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Panda Security is a Spanish-based company with a strong record of antivirus innovations. From launching daily signature updates in 1998 to introducing behavioral monitoring in 2004 and cloud scanning in 2007, Panda has been involved with a host of technologies we might now take for granted.
The company has several plans for its home users – Panda Dome Essential, Panda Dome Advanced, Panda Dome Complete, and Panda Dome Premium – all building upon each other in terms of features, and each offering a firewall, WiFi protection, online shopping security, a Dark Web Scanner, and at least some VPN.
Higher tiers offer even more tools, including parental control, anti-ransomware, PC optimization, password manager, file encryption and shredding, update manager, and so on. And the best part? All tiers have a 30-day free trial.
Panda Dome Essential
At a reasonable price starting at $34.99 (renewing at $49.99) for a one-year, one-device license, the Essential package goes well beyond the basics of real-time antivirus and URL protection and covers up to 10 Windows, Mac, and Android devices (the price increasing depending on this number).
To complement its real-time antivirus protection with link filtering, Panda Dome Essential adds a simple firewall to block network attacks and even free VPN access. Okay, with no choice of location and 150MB of free data per day, you won’t be using it for streaming movies or heavy torrenting, but it’s fine for emailing on public Wi-Fi hotspots when you’re out and about.
Setup
Panda Dome Essential is downloaded and launched within a few seconds. Once the setup was complete, Dome Essential asked us to register the program by providing our email address. Some may prefer an antivirus program that allows you to stay anonymous, but many competitors do much the same as Panda. And at least we didn’t have to hand out any payment details.
The installation procedure itself was relatively speedy, with no complaints about ‘incompatible’ software or other hassles. In terms of being one of the most antivirus apps around, this seems to be quite true in Panda’s case, as its four core background processes only consumed a minimal 20-50 MB RAM during normal PC use.
Features
To launch a scan, you can simply click the Scan button on the top-left, choose the scan type (Critical Areas, Full, or Custom Scan) and wait for the results. Scans can run concurrently with no impact on the speed of either one of them or the system.
Although the regular scan buttons give you almost no control over how your system is checked, the Scheduled Scan feature is a little smarter. You can select which drives and folders to scan, exclude particular locations, and customize how the scan works in a few ways.
Scan times are average, at least initially. So, for instance, even the fastest Critical Areas scan took four minutes to check our test system. But effective optimization sees this drop over time, and our second scan took barely two minutes. A full scan took a little under 40 minutes the first time, and only 26 minutes the second.
Dome Essential’s firewall does its best to keep life simple, with a basic opening screen that just asks you to choose your current Wi-Fi location between Home, Work, and Public Place – enough for a basic user.
That said, if you know what you’re doing, heading off to Settings > Firewall enables defining its operating rules, and provides expert-level intrusion prevention settings relating to port scans, ping handling, flooding, and more.
A handy Process Monitor displays all the running processes, highlighting any that are accessing the internet and warning you of potential threats. That’s all very straightforward for beginners, but again, real power is only one or two clicks away.
The full Process Monitor report lists the name of every process, when it was detected and last scanned, where it was downloaded from, how many HTTP connections it has established, and lets you view whatever resources it was trying to access.
A welcome option is to create a bootable USB rescue drive to help remove malware that the regular package can’t reach. Other nice features include a software whitelisting system to control what runs on your PC, and a virtual keyboard to protect against keyloggers.
There’s also a monitor that raises alerts if you connect to unsecured Wi-Fi networks, and an option to ‘vaccinate’ USB keys to reduce the chance of infection by autorun viruses.
Another great addition is the Dark Web scanner that constantly monitors the dark corners of the internet and notifies you by email if your credentials appear in a new security breach, so you don’t have to worry about periodically performing these checks yourself.
Protection
Panda Dome has earned an AAA award from SE Labs for the period between October and December 2024, as it has shown a Total Accuracy Rating of 99% and not a single false positive – better than Microsoft Defender and Webroot, but not quite at the level of Avast, Kaspersky, or McAfee, all of which had the perfect 100% score.
At the same time, AV-Test’s Product Review and Certification Report for September – October 2024 has given Panda a 6/6 score for protection, 5.5/6 for performance, as it performed just a tad poorer than the industry average in some segments, and 6/6 for usability.
On the other hand, Panda Free Antivirus had a bit more false flags than recommended in AV-Comparatives’ False Alarm Test for September 2024, with 28 misidentified cases, with only Norton delivering more, and all the other tested platforms having significantly fewer.
It also had a rather poor offline detection rate of 36.6% in AV-Comparatives’ Malware Protection Test for September 2024 and a somewhat better online detection rate of 77.6%, albeit its online protection score was a strong 99.25%.
