Aura Antivirus & Identity Protection Review 2025: Is It Worth It?

Aura is an excellent identity protection service that also offers an antivirus. Though the advanced identity protection features are restricted to US-based customers, the more basic plans, including the antivirus, are also available in Canada. It has good malware detection rates and intuitive apps for all major operating systems. It also comes with a virtual private network (VPN), password manager, and parental controls (if you get a family plan).

Aura’s real-time scanner found and blocked almost all malware files during my tests. With a 98% detection rate, it’s on par with the best antiviruses of 2025.

Aura’s identity theft protection suite is excellent — it monitors the dark web for any exposure of your personal information and accounts, scans your bank and financial accounts for suspicious transactions, and even tracks your credit score. This service is very similar to Norton 360 with LifeLock (but Norton offers more extra features than Aura for a reasonable price).

Aura has some good aspects, but it’s far from perfect. Its VPN lacks important features, and the password manager doesn’t include advanced two-factor authentication (2FA) and biometric logins on the desktop apps. Moreover, Aura doesn’t have important features that many competitors offer, including a firewall, Wi-Fi network protection, and system optimization tools.

Aura offers 3 antivirus plans, with only the Ultimate plan including advanced identity theft protections. By default, the plans cover 3, 5, and 10 devices, but you can upgrade to the family version and get coverage for up to 5 adult users (that’s 50 devices in total). All of Aura’s plans are backed by a 60-day money-back guarantee, so there’s no risk in trying it.

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Aura Full Review — Good Security Features + Exceptional ID Protection for US Users

Aura offers a decent antivirus program and top-notch identity theft protection (for US users). It caught the vast majority of malware threats during my testing but lacks many customization options that other top competitors provide.

Aura’s wide range of identity theft protection services is impressive — it monitors bank accounts, credit reports, social security activity (and much more) and will notify you if your identity has been hijacked.

However, Aura’s VPN, parental controls, and password manager aren’t great, and it lacks important features like a firewall and optimization tools — competitors like Norton and Bitdefender offer all of these essential extras and more. Furthermore, Aura only includes parental controls in its family plan add-ons.

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Aura Plans & Pricing — Expensive Plans (But You Can Cover Up to 10 Devices)

Aura offers 3 annual plans, which all include the same antivirus and VPN. However, the more expensive plans offer more device licenses and extras like a password manager, ad and tracker blocker, and identity theft protections (including insurance payouts). Note that the Ultimate plan is only available in the US and territories (Canadian users can still get the more basic Antivirus and Antivirus Plus plans).

Competitors like Norton and Bitdefender offer more features for less money. However, Aura offers coverage on a good number of devices (the Ultimate plan covers 10 devices).

Aura’s annual plans include a 60-day money-back guarantee.

Here’s a summary of Aura’s plans:

Aura Security Features — Pretty Decent Features Overall

Anti-Malware Scanner — Detects Most Malware (The Mac Version Could Be Better)

Aura’s malware scanner can detect malware as well as top competitors, and it offers real-time malware detection and on-demand scans. It uses a huge database of known malware and machine learning to identify threats.

Aura offers 3 different methods for manually scanning your computer:

• Quick Scan — Scans folders where viruses and malware are often found, like system files and temporary files.
• Full Scan — Scans every file and folder on your device.
• Custom Scan — Choose specific files or folders to scan.

Aura detected about 98% of the test malware files I downloaded — this is almost as good as the top Windows antiviruses in 2025, which can all detect close to 100% of malware files. The real-time protection was just as effective, blocking most malware samples I downloaded onto my Windows 11 PC. This included spyware, trojans, viruses, and ransomware.

Aura’s on-demand scanner scored similar detection rates on my Mac, but its real-time protection wasn’t very good in my testing (Mac users should check out Intego, which has the best Mac antivirus scanner of 2025).

My main complaint is that you can’t schedule scans ahead of time — Aura’s scanner slowed my computer down somewhat during my tests, so I’d much rather be able to schedule my full disk scans to run while I’m asleep or not using my computer. Aura doesn’t provide scan logs, either, which makes it hard to track security trends and issues on your device (you only get to see a long list of every file scanned). All of the top antivirus products include scan scheduling and scan logs, so I was pretty annoyed that Aura lacks this basic functionality.

