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Customer Ratings & Reviews

Customer reviews

Rating 4.4 out of 5 stars with 30 reviews

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93%
would recommend
to a friend

Customers are saying

Customers find value in BullGuard's comprehensive protection suite, which includes features like parental controls, home network scanner, PC tune-up, and game booster. They appreciate the ability to protect multiple devices with a single subscription and the lightweight, non-intrusive nature of the software.

This summary was generated by AI based on customer reviews.

The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.
Page 2 Showing 21-30 of 30 reviews
  • Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 4 out of 5 stars

    AV Software with Networking/Optimization Tools

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    Bullguard may not be a household name yet, but it is a nice level of protection for home use and maybe students. I personally have never heard of Bullguard, so I gave this a shot. After some research, they are owned by Norton which helped build a little credibility and reputation. The overall presentation and layout of the software are fairly simple but not very intuitive. There are drop boxes you need to click to see what else can be done in a specific tile on the dashboard. I believe this needs a redesign, but the function is all there. It offers antivirus, parental controls, gaming mode, PC optimization tools, network discovery tools, and lots of things you don't usually see in normal antivirus protection. The Wi-Fi scanning utility, duplicate file scanner, and registry scanner are bonuses and make this worth the price in addition to the antivirus function. It does NOT offer VPN included in this package but they will sell it as an add-on. The firewall is excellent and offers DETAIL logs for advanced users. Things are easy to install and once you create your Bullguard login and enter the license code once. Now, software activation is easy without having to enter a license code each time. Download a trial and log in to get started. Now you will be presented with the dashboard and the plethora of functions to fit your needs. Good luck and explore! You will see what you need and start using things. In all, I think this is a good buy for 10 devices and also the extra functionality it brings with PC optimization. It is not resource-intensive and the Gamer mode does actually work. I noticed a 4fps-15fps jump when it is activated over my prior AV software. I think this is a buy, especially for those who are looking for basic protection.

    I would recommend this to a friend
  • Cons mentioned:
    Huge amount of files
    Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 3 out of 5 stars

    For MACs, only an antivirus program, nothing else

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    If you are looking for a full featured security suite for a MAC, keep looking. This premium product only serves MAC with an antivirus program. No other features are included, and per the support folks nothing else is needed. I would love to have tried the network filtering/monitoring, and other things, but they are not in the MAC version. As for being an anti-virus for MAC, I installed it while concurrently running ESET's full security suite for MAC. It worked in harmony with it, and BOTH programs recognized the EICAR test file for testing an anti-virus program - frankly this is the easy bait for a program test, but the only one I know of that should be used as the bar for testing. The only concern I have, and I don't know that I ever really realized an answer to it, while it was scanning my huge amount of files, it said that it had detected a threat (went from 0 to 1) and then later, while still scanning, it went back to a 0. Not sure what that threat was, or what happened to it, it never showed as anything found in the log or in quarantine. So this is a bit of a mystery. I guess it works okay, and having 2 programs searching for a virus vs. just 1 is a plus in my book. And both did find the EICAR test files, so that is a plus too. If I had a Windows computer available to do testing, I would have gotten the full experience. And I have IOS, not Android, so I was unable to test any of the Android features as well.

    I would recommend this to a friend
  • Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 4 out of 5 stars

    All in one antivirus: so simple

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    A good option for all-in-one shop core antivirus. I appreciate the fact that is right for all my house devices. With 10 licenses, I can install it on the two android tablets, in my android phone, our laptops, also ok to install in my daughter's mac. The subscription includes the antivirus, the internet subscription, and for the android the anti-theft identity protection. Installation is very simple, after downloading the first version (in my android), I created my account and introduced the license. All other installations are done directly from my account and after downloading the app. In the account, I directly follow the number of licenses that I used so far. One single downloading page automatically recognizes the version to download: for android, for mac, or windows. That can not be easier. A couple of details: 1.- The windows software includes a couple of nice functionalities in addition to more traditional antivirus (antiphishing, antimalware), which are the game booster and parental control. In both cases, they received the endorsement of my son. 2.- The windows installation takes longer than in android but (see above) the software to download Is more complete (and includes the last virus updates). 3.- Running the antivirus for a full scan on your laptop could you take up to 15 minutes. After the full scan, the auto-scan runs, while you are web surfing or gaming, which is not noticeable nor lacking. Only one aspect that took one star from my review: the VPN functionality is not included. Too bad because that this could be the most complete antivirus that I owned. If you say all in one, VPN absence is noticeable. Yes, I recommend thanks to its simplicity but save some money to add the VPN license.