Final verdict Essential
Panda Dome Essential is a likable product that is easy to use and includes some genuinely valuable extras, especially for experts, but it still can’t quite match the virus-detecting power and accuracy of the market leaders.
Panda Dome Advanced
If Dome Essential isn’t powerful enough for you, opting for the $41.99 (renews at $59.99) Dome Advanced for a one-year one-device plan gets you everything from the lower tier, plus parental controls and additional layers of protection – against ransomware.
Antivirus
Like Essential, Panda Dome Advanced has several scanning options. A Critical Area scan checks the most commonly infected areas of a PC; the Custom scan only inspects the files or folders you specify; and the Full System scan, of course, checks everything.
If that’s not enough, you can also set multiple scheduled scans. These start with a Critical Areas, Full System, or Custom scan, but you can also exclude particular folders or file types (handy for speeding up scans.)
Scan times were reasonable during testing. Panda Dome Advanced checked our 50GB of test executables in 39 minutes for the first scan, within the 15–50-minute range we typically see. There’s some optimization for subsequent scans, and Panda took 24 minutes for scan #2.
Ransomware
Panda Dome’s anti-ransomware relies on behavior-based detection, file access control, and whitelisting, as well as generates backup copies to recover files in the event of infection.
Among its tools is a data shield that configures the control and whitelists, decoy files used as bait, and shadow copies of files and folders to restore their previous versions in case of data loss, file corruption, or any other issue.
Parental control
Panda Dome Advanced includes Parental Control, but this has barely any features you’d expect from a specialized parental controls application. You can’t control app use, there’s no way to limit screen time or restrict internet access, and no clever geofencing support. The only option is content filtering.
The platform does at least give you lots of categories. Instead of a single catch-all Adult category, for instance, you can individually block or allow subcategories like ‘Lingerie and Swimsuit’, ‘Nudity’, ‘Sex,’ and ‘Sex Education.’ Although this works, it’s nonetheless extremely basic.
Final verdict Advanced
Panda Dome Advanced has a decent core antivirus engine, detecting and removing malware with ease. And although other big names in the industry might outperform its capabilities, it’s still a solid solution with plenty of basic and advanced features.
Panda Dome Complete
The next step up, Dome Complete, adds system clean-up tools, and a password manager for $53.99 for a one-year one-device license, renewing at $89.99 for each subsequent year of service.
Cleanup: PC Optimization
With PC Cleanup, you can free up space on your PC by removing various files (including trash, temporaries, registry, cookies, browsing history, and the like), you can select which programs you want to run at startup, schedule a cleanup task with specific parameters, or defragment your hard disk.
Password manager
Panda’s password manager does pretty much what any other such product does – managing all of your passwords under a single master key, auto-filling forms, generating strong passwords, and syncing them across all your devices.
It also supports the creation of ‘secure notes’ – encrypted virtual Post-It notes only you can access using your master generic-addon, as well as deleting your browsing history and closing your web pages and services remotely.
File encryptor
This tool allows you to encrypt any file with a password or an automatically generated key through the right-click menu, transforming data into a sequence of unreadable characters that no one can decipher without the corresponding encryption key.
File shredder
Finally, this feature facilitates an irreversible and secure shredding process of your confidential or sensitive information to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. It does this by overwriting a file’s contents with random data or zeroes to hide the original content and make it extremely difficult or impossible to recover.
Final verdict Complete
Panda Dome Complete provides a few useful extras anyone might appreciate, including a file encryptor and shredder, a password manager, and PC optimization tools. However, if you don’t need these, then Panda Dome Essential or Advanced might be a better choice.
Panda Dome Premium
Finally, the top-of-the-range Panda Dome Premium gets you unrestricted VPN access to all available server locations, an update manager, and unlimited premium technical support – all that at $56 per year for one-device coverage initially, renewing at $139.99.
Premium VPN
Panda Dome Premium also removes any limitations to its VPN use from the lower-level packages and equips the user with unrestricted VPN for secure browsing, connectable to any location where it has servers, including 60+ countries, for up to 5 devices.
Testing the VPN connection to the recommended server hailed solid download and upload speeds, not much slower than our basic connection, and connecting took only a couple of seconds. Connecting to more distant locations (like Thailand) than our own (in Europe) was only slightly lagging.
Update Manager
Panda Dome Premium’s Update Manager helps keep your computer up to date to prevent any security breaches. It lets you perform a critical or in-depth scan for any available updates to the operating system or apps installed on your device or even schedule these scans.
For each program detected and included in the list, the product provides the possibility of applying the patch separately or ignoring it. It also includes an option to update all programs at the same time.
Final verdict Premium
Panda Dome Premium is a perfectly rounded antivirus suite that is well worth the price when taking into account the free trial and significant discounts for the first year of its use, particularly if you plan on relying on the VPN, Update Manager, and Dark Web Scanner. However, renewing might be a bit costly if you intend to continue.
