The “best antivirus” for most people to buy, it turns out, is nothing. And after all that, we learned that most people should neither pay for a traditional antivirus suite, such as McAfee, Norton, or Kaspersky, nor use free programs like Avira, Avast, or AVG. We set out to do a standard Wirecutter guide to the best antivirus app, so we spent months researching software, reading reports from independent testing labs and institutions, and consulting experts on safe computing.