Overall, Aura’s antivirus protection is really good — its malware detection rates are comparable with the best antivirus competitors (although its macOS protections need work). However, I don’t like being unable to schedule scans or access scan logs. But Aura’s antivirus scanner detected most of the malware in my testing, so it’s still a decent choice for anti-malware protection.

Identity Theft Protection — Monitor Tons of Personal Information + Get Help From Live Agents

Aura’s suite of identity theft protection services is exceptional — it can monitor your personal information and financial accounts. However, the identity theft protection suite can only be accessed from Aura’s online dashboard, not through the Aura desktop app. The online interface is pretty easy to use, though, so I didn’t find this too inconvenient.

Aura’s ID theft protection includes:

• Credit monitoring and credit reports — Gives monthly reports from a major credit bureau and allows you to lock and unlock your credit file to prevent unwanted inquiries.
• Bank monitoring — Monitors your bank accounts and alerts you to suspicious spending.
• Data protection — Submits removal requests to data brokers that collect and sell your personal data, protecting you from unwanted advertising and robocalls.
• Dark web monitoring — Monitors dark web websites, forums, and chat rooms and alerts you any time your personal information is exposed.
• Social Security monitoring — Alerts you anytime a new bank, credit, or utility account is opened using your identity.
• Gamertag monitoring — Alerts you if your online handles have been compromised. Aura can only monitor accounts you have registered through Aura’s ID theft dashboard.
• Lost wallet remediation — If you lose your wallet, Aura helps you secure your credit cards, bank accounts, and IDs to help protect against identity theft.
• Home title and address monitoring — Helps protect against someone attempting to steal your home title or filing a change of address to steal your mail.
• Criminal and court record monitoring — Notifies you if your identity is used or mentioned in police, court, or other legal proceedings.
• 401K and investment account monitoring — Monitors the dark web and alerts you if your financial accounts have been exposed.
• Dedicated fraud resolution agents — If you fall victim to fraud, US-based dedicated agents will help you recover your identity and assets.

I really like that Aura’s identity theft protection includes an insurance policy (up to $1 million) to cover expenses incurred from identity theft. The insurance policy only covers expenses within the US, but it includes lost wages, elder, spousal, and child care costs, travel expenses, accountant costs, and legal fees (legal fees must be approved before being covered).

When Aura detects that a password or bit of personal information it is monitoring has been leaked on the dark web, it issues alerts to your web dashboard. These are very helpful, as they provide step-by-step instructions on responding to the specific type of breach. They also suggest calling Aura’s phone number if you’d rather have a human tell you what you ought to do.

That said, I do have one complaint. Even on the family plans, each adult user can only monitor 10 pieces of personal information in each of the 3 categories: identity, health, and financial. When you add up all of your debit cards, credit cards, bank accounts, and investment portfolios, you may have more than 10 pieces of information you’d like monitored. It’s easy to change what’s being monitored quickly, but inevitably, something will lose out. You just have to decide if that’s a physical address, a phone number, or a social security number. Luckily, there’s no limit to protecting passwords.

Overall, Aura’s identity theft protection is really good. I like how many types of personal information it monitors, and I appreciate that personal agents will help you recover losses and close your accounts if your information is stolen and used. That said, top competitors like Norton offer similar protection and have fewer limitations on how much personal information you can monitor.

Online Security (VPN) — Fast Speeds + Torrenting Support, but It’s Missing Important Features

Aura offers a simple VPN for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows. It’s a decent VPN for encrypting your internet activity and masking your true location, but it’s nowhere near as good as the top VPNs on the market.

Starting with the positive, Aura’s VPN lets you choose between servers in 110+ locations worldwide. This is a pretty good range, but unfortunately, Aura’s VPN lacks a kill switch. This means that you’ll give away your real IP address if the VPN disconnects suddenly (which happened twice in my tests) or whenever you change servers. It’s also missing split-tunneling, another basic, industry-standard feature that all the best VPNs on the market include. That said, I like how you can automatically enable the VPN whenever you connect to an unsecured network.

Aura is decent but not great for streaming — it works with Netflix and Paramount+, but not with Amazon Prime, Hulu, or Disney+. If you want a really good streaming VPN, check out our top choices for all popular streaming sites here.

