Acronis Antivirus Review 2024: Can It Keep You Safe?

Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (formerly Acronis True Image) is a decent antivirus — it has a good core set of cybersecurity tools, including a malware scanner, real-time protection, and ransomware protection. However, Acronis focuses less on its antivirus engine and more on reversing the consequences of data loss.

Where Acronis really shines is in its system backup and recovery. Acronis creates a full system backup for you and can store it in the cloud — its more expensive plans allow you to store up to 5 TB of data, meaning you can back up most PCs. While the system backup can take a very long time, I was impressed by the fast recovery process when restoring data.

However, Acronis has several drawbacks that prevent it from being one of my favorite antiviruses. I have one main criticism — it’s pretty expensive for how few extra features it has. Unlike my top antiviruses, it’s missing a firewall, a VPN for data encryption, parental controls, and a lot more. It’s just as expensive as its top competitors, despite missing many basic necessities. Unlike standard antiviruses, which focus primarily on prevention, Acronis focuses mostly on providing excellent backup and recovery tools.

That said, I do like Acronis. Its features work pretty well, so if you’re looking for a quality system backup tool with antivirus capabilities, it fits the bill. The customer support is also excellent, and while there’s some complexity to Acronis’s more niche tools, it’s generally pretty user-friendly. It’s also got a generous 30-day free trial of its most expensive plan and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you have plenty of time to try it out before you commit.

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Acronis Antivirus Full Review — Good + Well-Designed Antivirus (Focuses on System Backup & Recovery)

There’s a lot I like about Acronis: its malware engine is strong and reliable, and its backup features are great. Its scans are incredibly thorough, the user interface is pretty well designed, and I had a great experience with customer support. Acronis consistently scored well during my testing and didn’t interfere with my other programs.

However, there’s also a lot I don’t like about Acronis. Many of the antiviruses I’ve tested come with a VPN, password manager, parental controls, dark web monitoring, a firewall, and more. Acronis doesn’t offer any of that and instead focuses on system backup and recovery. Being in the cybersecurity space, I’d really like to see it include some of the extra cybersecurity features we’ve come to expect in a comprehensive antivirus package.

That being said, while Acronis may not be for everyone, it comes with a 30-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee — so you can test it out for yourself.

Acronis Antivirus Plans & Pricing — Expensive Plans, but They Come With a 30-Day Free Trial

Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office has 3 plans, but in my opinion, they’re all a bit overpriced. The most basic plan, Essentials, provides system backup and recovery, but it doesn’t include malware protection and removal (or real-time malware scanning). Nor does it contain any extra features despite costing as much as a fully-featured antivirus. The 1-device license will set you back $49.99 / year, but you can pay more to cover up to 5 devices (as is the case with all three plans).

The Advanced plan is a much better security suite. It contains an excellent malware scanner, real-time protection, and 50 GB of cloud backup storage (which can be increased to 500 GB) for $54.99 / year. It still lacks extra features, but the malware engine works really well and is reliable.

At $124.99 / year, Acronis Premium is the most expensive plan, although it doesn’t include many more features than Advanced. It does add electronic signatures and blockchain-powered file notarization, but the largest difference is that the maximum storage space increases from 50 GB to 1 TB (but you can upgrade as far as 5 TB with a price increase).

There is also a free version of Acronis on mobile, but it only offers backup and restoration — no malware scanning or antivirus capabilities.

Overall, I don’t think Acronis offers enough for how expensive its plans are. Top antiviruses like Norton are much cheaper but offer significantly more features, have faster scans, and cover more devices as standard. That said, Acronis has a reliable malware scanning engine and comprehensive system backup capabilities — plus it offers a 30-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it out risk-free.

Here’s a quick overview of all the Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office plans:

Acronis Antivirus Security Features — 99% Malware Detection Rate + Excellent System Backup Tools

Acronis’s malware scanner provides protection against all kinds of malware threats. To test it, I downloaded an archive containing 1,000s of malware samples — including trojans, rootkits, cryptojackers, and spyware. The full scan detected more than 99% of the malware samples on my PC and removed them. However, it was slow — totaling about 4 hours (Norton took 40 minutes in comparison and ran subsequent scans in 10 to 20 minutes each).

