Comodo Internet Security Pro Review

Antivirus protection is at the core of every security suite, and it’s almost always paired with a firewall. Comodo Internet Security Pro builds on the many features of Comodo’s free antivirus, adding a full-powered firewall and a malware-fighting guarantee, but that’s it. On the plus side, it’s priced more like a standalone antivirus than a suite. Even so, you’ll be better off paying for our Editors’ Choice-award-winning entry-level security suite, Bitdefender Internet Security, which combines a rich set of features with a collection of excellent scores from the testing labs.

How Much Does Comodo Internet Security Pro Cost?

When I last reviewed Comodo’s security line, it included a free suite called Comodo Internet Security Premium and a commercial suite named Comodo Internet Security Complete. The latter cost $89.99 per year for three licenses. That price, roughly in line with top-tier suites from other companies, didn’t jibe with the suite’s relatively limited capabilities.

It’s Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online

Pricing for the current Comodo Internet Security Pro is quite different. At $29.99 per year, it’s less expensive than any competitor except K7 Total Security, which goes for $27 per year. You can get a three-license Comodo pack for $39.99, just $10 more. At that tier, it undercuts K7, which runs you $41 per year for three licenses. Most competitors cost more per year at the three-license tier, from $55.95 for G Data Internet Security to $84.99 for Bitdefender Internet Security.

Many suites offer additional volume discount tiers that protect five devices, 10 devices, or even more. For example, a five-license Bitdefender subscription costs $89.99 per year. Norton 360 Deluxe goes for $119.99 per year, but that gets you five suite licenses, five no-limits VPN licenses, and 50GB of online storage for backups. You pay still more for McAfee+, but your $149.99 subscription lets you protect all the devices in your household, whether they run Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, or ChromeOS. Comodo Internet Security doesn’t offer discounts past the three-license level.

Getting Started With Comodo Internet Security Pro

After a quick installation, Comodo presents a page of permissions for your consideration. As with the free antivirus, switching to Comodo’s DNS servers is a security upgrade if you’re currently relying on what your ISP supplies. You may want to think twice about letting Comodo send untrusted files to the cloud for analysis, because PDFs and other potentially sensitive documents can be considered untrusted. As for sharing anonymous program usage data, there’s little harm in that.

(Credit: Comodo/PCMag)

When I last reviewed Comodo’s suite, it looked almost identical to the free antivirus. The current edition has quite a different look. A big green shield icon containing a Comodo “C” dominates its main screen, with a large green button to launch a quick scan. If there’s any problem with protection, the shield and button turn red, and clicking the button restores proper operation.

(Credit: Comodo/PCMag)

A simple menu at left includes four unlabeled icons whose labels appear when you hover the mouse over them. The General button returns to the main screen described above. The other three, labeled Protection, Analysis, and Tools, serve up additional program features.

Features Shared With Antivirus

Naturally, when you pay for this security suite, you get every feature that comes in Comodo Free Antivirus. Please read that review for my complete findings; I’ll summarize here.

Independent antivirus testing labs around the world put antivirus apps through rigorous testing and regularly report their results. I follow four such labs, but only one of them includes Comodo in its latest reports. Experts at SE Labs use a replay technique to challenge multiple antivirus systems with identical real-world malware attacks. Each antivirus can earn certification at one of five levels: AAA, AA, A, B, and C. Comodo earned AA certification, which is good. However, in the last five years of such tests, 84% of antiviruses tested have reached the top (AAA) level.

When multiple scores are available, I use an algorithm to derive an aggregate score on a 10-point scale. With just one score, Comodo doesn’t qualify for an aggregate score. Among those tested by all four labs, Avast One Silver holds the top score, 9.6 of 10 possible points, with Microsoft Defender Antivirus next at 9.3 points.

(Credit: Comodo/PCMag)

Comodo offers a variety of antivirus scan choices in addition to the typical full scan, quick scan, and custom scan. You can scan to see what trust level Comodo’s database assigns to your files. If tough malware resists cleanup, you can run the cleanup-only Comodo Cleaning Essentials. Interestingly, the free edition has a built-in option to burn a Rescue Disk, which boots into an alternate operating system, leaving Windows-centric malware powerless. That option doesn’t appear in the Pro edition, though you’re free to go online and download the Rescue Disk.

In my hands-on malware protection test, Comodo scored 7.0 of 10 possible points. That’s the lowest score of any antivirus tested with my current sample set, and among the lowest of those tested using previous samples. Tested with the current samples, Avast and AVG both managed a near-perfect 9.9 points, while Norton and Malwarebytes Premium Security reached 9.8.

The separately installed Comodo Online Security browser extension should keep your browser away from dangerous and fraudulent websites, but it didn’t perform well in testing. It blocked access to only 2% of malware-hosting URLs. Comodo caught another 61% at download time, but its overall 63% protection rate is lower than almost all current antivirus tools. At the other end of the scale, Bitdefender, Guardio, Sophos Home Premium, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm all scored a perfect 100% in their latest iterations of this test.

Comodo performed even worse in my phishing protection test, scoring a big fat zero. The phishing protection component built into Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer vastly outperformed Comodo. Others have pegged the needle at the high end of the score meter. Guardio, McAfee+, Trend Micro Internet Security, and ZoneAlarm scored 100 percent in their latest phishing tests, as did the phishing-centric Norton Genie.

By default, Comodo’s containment system runs unknown programs in a virtual environment, so they can’t do any permanent damage. In testing, the containment system prevented two real-world ransomware samples from encrypting thousands of files, though one of them damaged hundreds files before being contained. Two other ransomware samples slipped past all layers of Comodo protection.

