Norton 360 for Mac Review: How Well Does Norton Protect Your Mac?

With a massive marketing budget and instant brand awareness, Norton 360 has long been a major player in the antivirus space. And with the stakes higher than ever in the face of increasingly large-scale hacks and data breaches (including a hack in August 2024 that compromised billions of accounts in the US, Canada, and the UK, compromising the private information of almost everyone I know), Norton 360 for Mac has its work cut out for it.

Like its predecessors, Norton 360 is easy to download and install from Norton’s website, and the company offers a 7-day free trial in exchange for your credit and debit card details. The software requires Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) or later to install and run, and is available for $39.99/£24.99 for the first year of the Standard package, which provides protection for one device. To protect more devices, you’ll need Deluxe ($49.99/£29.99) or Select $79.99 (called Advanced in the UK for £34.99). All of these prices are for the first year only, with the price rising to $94.99 per year for the Standard package after that. Beyond its antivirus components, the software provides 110GB of cloud backup, a password manager, a basic VPN client, and dark web monitoring.

Like most Mac utility apps, Norton 360 is fairly straightforward to download, install, and grant full access to your hard drive. The software runs smoothly, and its notorious resource-hogging problem in the past seems to have been resolved. Norton’s add-ons tend to work fairly well, and while its VPN is more basic than a dedicated client, it’s easy enough to set your preferred home country and establish a connection. The password manager is reliable and includes a downloadable recovery key if needed, and the level of firewall customization is admirable, though you’ll need some technical knowledge to avoid getting into trouble.

For alternatives, read our roundup of the best antivirus software for Mac.

Features

Norton 360 for Mac also offers other utilities, including an intuitive startup management module that provides a range of access to login items without getting into too much detail. The file cleaning module works well, but doesn’t seem like a novel idea anymore, given that it’s almost a de facto feature for most utility programs these days. The software tracks down gigabytes of junk in application caches (system and user), downloads, and system and user log files, then offers a quick way to access them, choose what to delete, and delete them. The dark web protection module also works well, and a quick scan revealed that my information was available on the dark web via an Adobe hack, even though I changed my password a long time ago.

When it comes to virus monitoring and scanning, the news is generally good, if not ideal. It’s easy to create whitelists and exceptions, as well as schedule scans. It’s easy to target an external volume such as a USB drive with the custom scan feature, and Norton 360 for Mac detects a fair amount of virus activity, noting 25 individual infections on a test drive after scanning it. The software pairs well with macOS’s Gatekeeper, and between the two working together, the vast majority of test infections were scanned, flagged, and quarantined.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

Norton 360 also comes with extensions for your favorite web browser as well as Norton Private Browser, which is based on the open source code of Google Chrome. These tools do a good job of warning you about spam and phishing websites, but they aren’t perfect and still allowed me to access questionable websites that appeared through my Gmail account’s Spam folder.

Unfortunately, there are still a few bugs to iron out. While a full scan of my MacBook Pro’s SSD located dozens of infections and quarantined them, it still allowed malware to be installed in the form of a rogue copy of Adobe Flash Player as well as the controversial Wave web browser, which was used as the default tool in several recent phishing scams in 2024. Norton 360 for Mac also failed to detect the OSX.Proton malware, which had to be cleaned with a free copy of Malwarebytes.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

Perhaps the most annoying issue was a bug in the cloud backup feature that prevented any web browser (including Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, and Norton Private Browser) from clicking the “Start with Backup” button and creating an initial backup set for the cloud, rendering the feature useless. This seemed to indicate that the feature was little more than a last-minute thought, or another item to add to a bulleted feature list.

Finally, the application still cannot perform scans on .zip files, or at least cannot find the sample infections I had stored on a test drive until the archive is unzipped.

Should you buy Norton 360?

Norton 360 for Mac has some great features, and while the user interface is clean and user-friendly and the program runs quickly in its foreground and background tasks without crashing or slowing down, it lacks attention to detail, which is worrying. The fact that the cloud backup feature seems completely unusable, regardless of the web browser used, is inexcusable, the OSX.Proton malware should have been flagged and quarantined and should not have been removed by another utility, and as several igamesnews reviewers have pointed out, one would expect Norton 360 for Mac to be able to scan .zip files at this point in its history.

While there are a handy set of tools and modules here, it seems that Norton’s budget and marketing efforts have outstripped what the QA and development teams were able to deliver. If these departments slow down, get their act together, and match what’s promised with what’s delivered, there’s a considerable product to be had here, but in the short term, you may want to stick with the free trial of Norton 360 for Mac or consider an alternative application for your antivirus needs.