While Aura’s VPN allows P2P traffic, I wouldn’t use it for torrenting — without a kill switch, your ISP is likely to detect torrenting activity if there are any VPN server connection issues. If you’re interested in torrenting, I’d consider ExpressVPN.

Aura’s VPN also blocks suspicious websites, like those that attempt to phish for your personal data. I tested multiple known phishing links to determine the efficacy of this feature, and the VPN detected and blocked some of them, but I was still able to visit several dangerous sites. That said, the built-in ad and tracker blocker were fairly effective in my tests, blocking about 75% of ads (including most video ads on YouTube). Still, it’s a shame that you need to be connected to the VPN to get both of these features.

In terms of speed, Aura’s VPN is really good. VPNs route your traffic through an encrypted server before sending it to its destination, which inherently slows the connection speed. But in my tests, Aura’s VPN was incredibly fast, and my connection speed was barely reduced at all.

First, I ran a speed test to determine my base connection speed without connecting to the VPN. Then, I connected the VPN and ran another speed test.

My ping was slower, but my connection speed only decreased by about 3%. I could stream 4K videos without buffering and load content-heavy sites like Instagram, which is decent.

Overall, Aura’s VPN is good for encrypting your browsing activity, has fast speeds, and allows torrenting. However, it has some major drawbacks, namely the lack of essential security features like a kill switch and useful extras like split-tunneling and support for multiple VPN protocols.

Password Manager — Basic Password Management Features (Lacking Important Extras)

Aura’s password manager has some nice features but is otherwise frustratingly basic — it doesn’t offer the same features or functionality as any of the top standalone password managers in 2025. However, it’s synched up with Aura’s identity protections, which I quite like.

Let’s start with the positives. The password manager will incorporate any credit card, address, password, username, or other information you add to the identity protection vault. So, in addition to benefiting from Aura’s dark web monitoring, your passwords and card details will be available as auto-fill options when you use forms on websites.

On that note, the auto-fill function works great for passwords, usernames, addresses, and credit cards. Aura never failed to fill out fields on forms with a single click. On the other hand, auto-save worked for passwords but not for addresses. I had to manually add an address to my account before Aura would offer to fill it in. This isn’t a big deal, but my favorite password managers consistently ask whether you want to save information.

I also like Aura’s email alias feature — it allows you to create and use a randomly generated email address for website registrations. This alias forwards emails to your main mailbox, keeping your real email address private. If needed, you can delete the alias to stop mail forwarding. Aura also lets you do this when creating new entries in the vault or editing details for existing services. I love that this feature is included for free (1Password offers something similar, but it’s a paid add-on).

Aura’s password monitoring is straightforward yet effective. Upon logging into Aura’s website, you immediately see real-time monitoring of your passwords in your vault. Aura actively scans for your details on data broker sites, identifying specific brokers with your information. You’re promptly alerted if your information is compromised so you can take action. It also has an auditing tool that alerts you to weak passwords even if they weren’t involved in a breach.

However, the password manager lacks other important features, like advanced 2-factor authentication (2FA). It also only allows password sharing between users subscribing to the same family plan. To unlock the password manager, you need to enter your main Aura password. I wish you could use a separate password for added security. The mobile app does support biometric logins, but there’s no way to enable this on desktop. The whole thing could be organized better. For example, I like how 1Password lets you create multiple vaults to simplify organizing and sharing your passwords.

Aura’s password manager is available as a browser extension for all major browsers and is also integrated into the main Android and iOS app. In addition to auto-fill and password auditing, the extension provides protection against trackers, phishing pages, and other malicious sites, but this wasn’t very effective in my tests.

Overall, Aura’s password manager is basic but capable. It’s not that feature-rich, but it does the basics well and is integrated with Aura’s dark web monitoring. As a bonus, the email alias feature is a cool extra.

Read the full Aura Password Manager review here

Parental Controls (Family Plans Only) — Great if You Want a Simple Way to Monitor Your Kid’s Activities

Aura’s parental controls are a good choice for those looking for a beginner-friendly app to monitor their children’s online activities on Android and iOS devices. While it doesn’t top the best antiviruses with parental controls, Aura offers a suite of standard features that align with expectations for mobile monitoring, albeit with notable gaps in certain areas. