BullGuard is a London-based company which has been developing popular consumer antivirus software and security tools since 2002.
BullGuard Antivirus is a simple product with real-time virus protection, malicious URL filtering, and, surprisingly, a performance booster for games and other demanding full-screen applications. 24/7 customer support, including live chat, is available if you have any problems.
The 2020 release of the program adds new machine learning technology, which the company says improves zero-day threat detection 'without any impact on the computer's resources'. It works offline, too, so you'll be protected even if malware breaks your internet connection.
BullGuard's VPN can be launched from the interface, as well, although you'll need to purchase a separate license to use it. Unlike Kaspersky, Bitdefender and others, BullGuard doesn't have a limited free version of its VPN, or even a trial.
That's about it for new antivirus or security features, which is a little disappointing. Although BullGuard's 2020 range also features a major addition in its new Secure Browser, a customized app which uses multiple layers of security to keep you safe online, that's not available in BullGuard's baseline antivirus package.
BullGuard Antivirus is priced from a low $30 for a one-year, one computer license. That's decent value, especially as competitors like Bitdefender and Kaspersky no longer sell single device licenses, instead charging at least $60 (on renewal) to cover up to three computers.
BullGuard offers further discounts by extending the subscription – a two-year license is $48, with three-years running to $60 – but, unfortunately, the company doesn't allow you to add multiple PCs on a single license.
If you have multiple devices to protect, you might prefer BullGuard Premium Protection. That's not only cheaper per device – a three-year, 10-device license is $200, just $6.63 per device per year – but it also protects Windows, Mac and Android, and has many more features: a firewall, parental controls, cloud backup, PC optimization, a Home Network Scanner, and even identity protection.
You can check out a 15-day trial of BullGuard Antivirus, and there are 30-day builds of BullGuard Premium Protection and the intermediate BullGuard Internet Security. You're protected by a further 30-day money-back guarantee, giving you plenty of time to be sure this is the right antivirus for you.
Setup
BullGuard's trial builds are easy to find on the website, and we had our BullGuard Antivirus installer downloaded within seconds.
Like many competitors, BullGuard requires that you hand over your email to create an account before you can activate the trial, but that was also straightforward and there were no other setup hassles.
BullGuard Antivirus installed a long list of components on our test system. After rebooting, we found it had grabbed around 750MB of disk space, added 10 new background processes and assorted other extras, including an Outlook add-in (more on that later).
While this looked a more heavyweight setup than many competitors, BullGuard's various processes didn't grab much in the way of RAM or other system resources, and we didn't notice any significant impact on our system speed.
It's important that an antivirus is able to prevent itself being disabled by malware. We tried deleting BullGuard Antivirus files, closing processes, stopping services and other tricks, but weren't able to compromise our security. So that was a good start for the app, but then we uncovered a couple of problems.
Security vulnerabilities
BullGuard Antivirus enables users to define exactly what they want to be checked in Quick and Full system scans, and we noticed these settings were stored in plain text files without any special protection. An attacker could replace the default settings with their own, turning off just about every scan option, greatly reducing the chance that BullGuard would detect anything at all.
As an example, running an initial Quick Scan on our review system with the default settings took around seven minutes. After replacing the Quick Scan file with our own, where every possible scanning option was turned off, it checked so little that the scan was complete in about five seconds.
In another more serious problem, we were able to disable BullGuard's file system filter driver with a single standard Windows command (requiring admin rights). As a result, BullGuard Antivirus wasn't able to detect malware as it was downloaded, unzipped or otherwise saved to, or opened from our hard drive.
It's important to put these issues into perspective. The scan settings vulnerability only affected on-demand scans, for instance, leaving BullGuard's real-time protection working as usual, blocking threats as they appear. And even if an attacker also disabled the filter driver, BullGuard Antivirus isn't finished. URL filtering will still block attempts to download malware from a known dangerous site, and the behavior monitoring layer is constantly looking out for suspicious processes.
We raised our concerns with BullGuard, anyway, and the company responded quickly. It rolled out a fix for the filter driver issue almost immediately, closing the more serious security hole. The lesser scan settings issue had already been fixed in BullGuard's Small Office Security product, BullGuard explained, and the consumer products will get the same update in the next release.
We're happy to accept that the risks here are largely theoretical. It would take some effort to exploit these vulnerabilities, and there's not the slightest evidence that's ever happened.
They still constitute worrying mistakes, though, especially leaving the filter driver unprotected. If BullGuard missed this issue, are there other problems it's failed to spot? We have no idea, but this has to be a concern.
Features
The BullGuard Antivirus interface is cluttered in the extreme. Rather than having its main screen focus entirely on antivirus and your security status, the program divides it up into eight or nine small panels.
Only one of these relates to antivirus – two more cover vulnerability scanning and the performance-optimizing Game Booster, which are handy features, but not ones you'll need to look at daily. The remaining six (BullGuard VPN, Firewall, Backup, PC Tune-up, Parental Control, Secure Browser) are greyed out or unavailable as they're not included in BullGuard Antivirus.
