Security companies tend to offer several tiers of protection, so users can find their desired balance between price and features. For some, antivirus is sufficient. Others want the added protection found in a full security suite. And some will spring for the feature-rich security mega-suite. The key factor for the company is to achieve the right balance of features to make each tier desirable. BullGuard Premium Protection, the mega-suite in this family, adds identity protection and a network monitor to the features in BullGuard's entry-level suite. That's not a lot of additional protection, but a quirk in pricing makes it a better deal than BullGuard Internet Security. For $99.95 per year, you can install BullGuard on 10 devices. Upping the subscription to $139.95 raises that limit to 15 devices. You can use your licenses on Windows, Android, or macOS devices, but the Mac product is sub-par. The strange thing is, a 10-device subscription for BullGuard Internet Security goes for $140.95, a dollar more than you'd pay for a 15-device subscription to BullGuard Premium Protection. My company contacts verified that these prices are correct. View All 8 Photos in Gallery For comparison, you pay $99.99 per year for a 10-license subscription to Bitdefender, roughly the same as BullGuard. Norton's top suite costs $109.99 per year for 10 licenses, but it also gives you 25GB of hosted online storage for your backups, something BullGuard doesn't offer. Kaspersky Security Cloud charges $149.99 for 20 licenses. McAfee LiveSafe goes for $99.99 per year, which gives you unlimited license to install protection on your Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. Like other BullGuard products, this suite's main window features two rows of square panels with colorful icons representing security components. Panels for Identity Protection and Home Network Scanner join the seven panels present in the entry-level suite. All three products can shrink the main window's width so that only three and a half columns are visible, with a slider to bring the hidden ones into view. With Premium Protection, that mode can be useful. Required Reading My typical pattern for reviewing a security company's product line starts with thoroughly evaluating and reviewing the antivirus. When I review the entry-level security suite, I summarize the antivirus review but focus on features specific to the suite. And if there's a mega-suite with even more features, I summarize previous reviews and focus on those additions. As I mentioned, this suite adds two significant features beyond what you get with BullGuard Internet Security, which earned a 2.5 star rating due to its uneven feature quality. Rather than give a detailed summary of that review, I'm going to send you off to read it. When you're done, come back here and learn about the network scanner and identity protection components. Note that the Facebook activity tracker from the previous edition is gone. That's no loss, since it wasn't working at the time of my review. Identity Protection If a data breach results in your personal data floating around the dark web, the sooner you know about it the better your chances of avoiding full-fledged identity theft. BullGuard's identity protection (provided by Experian) warns you the moment your personal data shows up on the internet or the dark web. Check Point ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus+ provides a similar service, in partnership with Identity Guard. You manage BullGuard's identity protection service by logging into your online BullGuard account, the same place you go to manage mobile security. To start, you set up a separate passcode for the identity protection service. Next, you fill in the information you want monitored. On the Personal Details page, you enter data including your name, SSN, date of birth, driver's license number, and passport number. The Financial Details page takes as many bank account or credit card numbers as you care to enter. For security purposes, you only enter the first six and last four digits of credit card numbers. Finally, on the Contact Details page you enter addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. With your personal data in place, it's time to check the Summary page. If the identity protection system found any of your personal details exposed, you'll see a big red warning image at the top. A red warning icon flags the item or items that triggered the alert. If it was a credit card, you enter the missing four digits for final verification. I found the system overall to be sluggish, awkward, and poorly designed. I experienced significant delays between clicking a button or link and seeing the results. Each detail item has a small info icon, but rather than offering information in a tooltip, clicking the icon slowly dims the entire window and displays a small popup with little useful data. And the summary page itself has a weird internal vertical scroll bar, totally unnecessary since the browser itself has a scroll bar. Fortunately, you only need to set it up once. The benefit of an early warning system to head off identity theft far outweighs the minor inconvenience of awkward setup. Home Network Scanner The Home Network Scanner component is new in this edition of BullGuard. When you launch a scan, it starts listing every device connected to your network. You may be surprised at the number of devices it turns up. In addition, it pops up a notification when a new device connects. Like Bitdefender Home Scanner, BullGuard checks all the found devices for security flaws. If your main router also provides Wi-Fi, as many do, one scan is all you need. If, as in my own network, you have a separate Wi-Fi router, you may need to run one scan from a device with a wired connection and another from a device that connects over Wi-Fi. Of course, this would be true of any software-based network scanner. On my test system, each scan took about 15 minutes, which is par for the course. Bitdefender Box, from the same company, is a hardware solution to full network security. I checked with my sources at the company and learned that with proper configuration and connections the Box should be able to secure both networks in the scenario described above. BullGuard reports the name and type of each found device, along with the manufacturer's name and IP address. You can click for details of any found problems, or to get the device's MAC address. Network wizards can drill down to view open ports and other such arcana. Some devices don't supply a name, or supply an unintelligible name, and some don't report the correct device type. Like Bitdefender and Glasswire, BullGuard lets you edit the name and change the device type. Of course, you need a certain amount of network savvy to figure out which device is which, based on the IP address and MAC address. Avast offers a network security scanner in all products, even Avast Free Antivirus. It creates a similar device list, calling out any with problems. However, it doesn't let you assign names to unknown devices. Network scanning in Panda Antivirus Pro works only on Wi-Fi networks. In addition to warning about insecure Wi-Fi and listing all connected devices, it lets you block access for unauthorized devices. The network scanner in ESET Internet Security performs a similar function as the others described here, but it reports its findings very differently. Devices appear as icons, in concentric circle around the main router. Currently connected devices show up in the inner circle, while those that the scanner hasn't seen for a while drift to the outer circles. Besides numerous computers, smartphones, and tablets, the modern connected home contains any number of smart devices, from remote-viewing doorbells to internet-aware toasters. You can't install security on your connected garage door opener, so scanning everything on the system for security flaws is a very, very good idea. A Better Deal BullGuard Premium Protection includes the complete feature set of BullGuard Internet Security, warts and all. It adds two very useful components, identity protection and network security scanning. Note, though, that Bitdefender Home Scanner gives you network scanning for free, and Check Point ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus+ includes identity protection. A quirk in pricing does make this product a better deal than the entry-level suite, so if you're a die-hard BullGuard fan, choose Premium Protection. In the realm of cross-platform multidevice security suites, Symantec Norton Security Premium is our Editors' Choice. It offers top-notch protection for Windows, macOS, and Android devices, plus limited iOS protection. Its antivirus aces our hands-on test, all of its components are top quality, and it comes with 25GB of hosted storage for your online backups, all for just $10 more than BullGuard's 10-license price. BullGuard Premium Protection Bottom Line: BullGuard Premium Protection adds identity protection and network security scanning to the uneven features of BullGuard Internet Security. The added features are worthwhile, and a quirk in pricing makes Premium Protection a better deal.

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