This is likely due to the program indexing the system and analyzing only files that have changed since the previous scan. Malwarebytes' full-scan completion time is a shockingly short 16 seconds, almost 3 hours less than Sophos' 2-hour and 56-minute time, and also shorter than middle-of-the-pack entrants like Kaspersky (41:20) and Norton (25:49). That's not as bad as McAfee AntiVirus Plus' 47% fall (the worst offender), although it wasn't as good as Sophos' 7% full-scan system hit. During full-system scans, the VLOOKUP test finished in an average of 4 minutes and 41 seconds, for a sizable performance dip of 31 percent. You would be more likely to notice the slowdowns created by Malwarebytes' active scans.

Still, this is overall great news for Mac users: Most of the time, you'll never notice that you've got antivirus software running. Still, other antivirus products' passive system impacts ranged from 5% ( Sophos Home Premium) to zero percent (Bitdefender), placing Malwarebytes in the middle of the spectrum. That's a passive system hit of 2%, which may be hard to notice. With Malwarebytes for Mac Premium installed on our MacBook, and no active scans running, the VLOOKUP test finished in an average of 3 minutes and 40 seconds, 5 seconds more than without any antivirus software installed. Our test machine was a 2017 MacBook Air with a 1.8-GHz Intel Core i5 CPU and approximately 54GB of data stored on a 128GB SSD. Malwarebytes for Mac Premium created a medium-size impact on system performance, which we assess by running our custom Excel VLOOKUP benchmark test that matches 60,000 names and addresses on a spreadsheet. Malwarebytes for Mac Premium: Performance and system impact But if you're looking for Malwarebytes to keep someone else's system safe, and they're not tech-savvy, this may not be enough. Personally, I find that OK, as I don't need anything more, and all that other stuff always feels like overkill. That means it's missing the search-monitoring browser extensions you get with other solutions, the email-monitoring in Avast and the parental controls of Kaspersky.

Malwarebytes for Mac Premium keeps things simple and standard, with a no-frills package that's focused on fighting malware. (Image credit: Malwarebytes) Malwarebytes for Mac Premium: Security and privacy features

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