The real-time malware protection is also pretty good: once I had removed the malware samples, I switched the real-time protection on and tried re-downloading them. Acronis intercepted them before they infected my device.

Overall, the malware scanner is reliable — but it’s disappointing that it’s not included in Acronis’s most basic plan (or in its mobile plans).

Despite this, Acronis puts its system backup and restoration abilities front and center. The backups create replicas of every file and folder on your PC and store them inside Acronis’s cloud so that you can easily recover your data with the click of a button.

Acronis also uses disk cloning software to create duplicates of your system during backups and to migrate files to more efficient disks. You can schedule full system backups to run in the background, too. However, the first time you back up your system, it’s a slow process. I had to leave the backup process overnight to finish. Future backups are much faster though.

Acronis also allows you to archive files that you haven’t used in a long time, freeing up space and helping your system run faster. I archived about 22 GB of old files from my laptop, but like with the scans and the backup features; archiving was quite a slow process.

There’s also a handful of other tools included with Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, like a system optimization tool. It works pretty well, but it didn’t improve my system as much as the optimization tools included in Bitdefender’s plans did.

Acronis ASign is another cool tool that lets you electronically sign documents. It’s easy to use and lets multiple people simultaneously sign anything from rental agreements to liability waivers. Documents signed in Acronis ASign are also notarized via Acronis Notary (a block-chain powered service) — which is great!

Finally, Acronis comes with good ransomware protection that uses heuristic analysis to study file patterns on your computer and block any unauthorized encryption attempts. It works pretty well, and by pairing itself with a customizable allow and deny list for programs, it ensures you remain protected from ransomware while keeping false positives at a minimum. It’s also one of the few features available on all plans.

Overall, Acronis antivirus sacrifices speed for thoroughness, but provides good malware protection and an excellent system backup tool. That said, it lacks useful additional features like a firewall, a VPN, parental controls, and more.

Acronis Antivirus Ease of Use & Setup — Well-Laid Out Tool (That Can Sometimes Run Slowly)

Setting up Acronis is very simple — it only takes a few minutes to download, and it isn’t any more complicated than installing other Windows/Mac software. The sidebar on the left has all of the features well laid out — but each page packs a lot of information. For example, the malware scanner also shows you archives, scanned files, quarantined and removed files, vulnerabilities, and more — all on one screen!

All the extra features like the device backup, file archiving, and sync tools work well, but I wish the Tools tab had more explanations for what each feature did. Some are obvious, like System Clean-Up, but some tools are more complex, and there’s barely any explanation of what they do. Take Acronis Secure Zone, for example. It’s a protected partition for storing backups, which sounds simple enough, but the application provides very little guidance on how it works. That said, only advanced users will want to use features like this, so it wouldn’t affect most people’s experience.

My biggest problem during my tests was that the program was really slow. The first full scan took nearly 4 hours (most top antiviruses only take about an hour or so); backing up my device took a full 7 hours, requiring me to leave my laptop on overnight; and archiving less than 25 GB of files took me well over 4 hours. I was disappointed with how long it took to perform basic actions, especially when all of the features otherwise worked well.

The Acronis mobile app isn’t super impressive either — especially if you want malware protection on your phone. It’s not an antivirus but a free mobile backup and storage tool. While it lets you back up your mobile phone data, it’s pretty limited and doesn’t back up essential apps like Gmail or Google Calendar. It also doesn’t support MMS backup. If you’re looking for a mobile antivirus, you’re better off checking out our lists of best antiviruses for Android and iOS.

Acronis Antivirus Customer Support — Great Support (Active Community Forums)

Acronis’s customer support is excellent — when you first click on the Support tab and then on your product, it’ll take you to a help center packed with useful information. It’s available in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese. To the left is a sidebar allowing you to choose which device and version you’re looking for answers for. The answers contain a lot of information and cover every basic problem a user might encounter. Overall, I found the help center very useful.

