BitDefender Anti-Virus Review
Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 9:58PM
Update: See an updated review of the Zenith rollout of BitDefender
At work we are moving to a new anti-virus solution because one of our main partners (Zenith Infotech) has decided that they did not want to move to AVG 8 from 7.5. AVG 7.5 will no longer be supported by AVG Technologies after December 31st, and there is no upgrade path. So regardless of whether they stuck with AVG or went with another solution the transition would suck. Well, Zenith decided to go with BitDefender.
I was a bit wary of this, as AVG has been my anti-virus of choice for both enterprise and home users for years now. AVG just does a great job of keeping out of my way and does a fine job detecting and preventing malware. Well, my wariness was warranted. After about a month of use now, I have seen that BitDefender is definitely not up to par with AVG. At first glance it had a nice, simple interface which could definitely be easily used by end users. BUT, I have kept running into problems with it. For some reason it keeps freaking out on my XP laptop, randomly stopping the BitDefender services every other day or so, and telling me to reboot the computer! I know better than that, and just go to services.msc and restart it in there, but the end users that I support won't. That alone will result in a lot of angry calls if happens to my clients. But it doesn't end there...
BitDefender also randomly decided it wanted to lose my licensing information and tell me that I had not registered the product, when I most definitely had. I really hope that this is just me having these problems, but I will see very soon. We are beginning a rollout company wide sometime next week, so I am really hoping that these issues don't crop up. If they do, not sure what we will do as I would not feel comfortable installing it on customer machines whatsoever.
Summary: BitDefender = Bad
Reader Comments (8)
Hi Rob,
How did your deployment end up in the end?
We're in the process of converting our clients as well and have been having the exact issues you've encountered. (We're also using Zenith). Have you found fixes to the issues you mentioned?
Thanks in advance!
Jason
Jason,
We are still in the process of working through the kinks. I am about to install BitDefender on our first client machine today, a small shop and only on a single machine at first. Waiting for the licenses to get generated as we speak.
We have actually ran into more trouble, we installed the BitDefender Management Console on one of our servers internally, and it caused our MS CRM to stop working. We initially thought it might be due to a conflict between SQL Express (which BitDefender installs) and SQL '05 (which CRM uses), so we got Microsoft involved. They did say that it could be an issue, but that in this case it wasn't. So my co-worker just uninstalled the console and CRM popped back up no problem.
Needless to say, we are a bit pissed. The majority of our clients have a single server, and a lot of them are running apps that require a SQL back end. This is quickly turning into a nightmare.
As for my own machine running BitDefender... things have gotten better. For whatever reason, it is no longer stopping the BitDefender service every other day. Maybe an update fixed that? However, it did require me create an account with BitDefender before it would send out more updates, and I wasn't very pleased about that. I'm assuming that if there is a Management Console every single user in the organization won't have to do that.
Overall, I just don't understand why Zenith decided to go with BitDefender. It seems like we are the beta testers for this product. It might have great detection levels, but if it is impossible to manage or keep running than those detection levels are worthless. I'm assuming that they got BitDefender cheaper, gotta keep those licensing costs down!
Anyways, thanks for the comment and good luck in your own rollout!
Check out Kaseya, they just released their latest version of KES which integrates AVG 8.0. We started migrating customers from Zenith and its pretty seamless. No ports to open, no server console installs, everything deployed & managed from one central location.
Well, that would be a pretty huge change for us. We are hugely integrated into the Zenith model, I really don't see us going away from Zenith anytime soon.
But I am interested, what does Kaseya use for remote support? Zenith greatly improved their remote support by integrating LogMeIn Reach. How does Kaseya compare with reporting options?
Thanks for stopping by!
Kaseya offers 5 options for Remote Support. We use their version of RealVNC for workstations and RDP for servers. Both are tunneled through Kaseya so we don't have to install anything separately, open any ports or configure anything. It is rock solid and works great. They also have a nice feature that allows us to RC our other B/F clients without installing an agent on them. As with everything in Kaseya it is incredibly powerful but a little overwhelming, meaning you can do just about anything you can imagine but it does require some set up. They have a true executive summary report which is no more than 2 pages long but at the same time you can get extremely granular reporting as well.
Thanks for that info Alex. Sounds like overall you are very impressed with Kaseya, but is there anything that you miss from Zenith? Or did you not use Zenith all that much in the first place?
Just saying that are +/- to every piece of software : )
We are currently switching from Kaseya to Zenith. The problem we found with Kaseya it that there is too much set up. I really like the patch management in Zenith, they do the management for you. In Kaseya you approve the patches, and the deploy them to machines yourself.
The BDR system seems far more advanced than the Acronis software bundled with Kaseya.
This is not to say that either Kaseya or Acronis are bad products, in fact we on a pretty large number of licenses, and will continue to use it for certain customers.
Sounds like Kaseya is more along the lines of Silverback then. A very powerful tool, but one that takes a lot of upfront tuning to really use effectively. I really haven't heard of another managed services solution like Zenith, where they have a service desk, patch management, a great backup product etc. Their new Data Center in a Rack sounds awesome as well, I will probably write up a post about that at some point.