The free antivirus shares several other features with the suite reviewed here. A Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS) limits activities by unknown programs, though it affects both malware and legitimate programs alike. It doesn’t protect against exploit attacks the way HIPS does in some other security suites. Note that HIPS is disabled by default, and harder to find in the suite than in the antivirus. You really have to dig to find and enable it.

The tech-heavy Kill Switch utility, a separate installation, analyzes running processes and, at your command, terminates them. And the Virtual Desktop isolates your programs from the possibly compromised regular desktop.

Impressive Guarantee

One thing that distinguishes Comodo’s paid suite from the free antivirus is an impressive warranty. Comodo guarantees that if malware gets past the suite’s protection, support agents will spend as much time as it takes to remotely remediate the problem. In the unlikely event that the malware comes out victorious, the company will reimburse up to $500 in repair costs. Norton, ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, and McAfee offer similar guarantees, though they offer a simple refund of your purchase price, not reimbursement for repairs.

(Credit: Comodo/PCMag)

Don’t imagine, though, that you can install Comodo on some stanky old PC that’s dripping with malware and then immediately demand reimbursement. Quite reasonably, Comodo insists that you make sure the suite’s protective features are configured correctly, for starters. During the process of activating this warranty, it checks that you have Antivirus, Firewall, Auto-Containment, HIPS, and VirusScope behavioral analysis enabled, and that Comodo is configured to log all activity.

To finalize the activation process, you must run a full scan and deal with any found threats. After that, with the computer in a known clean state, the warranty kicks in. Where Norton, McAfee, and ZoneAlarm require you to sign up for automatic renewal if you want a guarantee, Comodo only insists that you configure your security correctly.

Comodo Firewall

Comodo offers its firewall as a free standalone, one that shares many ancillary features with the free antivirus. With powerful firewall protection built into Windows, we’re no longer convinced that you need a personal firewall, but it does make a nice addition for a security suite.

The firewall component handles port scans and other web-based attacks, putting the test system’s ports in stealth mode. That means they’re not merely closed to unauthorized access—they’re not even visible to outside attackers. Of course, Windows Firewall can do the same, so this is more a baseline than an accomplishment.

(Credit: Comodo/PCMag)

The other half of a typical personal firewall involves controlling how programs access the network and the internet. Some firewalls rely totally on the user to decide which programs can use the network, blasting out confusing pop-up queries. Others, like Norton, make all their own decisions. Norton automatically configures network permissions for known-good programs, exterminates known-bad ones, and puts any unknowns under heightened surveillance.

(Credit: Comodo/PCMag)

With Comodo’s firewall, the user has many choices—too many, in my opinion. The typical user who leaves all settings at their defaults gets only the simplest application control. Out of the box, the firewall runs in Safe Mode, which filters inbound and outbound traffic, but allows connection for programs that Comodo certifies as safe. You can switch to Training mode, which assumes all network activity is safe and creates rules to allow any traffic it sees. Going the other way, Custom Ruleset mode asks you what to do for every program the first time it appears.

I tried and tried to get the firewall to display a popup. I used a tiny browser that I wrote myself, something that would never be on a list of safe programs. I experimented with all three modes. Finally, I realized that I also needed to un-check a box titled “Do not show popup alerts.” Even then, the popup triggered only in Custom Ruleset mode, while I expected to see it in Safe mode as well. The average user will leave the defaults in place, meaning no alerts but also not much program control.

(Credit: Comodo/PCMag)

A burglar alarm with a big, accessible Off switch wouldn’t be much use; the same is true of security software with a Registry setting to turn off protection. Comodo exposes no such switch, fortunately. I couldn’t kill its processes using Task Manager or other task-kill tools. In previous tests I managed to reset the startup type for Comodo’s services to Disabled; this time, it protected its services against any modification. Like the best security suites, such as Norton and Bitdefender Internet Security, Comodo’s firewall is hardened against this kind of tampering.

What’s Not Here

The Comodo suite I last reviewed included a feature called Secure Shopping. This was effectively a stripped-down version of the Virtual Desktop feature, aimed at protecting legitimate programs. You can still download the free Secure Shopping tool separately, but it doesn’t seem to be included in the suite.

You can also download Comodo Backup separately, but it’s likewise absent from the suite reviewed here. You get 10GB of hosted storage with a free account. The version included when I last reviewed this suite offered 50GB of storage, the same as Norton. Or rather, it should have done so. At the time of that review, the backup system simply did not work.

(Credit: Comodo/PCMag)

One option in settings for the firewall is titled “Enable Trustconnect [sic] alerts.” It’s turned on by default, configured to offer a VPN connection any time you connect to an unsecured network. For testing purposes, I changed that to include any public network and tweaked the designation of my home network to public. Doing so revealed that this feature does nothing unless you’ve separately purchased the Comodo TrustConnect VPN.

Verdict: Lower Ambitions, at a Lower Price

With fewer features than the Comodo suite we’ve reviewed in the past, Comodo Internet Security Pro barely squeaks into the security suite space. To the company’s free antivirus it adds a hardy firewall, an impressive guarantee, and very little more. The antivirus fared poorly in testing, but the guarantee means you get expert help for any missed malware. And it’s priced way below most competing suites. Editors’ Choice award winner Bitdefender Internet Security costs more, but it’s worth the price. Bitdefender earns praise from the independent labs we track and packs in a bounty of useful security features.