It was very difficult to find a place online to write customer reviews for Aura Antivirus, so I’m turning to Reddit. I’ve had Aura for a little over a year now, and here’s my review:
Big Issues:
- I stopped using Aura for an alarming issue with their antivirus - on a Windows 11 machine, Aura caused Blue Screens of Death loops 3 minutes after PC booting due to kernel mode heap and stack corruptions, i.e. badly written code running in Kernel mode. I spent $250 on a laptop repair shop, only to have the issue start again in a few weeks. Removing the software in Safe mode instantly stopped the BSOD loop. I canceled a few days later, and they did not refund me for their issue. Not only is this incredibly frustrating and hindered my work, it’s actively dangerous, as unstable code running in kernel mode is begging for exploitation, data breaches, etc.
What I liked:
- Their identity theft monitoring service, which caught an illegitimate attempt to open a bank account in my name.
- The VPN was simple and easy to use, I never had any issues with it.
- I liked the simplicity of the products; there were fewer simpler settings to choose from (often just “on” or “off”), in contrast with the noise of many products today.
Other miscellaneous issues that were annoying, but not worth leaving for:
- They will flag a password as “reused” if you use an ID and PW for both an online account and a mobile app. It usually forces you to save these as separate accounts, because it won’t autopopulate from one or the other unless you do.
- The UI is clunky, and doesn’t allow you to manage things in a timely manner. For example, if you have old unused passwords and you want to delete them, you must individually select each one, wait for a UI, click a dropdown, click on delete, confirm the delete, and then navigate back to where you were on the list, because it refreshed you back to the top of your list.
- The “vault” service randomly started asking me to confirm document IDs on their website before I could autopopulate passwords. This confirmation had software issues, and did not work; it kept saying I had an error and looped like that endlessly. I stopped being able to use the password manager entirely after this.
- The antivirus quarantined programs without ANY notifications sometimes. As a developer, this was infuriating, and led to many hours trying to fruitlessly figure out why things weren’t working. As an example of this, it quarantined python’s main executable randomly without telling me.
- The Password Manager on the android mobile app had a bug for some time where tapping on the password I wanted to use did nothing.
I hope this helps anyone out there trying to figure out whether or not to purchase this software.