While this is a huge waste of valuable on-screen real-estate, it doesn't make the package any more difficult to use. A drop-down list displays the actions you can take – Quick Scan, Full Scan, Custom Scan, Quarantine, Settings – and you can launch any of these in a couple of clicks.
Hidden away in the Settings is an option to add further scan types, which BullGuard calls Antivirus Profiles. You could use this to create custom scans where you get precise control over which areas of the system are checked, what files are examined, the way the scan is run and what the program does if it finds any threats.
This is a valuable feature which gives you all kinds of options. You could create a scan which focuses on a key area of interest, perhaps folders of documents or executables, or network drives which might not be checked otherwise. You might be able to improve performance by excluding data-packed drives or folders you're sure aren't at risk, and you can experiment with some interesting low-level tweaks.
For instance, by default our review system used four threads for scanning. Reducing that would cut system load during a scan, while adding more threads might speed up the scan process, and BullGuard's ability to adjust this setting will help you find the right value for you.
BullGuard Antivirus also provides real-time protection, and for the most part that worked as we expected. Dangerous downloads were automatically scanned and blocked, for instance, and the package immediately detected malware we unpacked from a password-protected archive.
We noticed one limitation, though, in email scanning. BullGuard Antivirus doesn't scan incoming emails at the network level, instead using email client add-ins (Outlook and Thunderbird are supported). If you're using another client, or the add-in doesn't work or gets disabled, your emails won't be checked.
If you read your emails in a browser, this won't be an issue. And even if you're affected, BullGuard's real-time protection should detect and block any malicious attachments as soon as they're saved or opened. Still, it could mean some users will lose a layer of security they'll often get with other vendors.
In our brief tests, scan times proved fractionally shorter than average. They didn't noticeably affect the performance of our system, either, and we were able to continue working without active scans getting in our way.
BullGuard Antivirus supports a simple vulnerability scan, which checks your Wi-Fi security, auto-run settings for mobile devices, Windows Update status and whether your drivers are digitally signed. This isn't exactly extensive, and we suspect competitors like Kaspersky and Avast are covering more areas, but if you have nothing similar, the scan could still give you genuinely useful information.
BullGuard's final highlight is its Game Booster, an interesting tool which recognizes when games or other full-screen applications are running, and tries to improve their performance by giving them a greater share of system resources. Although this has nothing to do with antivirus or security, it's aiming to combat the notion that installing an antivirus will slow down your PC.
The Game Booster works by shifting user processes (and optionally, in this release, system processes) to use the same CPU cores, reducing their demands on your system resources and making a greater share available to the game.
It's a smart idea, and independent testing has shown very positive results. Gaming rig builder ChillBlast benchmarked the game-related performance of BullGuard Internet Security against Kaspersky, AVG, Norton, McAfee and even Windows Defender. Not only did BullGuard deliver the best performance, it was even faster than a control system with no antivirus installed.
In other words, installing BullGuard Antivirus didn't reduce gaming performance, it actually improved matters. We wouldn't choose an antivirus based on that, alone – security issues should come first, after all – but it's an interesting feature, and could be very appealing to some users.
Protection
BullGuard Antivirus isn't assessed by many of the independent testing labs these days. It hasn't appeared in AV-Comparatives' Real-World Protection Test since 2018, for instance.
AV-Test currently includes BullGuard Internet Security in its Windows antivirus reports, though, and they give us some useful pointers to its likely performance.
The September-October 2019 results saw BullGuard block 100% of well-known malware in both tests. The package also blocked 100% of zero-day threats in September, and 98.4% in October. While that's very capable, nine vendors blocked 100% of threats in every test, leaving BullGuard in tenth place out of 19.
The company did better in some of the earlier 2019 reports, worse in others, and probably the best word to describe its performance is mixed.
These lab tests are lengthy and thorough, but they don't always provide the specific information we need, and so we also assess antivirus packages by running smaller tests of our own.
BullGuard Antivirus had no problems with our first test, detecting malware samples without difficulty when they were downloaded or unzipped on our review system.
Our second more advanced test used a custom ransomware simulator which would attempt to encrypt thousands of documents on our system. By creating this threat ourselves, we ensured it wouldn't be recognized from the file signature alone, making the program an interesting test of BullGuard's behavior monitoring.
Unfortunately, BullGuard Antivirus appeared not to notice our threat at all, and paid no attention as it encrypted thousands of test files. We don't mark down apps which fail to spot our simulator, because it's not real malware and we can't say why it wasn't detected. But this was still a little disappointing, not least because the package detected and blocked our simulator during the last review.
Final verdict
BullGuard is lightweight, configurable, and has an unusual extra in its Game Booster. Its lab test results aren't great, though, and the self-protection vulnerabilities we found are another concern, although it's good to see they're now fixed.