Spybot was founded in 2000 by a German software engineer named Patrick Kolla and was initially designed to combat two of the earliest known adware programs - Aureate/Radiate and Conducent TimeSink. The program is generally distributed as freeware but some new tools have been developed in order to prevent viruses.
The freeware version is, as you’d expect, completely free. So why opt for anything else? Well, the free version wasn’t designed to prevent viruses it was developed to remove threats from an infected PC. So, if you haven’t guessed already, their paid version acts as an antivirus which is designed to stop malicious attacks. It comes in at $15.99/year which is a nice low price.
Honestly, scans from Spybot don’t compete with the likes of Norton, McAfee and Total AV. They can be inconsistent, seem much too quick to complete and don’t pick up all the threats the likes of others can. The software itself is smooth and reliable in terms of stability but if the program doesn’t perform that well, is it worth the risk?
No live chat or contact numbers present anywhere on the website which sparks warning bells immediately. To compete in this day and age you need great customer service and support. Live chat is the most used support vertical, we think it’s crazy to not offer this. Having a phone number on the site would give us a little more confidence but no sign of this either.
Spybot packs a punch when it comes to features, but they aren’t all useful or relevant anymore. Their immunization tool was designed to protect IE users from bad URLs which was great about 10 years ago but with the development of the most used browser (google chrome) this feature is pretty useless as it doesn’t support any other browser. Don’t get us wrong though, Spybot comes with the usual suspect features like a quarantine, system scanning, file shredder etc.
