Today i will talk about some of the best AV solutions that are available for free for home and personal use. I have tried to put together a small list of good free AV solutions available. Just a note here, the order doesn’t indicate any ranking. Take a look at these and give them a try if you are not ready to buy a Antivirus solution.

Panda Cloud AV

This is something different. Panda Cloud Antivirus is the first free cloud-based antivirus thin-client consisting of a lightweight antivirus agent  connected in real-time to PandaLabs’ Collective Intelligence servers to protect faster against the newest malware variants while barely impacting PC performance.

This one has performed great on my system when i was testing it few weeks back. Just check this out and perhaps you may even keep using it even though you intend to buy a  paid AV solution.

Avast

Avast Antivirus is free for home and personal use. You need not pay anything to use it. It works quiet well on your system providing real time capabilties along with regular updates of virus definition. The interface can be quite confusing sometime and you can change its skins too ( Not seen in any other AV product). A good bet if you are not ready to buy a commercial or paid Antivirus solution for your system.

AVG

AVG provides both Free and Paid versions of its Antivirus solutions. Its the most popular Free Antivirus solution. The Paid version provides some additional functionality over the free one but both of them got real time scan capabilities. AVG can be a bit resource hungry on your system sometimes. Another good bet if you need a free AV for your system.

Avira

Just like AVG , Avira too have a free and paid version. It works well with less resources and it’s one of my favorites if you ask my choice in Free Anti Virus category.  The reason being its good virus detection, a better interface and low on resources. This is my personal opinion and not based on extensive tests.

Bitdefender Free

It is a cut down version of Bitdefender Anti Virus solution, the only problem with this version is that it doesn’t have real time scan capability and hence its not recommended to use to run on a fully working system. It can be used to clean already infected files but it can not prevent your system from being infected.

ClamWin

It is a open source GNU licensed anti virus solution but lacks real time scan capabilities. ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner. You need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus or spyware. Though it provides good detection capabilities along with integration to Windows explorer, this is not a full AV solution for any system

Comodo Internet Security

It is a combination of “Comodo AntiVirus + Comodo Firewall”. Many of you must have heard some good things about Comodo Firewall. It provides everything that you need to protect your computer from viruses and other malicious stuff. It includes real-time On Access scanning, Built in scheduler  to schedule scans ,moving suspicious files in quarantine preventing infection, automatic updates of virus definitions and Simple to use.

Microsoft Essentials

It is the security solution provided by Microsoft for free for Windows operating system. Even though its not that good compared to paid solution, it is one of the good ones in Free Category. The detection rate is not bad but it may be heavy on resources sometimes.

Hope i was able to cover all the good ones. Tell me if i missed your favorite one in comments below.