    I would recommend this to a friend
  • Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 3 out of 5 stars

    Easy to defeat Parental Controls

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    Disclaimer: I am a member of Best Buy’s Technical Insider Network, TIN for short. Reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews. Impressions: There are a lot of features here but I only have room to those that stood out to me during my short time with the product. BullGuard Premium Protection suite covers your system from virus attacks, phishing, malware, and network vulnerabilities. It includes a firewall, PC tune-up utilities, cloud backup, parental controls, and a secure browser. During my first week of use I did not run into any virus, phishing, or malware attacks. I went to several unsavory sites that I would normally associate with security vulnerability. Either I am very lucky, or Bulldog did a great job of running interference for any nefarious applications trying to take advantage of me. This does not mean that BullGuard did a good job or that the experience was wonderful. Just the opposite. I found the BullGuard interface to be clunky. And the parental controls were so easy to bypass that I would call the implementation irresponsible. Parental Controls: As parents, we must accept that the internet is also raising our children. We also must accept that fact that we cannot 100% monitor 100% of our children’s activity. That’s why automated monitoring and filtering tools are a necessity to help protect our children from content that is considered inappropriate for their age group. BullGuard’s parental controls allows you to use pre-defined profiles for ages 3-7, 8-12, and 13-17. The content restriction categories are Adult, Controversial, Communications or Media, and Shopping and Entertainment. You can also explicitly define safe and unsafe sites. Access controls allows you to set activity times including times of day, hours per day, total usage time, and set the time limit type to entire PC or Internet only. Applications auto block Instant messaging programs. The section allows you to allow chat on with certain applications. You can also add applications to the list. Finally, Privacy settings allow you to setup a filter to prevent user-defined data from being shared. Information such as a phone number or home address that can be easily collected from a child. To test this, I set myself up under the most restrictive controls; 3–7-year-old. The first thing I noticed was that many of my services stopped working. Surprisingly, OneDrive was blocked. That made no sense to me. The Epic game client was also blocked. BullGuard does not give me any mechanism to override this behavior. Maybe this blocking is tied into another feature in parental controls but there is no way of knowing without turning each option on and off to verify a behavior. I tried to go to popular sites and perform content searches to see what BullGuard would let me get away with. First, BullGuard blocked me from going to popular sites like xbox.com and bestbuy.com. So, no shopping or gaming. I also tried to hit some less popular sites associated with alcohol, drugs, and social media. Again, the sites were blocked. Performing searches did not fare as well. BullGuard did not filter any content from the search engine. I believe BullGuard relied completely on the web browser to filter content. For example, MS Edge uses Safe Search. By default, Safe Search is set to moderate. If I perform a search that could bring up adult content, then safe search would filter out those results. However, I can easily adjust Safe Search from Moderate to Off from either the Video or Image search pages. Once I make the change, I can view any illicit imagery associated with the search. BullGuard makes zero attempt to block me, a 3–7-year-old child, from adjusting my own search restrictions. Worse, BullGuard makes it super easy to circumvent the parental controls. BullGuard has its own browser called Secure Browser. It may be secure, but it is not impacted by the Parental controls. With the Secure Browser, with 3–7-year-old parental controls applied, I was able to shop for alcohol, browse adult content, access any website regardless that I explicitly blocked the site, and could access all sorts of content I would not my child to access. You can mitigate this by deleting the shortcut from the desktop. However, your child can still open the BullGuard Secure Browser from the BullGuard Control panel. This is a huge hole in the system. Either BullGuard needs to integrate parental controls with Secure Browser or block Secure Browser. Parental Controls Logging: BullGuard Messaging Centre keeps a log of parental control activity. The Messaging Centre gives a very high-level view of activity. For Parental Controls, you will see User, number of blocks per category, and time spent on the system. Clicking the View Report button will generate a detailed activity log along the option to expand the details for each entry. The only downside I see to this log is that the system does not automatically email the log to the parent. Active monitoring is always better than passive monitoring. And I can tell you from experience with my own children, illicit material is easy to come by when looking for images of relatively innocent content. As a parent, you may never find out about it with passive reporting. Setup: Setup was easy and disappointing at the same time. Most security suites I have used will detect and offer to remove previously installed security suits. BullGuard installed alongside McAfee. This caused the real-time file scanner to fail. This state persisted until I manually removed McAfee. I would never know that there was an issue a BullGuard function if I had not been actively monitoring the logs. User Interface: The BullGuard interface is functional but needs a usability pass. There is a disconnect between Settings, application features, and logging. Don’t get me wrong. BullGuard collects logging information far more than any other consumer security suite I have used. Control over the Firewall is very good. But there is no unified interface that presents everything in a unified interface. It took me a while to discover the quarks of the UI to find all the features, logging, and settings. In some cases, like with Home Network Scanner, I have not found my way back to the port scanning report. One more note regarding Logging. Neither Norton nor McAfee allows you to see detailed logging information. If you are into metrics or taking a more direct control over your system security, then BullGuard will provide you with that level of control. The downside is that you will need to do a little hunting to piece together actionable information. VPN: VPN is only available in the Premium Protection as a 7-day trial. After which, it is a separate annually recuring fee. Home Network Scanner: I like this feature. It is a unique feature that I have not seen in a consumer security suite before. The Home Network Scanner will scan the network for all connected network devices. It then will perform a vulnerability scan on each device. However, BullGuard seems to collect a minimum amount of data on those devices. For example, can identify an iPad, a cell phone, a TV, and a computer (sometimes). It will show me the network names, IP Addresses, and MACs. It will also report if the device is exposing my network to external attacks. I thought I found a port scanning log, once, but I cannot navigate back to it. Also, I did not find any information telling me if BullGuard did anything with the network scan to further strengthen the network. For example, does BullGuard capture behavior data of my smart devices, builds a behavioral profile, and then alerts me to any activity that deviates from the profile? The Home Network Scanner does not differentiate how each device is connected to the network. Nor will it create a network map. My home network is made up of two wireless networks and several devices hard wired to my wireless router. BullGuard’s Home Network Scanner will identify all devices on the network. It also misreports all the devices on my network to be on the same wireless network as the computer making the scan. One cool feature of the Home Network Scanner is the auto notification of any device connecting to the network. This is great for uncovering when a neighbor, or someone else, is piggy backing on my network to enjoy an evening of free internet on my dime. Final thoughts: I cannot recommend BullGuard. I just don’t feel that they had the average user in mind when designing the user interface. It is not dumbed down as either Norton or McAfee. Nor does it need to be. A unified user interface, larger buttons, and contextual help would go long way to making this product more consumer friendly. Parental controls need a quality pass. BullGuard has received numerous awards for security. Unfortunately, I will need to rely on those experts because I did not encounter a security threat while using BullGuard. And no security threats were reported in BullGuard's security log.

    No, I would not recommend this to a friend
  • Pros mentioned:
    10 devices
    Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 5 out of 5 stars

    One solution for all devices!

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    BullGuard Premium Protection offers online protections for up to 10 devices on all platforms. So if you are a family that has Apple, Android and Windows - you can cover them all with this one purchase. It is easy to install and non invasive. It just runs in the background and is not as bothersome as some other programs. We have a ton of devices connected to our home - so I feel better knowing this is running on our systems.

    I would recommend this to a friend
  • Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 4 out of 5 stars

    good protection

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    overall i am pleased to have BullGuard protection. I like that you can download it onto 10 devices. so far i just have downloaded it onto windows devices. i have i believe 7 windows computers/laptops at least. so this was nice to have and know i can download onto all of my computers. the menu is pretty easy to use. it has a gaming mode that boosts your pc when you game. i believe this just turns off unwanted programs that are in the background that are not needed while you game. why 4 star though. maybe its just me, but when i do a scan, i like to have it come up and tell me what was done, if it found any threats, and if it fixed any threats etc. i have ran scans and nothing seems to pop up. outside of that though love it. just wished it would tell me if it found 0 threats or how ever many etc.

    I would recommend this to a friend
  • Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 5 out of 5 stars

    Great for gamers

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    This software is easy to install and configuration settings are set to go for most upon install. The interface is clean and each software module has it's settings in clean drop down menus. Scans are quick even for full scans on large hard drives. Updates can be set for automatic as frequently as every hour. What really sets BullGuard apart is what a great job it does on maximizing gaming performance. Not only does it stop notifications while playing, but it also combines all other running processes on one CPU core so the rest are free for maximum performance. I am running it on a high-end gaming desktop with a ten core processor. All my games run better and I never get annoying notifications that knock my HDR out of whack while playing a game. I feel confident it is keeping my computer secure and my games performing at their highest level.

    I would recommend this to a friend
  • Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 5 out of 5 stars

    protect your information!

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    You never really think you will get hacked and someone will get your information but in reality in can happen to anyone. Someone recently applied for unemployment by using my social security which my hospital caught because I am still employed but my info is now out there. No clue how but it is. Your personal information protection is invaluable. I hope this can fix any leaks in my network while keeping an eye out on the info that already made its way to some corner of the internet. Take it from me, network and internet protection is much more effective before your info is stolen. Keep yourself safe. Very easy installation process for full protection.

    I would recommend this to a friend
  • Pros mentioned:
    Parental controls
    Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 2 out of 5 stars

    works but not for the faint of heart...

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    I immediately got several false positives saying my already installed AV software was infected. The user interface is not the easiest to navigate to me. I found that it seemed they wanted to sell you additional services such as VPN instead of being included. The software installation process was a little slow even on a faster desktop machine with an NVMe drive. It was able to scan my network and detect my other systems and TVs, but says they are all secure. It does have built in backup capabilties which are nice but seems a little clunky. It has parental controls and identity protection as well. The UI also does not scale very well for systems with a larger monitor. This made it awkward to use and manage the configuration. The repeating false positives alone makes it hard to recommend this product. This would simply scare most people and prompt them to buying more support and services.

    No, I would not recommend this to a friend
  • Tech Insider Network Member

    Rated 5 out of 5 stars

    Multifunctional security

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    Tech Insider Network Member
    Posted .
    This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.

    The BullGuard premium protection is well worth it. It provides anti-virus, firewall, vulnerability checks, backup options, PC optimization and game booster functions. It also gives you identity protection and parental control options, along with a home network scanner that checks your entire network for possible vulnerability issues. It is simple to install, and you can use it for up to 10 devices. There is a setting for mobile devices so that you can locate and lock your device if it is lost.

    I would recommend this to a friend
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