Depends on your needs and your threat surface.

Are you just an individual? Use Windows defender and ublock origin in the browser.

If you’re setting this up for some older folks create a separate non-administrator id for them to use day to day.

As a business if you need antivirus your really want something with an EDR team behind it looking for anomalies - not just virus signatures. Something like bitdefender EDR or Huntress.

The industry for selling security products to end users has become a pile of ineffective and misleading products. On Windows, I would recommend sticking with the built in stuff, unless you have a stong usecase that you know another product will better meet. On linux I would generally expect a sophistocated enough user that antivirus is not needed or helpful.

I guess Malwarebytes has fallen out of favour going by the current replies here.

There is no such thing as “100%” malware detection especially if you are talking about signature based AV. On windows I just use the built-it security features. On OSX there is blockblock that checks any unknown binary on the system against VirusTotal, but still we are talking about Signatures. What I would suggest is going into an IDS like CrowStrike falcon, but is usually sold to enterprises and it’s pricy.

So there definitely isn’t a one-size fits all solution here and there isn’t one that detects everything. Security software like this is reactive by nature (ie: they cant protect you against threats that dont exist yet and malware developers do their best to avoid detection)

That being said, the default Windows Defender that comes pre-installed on any modern Windows OS is surprisingly robust. A decade ago they were a joke, but they’ve really improved things since.

If you’re looking for a paid cross-platform solution I’ve been mostly happy with SentinelOne, although it’s a bit of a resource hog on low-spec machines.

SentinelOne

in terms of prevention? Comodo, as far as commonly used solutions go, you need to know how to configure it though you also need to know how to handle the alerts it gives you and understand that it won’t ever give you an alert when everything is fine, that’s the catch. A lot of people have fucked up their entire computer when using comodo because they didn’t configure it correctly or blocked/sandboxed the wrong thing.

in terms of detection? Kaspersky, Bitdefender, Sophos, microsoft defender with configure defender on MAX, Avast/AVG

Avast and AVG are owned by the same company

Avira is also pretty good in terms of detection, but the setup file will never go away even after you uninstall it.

I’m not going to reveal what my security setup is, there’s a certain someone that’s probably going to end up on Lemmy who I’ve encountered on many of their sock puppet accounts. That person is definitely stalking my posts and comments on reddit after some of the stuff I’ve said to them.

There isn’t a “best” antivirus.

There’s some that are really good at detection, and a very small number that are good at prevention.

Usually, detection also means prevention, unless we’re talking about norton and mcaffee, which sometimes don’t detect anything until after the malware has already done its damage.

Comodo firewall configured like Cruelsister recommends along with bitdefender free, kaspersky (any edition with the firewall turned off), or MSD with configure defender on MAX is pretty good. Covers everything between comodo FW and one of those other three.

But those three conventional antivirus programs might start sucking at some point down the line. for as long as I’ve been using it, comodo FW has always been a good choice to pick up the slack of whatever realtime scanner you choose.