If you scroll down the support page, you can contact the Acronis support team or ask the community questions. I checked out the community forum and was pleasantly surprised to see that it’s pretty active. Most questions had timely responses, and the community was respectful to one another. I didn’t see any fake responses, internet trolls, or dismissive comments while I read through several threads.

The support team is very helpful, too. I used their Instant Chat service to connect to a customer support agent who helped me solve issues I had with the software. I didn’t have to wait after submitting my ticket either; the live chat lived up to its name of being instant. What’s impressive is that it’s available round the clock — even some top competitors don’t have 24/7 live chat support.

Overall, I was really impressed with Acronis’s customer support: the help center is packed with info and has an intuitive layout, the community forums are actually active, and its 24/7 live chat is available in multiple languages. If I had one complaint, I wish the live chat was easier to find: from the website’s home screen, it requires navigating through several menus, and I think it’s in an unintuitive spot. But that’s only a minor downside in an otherwise great experience.

Can Acronis Antivirus Keep You Protected?

Acronis can protect your PC from basic threats. It had a 99% malware detection rate during my tests, which puts it on par with some of the best antiviruses on the market (like TotalAV). The real-time protection and ransomware protection both work well, and the core cybersecurity toolset that Acronis provides you with is reliable and powerful.

However, it can’t keep you completely protected from every type of online threat. It’s missing many extra features you’d expect in an expensive antivirus package. It has no bundled VPN to encrypt your data; it lacks dark web monitoring to ensure your information isn’t leaked online; and it has no password manager to keep your passwords safe. So overall it won’t give you the comprehensive security that its top competitors offer.

In my experience, it’s also painfully slow compared to its competitors. While I appreciate how thorough the scans are, the scan took more than 4 times as long than those of other similarly-priced antiviruses. The backup process also took much longer than other system backups I’ve used — I had to leave my laptop running overnight and still had to contact support the next morning to ensure I wasn’t doing something wrong.

Acronis won’t keep mobile devices protected either. The Acronis mobile app lacks a malware scanner and focuses completely on providing your devices with a secure backup of your files — but at least it’s free!

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Acronis antivirus good?

Acronis provides a decent antivirus, but its flaws hold it back. It offers reliable security features, such as real-time protection, ransomware protection, and AI-powered threat analysis. All these perform well, and the antivirus solution consistently ranked high during my tests. Acronis also provides additional tools like system optimization, a secure file eraser, and online backup capabilities.

That said, Acronis has pretty slow scans and lacks a lot of the extra features you’d expect to see in a full-priced antivirus kit — there’s no VPN, password manager, parental controls, dark web monitoring, or anything else to make it competitive against top antiviruses such as Norton.

Why does Acronis antivirus take so long to scan?

Acronis prioritizes thoroughness over speed. Its comprehensive scanning engine meticulously examines every file, folder, and process on your system, ensuring no potential threats are missed. This in-depth approach means that the antivirus will take longer to complete its scans, but its enhanced security is worth the trade-off.

It’s also important to note that the initial scan typically takes the longest, as the software establishes a baseline for your system. Subsequent scans should be faster, as Acronis will only need to scan new or modified files.

Is Acronis antivirus compatible with Windows 11?

Yes, Acronis is compatible with Windows 11. The software developers at Acronis keep their antivirus up to date with the latest operating systems, including Microsoft’s newest release. By staying current with Windows updates, Acronis ensures its antivirus can provide optimal protection and performance on Windows 11 devices.

In addition to Windows 11, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (formerly known as Acronis True Image) also supports other Windows versions, including Windows 8 and 10. Aside from Windows, it also works with macOS, newer versions of iOS, Linux, and Android devices.

Does Acronis antivirus come with a VPN?

No, Acronis doesn’t come with a VPN. If you’re looking for one, I’d recommend either purchasing a reliable standalone VPN alongside Acronis or grabbing an antivirus with a bundled VPN.