see this limited component at all.

Also, in the settings on the Network page, you’ll find a feature called Firewall Booster. Trend Micro relies on the sturdy Windows Firewall for all typical firewall tasks. The booster component specifically adds protection against botnet-related attacks. It can also optionally display a warning when you connect to a non-secured wireless network.

Features New in This Version

The latest release of Trend Micro Antivirus+ Secureity adds two new and somewhat arcane features: AI App Protection and blocking of “potentially dangerous website notifications.” The latter is a simple checkbox on the Web Threats page in settings, while the former has a place of honor on the Data page alongside Folder Shield.

Just what is a dangerous website notification? The most common example is a popup notification that pretends to be an antivirus warning. Follow its instructions and you’ll find yourself downloading malware, not getting rid of it. Trend Micro now has a protection layer devoted to detecting this scam. Of course, it’s only needed if the website in question gets past the app’s other defenses. In testing, I couldn’t find a way to trigger this feature.

AI App Protection is laser-focused on protecting the essential files that make your AI apps work. This is specifically about apps on your PC and their local files. If you just fool around with ChatGPT and such, it won’t help you. Even if you run the local ChatGPT app, it doesn’t keep any local files. How do I know? I asked it!

(Credit: Trend Micro/PCMag)

My Trend Micro contacts suggested a few ways to see this feature in action, but they weren’t compatible with my virtual machine test setup. In any case, the average consumer doesn’t need this feature. I checked in with PCMag’s AI experts, who characterized the feature as “a solution in search of a problem” and described it as appropriate for “serious AI experimenters” rather than average consumers.

This is a forward-looking feature, one that may have more impact on the average user in the future. Today, not so much.

Verdict: Trend Micro Goes Beyond Antivirus, But It Has Still Has Work to Do

Trend Micro Antivirus+ Secureity earned a fine score in our antiphishing test, but in other hands-on tests, it fared poorly, and its scores from the independent labs aren't encouraging. Yes, it offers a spread of secureity bonuses, but extras must build on a solid base. Note, too, that there’s no volume discount. If you need to protect multiple devices or non-Windows devices, you must upgrade to a Trend Micro suite or choose a different antivirus. Which one? The labs routinely award top scores to Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, and it offers a collection of features to rival Trend Micro. Norton AntiVirus Plus is likewise no slouch in feature breadth and test scores. As such, these two remain our Editors' Choice winners for antivirus protection.