Guardio Review and Pricing in 2025: A Browser-Based Antivirus

How Much Does Guardio Cost?

Here’s a full breakdown of Guardio’s three plans, including discounts for paying annually and every two years.

As you can see, Guardio’s pricing is straightforward: $119.88 per year for one user with up to five devices. That price may seem steep at first glance when you can grab either a Norton Deluxe antivirus subscription or our top-rated antivirus and VPN bundle Surfshark for half of that. But we really need to break down Guardio’s pricing to get an accurate picture of value for money.

>> Also: Our Top Antivirus and VPN Bundles of the Year

Guardio Compared to the Competition

The first thing to point out is that the best antiviruses usually offer honeymoon deals. You pay a lot less for the first year or so before the regular pricing sets in. For instance, you can purchase a Surfshark One plan for as little as $2.49 per month if you commit to 27 months. That’s dirt cheap. But after that, the monthly price jumps to $17.95 per month, which is kind of pricey. TotalAV, our top overall antivirus pick, works the same way. Guardio’s rates won’t go up or down.

>> In Case You’re Wondering: How Much Does a Quality Antivirus Cost?

The second thing to keep in mind with Guardio is what you get with your plan. Guardio doesn’t come with a VPN like Surfshark, TotalAV, Norton, and McAfee. It doesn’t come with any secure storage or a password manager either, like NordVPN’s VPN with antivirus bundles. And, most critically for your online security, Guardio isn’t a traditional antivirus that performs deep system scans. But it can provide real-time protection across your digital activity, whether you’re browsing on your laptop or on mobile devices.

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Guardio is also a newer product and uses some very advanced behavior-based detection to protect your devices. And because it doesn’t require any system software, it’s lightweight and hardly requires any setup. 

Guardio’s Features

As we touched on above, Guardio isn’t packed with tons of extra software like some of the heavyweight antiviruses we’ve tested in our reviews. Still, it offers some protections every antivirus ought to have. Here’s a rundown of Guardio’s best features:

• Browsing protection
• Extension protection
• Email and phone security
• Search hijacking protection
• Email security

Browsing Protection

Guardio lives in your browser and scans and cloud-tests any site you visit, so theoretically it should be very good at rooting out malicious online content. It also gives you a log of the bad sites it’s blocked so you can review its decisions and whitelist any over-aggressive choices.

>> Learn More: A Complete Guide to Private Browsers

Extension Protection

This is a very interesting feature and something we haven’t seen before. But we should see more of it because fraudsters love sneaking nasty stuff like Trojans and adware in through rotten extensions. Guardio has a separate tab for extension monitoring, where you can keep an eye on all your Chrome extensions, which is a nice touch.

>> Must Read: Do I Have Adware on My Computer?

Guardio protected us from downloading malicious extensions.

Dark Web Monitoring (for Email Addresses and Phone Numbers)

Dark web monitoring is pretty standard among premium antivirus packages that offer identity theft protection features. If your email or phone number falls victim to a data breach, Guardio will let you know. Guardio lists this feature as “identity monitoring” on their dashboard.

>> Also: The Best ID Monitoring Services We’ve Tested This Year

Search Hijacking Protection

Search, or browser, hijacking happens when a criminal sneaks malware like a worm onto your device that then takes control of your browser. It may force you to use a search engine you don’t normally use or lead you to scammy ads. It might even redirect you to bogus homepages, which can be very dangerous. Guardio claims to be able to detect hijacking attempts and redirect you to safety.

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Email Security

In addition to keeping watch over your email address, Guardio is also trained to recognize and flag dangerous spam, including malicious emails and phishing attacks. It does this not by checking potentially malicious messages against a database of known phishing scams — instead, it analyzes message content, sender reputation and link behavior, among other things. Obviously, this is another protection that every antivirus should have, so we were very excited to see it on our Guardio dashboard and even more excited to test it.

Getting Started with Guardio

The most important advice we can give you about setting up Guardio is not to create your account with an email alias. Email aliases, or masks, are burner addresses you can use for signups to keep your actual address out of the hands of data brokers. This is internet privacy 101, and a security precaution we always recommend, but Guardio doesn’t like aliases and won’t send your login verification code if you use one.

To sort this out, we had to involve support. Guardio’s (mostly) human email support is blazing fast in most cases, but they couldn’t help here. In the end, we deleted our original account and signed up again with a Gmail address. After some fairly minor hiccups, we were able to get Guardio up and running. We signed up for a premium plan, which gave us a full seven-day free trial of all Guardio’s advanced features.

As we mentioned up top, there’s not a lot to do with Guardio and no software to download. We logged into our Guardio account through the Chrome browser extension (above), which opened up our dashboard. Then Guardio led us through the rest of their four-step security set-up, which took a few minutes.

