Panda

Panda still exists — nothing terminal happened. The Spanish company Panda Security was acquired by WatchGuard in 2020, and its consumer products — the Panda Dome antivirus range and VPN — continue to be maintained and updated. What did change is prominence: Panda is less visible in the consumer market than it once was, and in current independent tests it trails the leaders in this comparison. So the accurate reading is neither 'gone' nor 'thriving': it's an alive, supported, second-tier option that still has its fans — particularly for its interface and family plans.

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Yes, there's a genuinely free tier: Panda Free Antivirus offers basic real-time protection permanently, with no trial expiry. The paid Panda Dome plans add the substance — the firewall, parental controls and the VPN, which stays capped at 150 MB per day on most tiers and only becomes unlimited on the top Dome Premium plan. The Dome Advanced plan in our comparison runs US$64.49/yr for the first year. A frank buying note: free Panda is fine as bare-bones cover, but if you've decided to pay, compare against Bitdefender first — it tests better for similar spend.

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Solid but mid-field, honestly. Panda's protection works, and its interface remains one of the friendliest in the category — that ease, and its family plans, are its best arguments. But in the most recent independent test rounds it falls short of leaders like Bitdefender and Norton, which is why it sits towards the back of our ranking despite the likeable packaging. The fair verdict: a valid option if the interface or a family-wide plan is what wins you over, but not the pick on protection alone — at similar spend, the leaders simply test stronger.

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For most people, Panda Dome Complete is the balanced pick of the range — the tier where the suite rounds out with system clean-up and device-care extras. Panda Dome Premium is the top rung, adding priority support and the main upgrade reason: the VPN with its daily cap removed (on lower tiers it's limited to 150 MB per day). Our comparison prices Panda Dome Advanced, the mid-range plan covering five devices. Whichever tier tempts you, apply the same test: list the features you'll genuinely use, then compare that tier's renewal price against Bitdefender's equivalent — Panda wins on friendliness, the leaders on tested protection.

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Two clocks. Panda Free Antivirus never expires — permanently free, basic protection. Paid Panda Dome licences are annual subscriptions that renew automatically, and that's the part to watch: renewal is priced higher than the promotional first year — for the Dome Advanced plan in our ranking, US$64.49/yr in year one against US$86/yr at renewal. The pattern is standard across this category, and so is the defence: note the renewal date when you buy, then decide deliberately rather than by default whether year two at the full rate is worth it.

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Open Panda and run a full system scan — not the quick scan — and let it quarantine everything it flags. Then open the quarantine, review the detections and delete the confirmed threats; quarantine first is the right order, since it lets you restore a false alarm. For infections that resist or block a normal scan, escalate to the boot-time scan, which runs before Windows fully loads and catches malware that hides from a running system, or Panda's dedicated cleanup tools for stubborn cases. Afterwards: change important passwords if anything serious turned up, and let the scheduled scans keep running — reinfection via the same download habit is the most common sequel.

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