Our Experience: Guardio in Action

Malware can end up on our devices in a number of ways and it’s a zero-sum game. So if you’re going to invest in antivirus, whether you’re paying $3 a month or $10, it needs to work in every case. While Guardio worked quite well in some situations, it was hit or miss in others. Occasionally, it just left us scratching our heads as to just what was going on.

We try to duplicate the malware scenarios our readers might end up in. So in our first round of malware tests, we simply tried to sneak a few malicious files past Guardio. We used the Anti-Malware Testing Standard Organiztion’s (AMTSO) test viruses for these tests.3 AMTSO’s files simulate live viruses to trigger antivirus defense mechanisms, but aren’t actually malicious.

In our first test, Guardio performed well, flagging the virus before we could download it. But when we tried to smuggle the same virus past Guardio off a simulated page redirect — a common enough exploit used by hackers — it slipped right by.

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We also tried downloading viruses lurking in a battery of compressed files because, again, this could happen to anybody downloading an attachment. Guardio blocked some of the malware-laden files, but let others by. In some cases, it didn’t block the files but they didn’t end up in our downloads folder either, so we weren’t sure what was happening.

When we switched to Firefox, all the files landed in our downloads folder, which is what we expected. Guardio doesn’t work with Firefox. This highlights a key security issue with Guardio. You have to be browsing with Chrome; otherwise, you’re at risk.

Malicious Sites Tests

To push Guardio a little harder, we went to PhishTank and CERT, two phishing verification platforms that collect and register malicious URLs. We tried to access 50 random websites they’d flagged as dangerous. Out of those 50 attempts, Guardio flagged and blocked about half of the malicious URLs. That said, its catch rate for websites flagged by CERT, which is updated 24/7, was over 80 percent.

Guardio could make the case that it didn’t flag the bad sites because they weren’t dangerous. We wouldn’t really know. It also isn’t clear if our favorite antiviruses would have fared any better. However, there were a few cases that gave us pause.

One suspicious site Guardio didn’t catch was a website with a fake Nivea sweepstakes (and a possibly fraudulent signup form). This was a big miss. On subsequent visits to the same malicious sites, Guardio also often failed to give us any warnings. Even more puzzling, these second visits would show up on our dashboard as blocked when we’d just accessed them.

Phishing Tests

Guardio works with Gmail to spot phishing emails, so, again, you have to be fully committed to the Google ecosystem to take advantage of this feature.

Live testing phishing protection is a little tricky. Google is already pretty good at catching phishing scams and almost always flags them and sends them to our spam folders. We tried to trick Guardio anyway by crafting an email from a fake crypto outfit, peppering the email with all the usual phishing catchphrases: “dear user,” “urgent,” “confirm new password,” etc.

As expected, Google sent the email right to spam, which is a feather in Google’s cap. Unfortunately, Guardio was silent.

Guardio Mobile Experience

Guardio’s mobile app doesn’t use a browser extension so we could use any browser we wanted and stay protected — though we did test the app on both Firefox and Chrome just to make sure. The experience was, again, a mixed bag.

For malware downloads, Guardio was on the ball. Though it was slow to flash its warnings, it prevented us from downloading our test viruses onto our Pixel 6. For zipped files, Guardio scored a 0/5. And, remember, once those malicious files are on your device, Guardio can’t do anything.

When it came to phishing tests, we weren’t sure what was happening. Guardio was obviously running in the background, because most of the sites wouldn’t load, which, OK, is good. But we weren’t getting any explicit warnings either.

Once, we did get a push notification from Guardio when we attempted to access a website that had been flagged as suspicious. But it was just that one and when we tried to access the same site a few minutes later, we got nothing.

Guardio Free Trial

There aren’t many top antiviruses that offer lifetime free plans. Our top antivirus TotalAV does, though system scans are manual with the free plan. Bitdefender is another exception. You can read more about our experiences with Bitdefender in our complete Bitdefender review.

Guardio also has a free option. But, as we mentioned above, it doesn’t block malware, it just alerts you when you’re at risk. In other words, Guardio’s free plan won’t protect you from malicious scripts or downloads once you’ve triggered them. For many of us, this won’t be enough.

However, there is a way to test Guardio without paying. You can try the premium service for a week for free. You’ll have to put your credit card down, but you won’t be charged unless you decide to continue with the service at the end of the trial.

Is Guardio a Good Antivirus?

Guardio is a new breed of antivirus that we expect to be seeing a lot more of in the months and years to come. It sheds the bloat of traditional antiviruses, which are scrambling to offer more and more, and focuses on the one place we’re most vulnerable: our browser. This is an approach we like a lot, though it isn’t perfect.

In the end, if you can stomach working with Google and don’t mind juggling separate subscriptions for the services Guardio cuts out, Guardio is worth considering for your next antivirus.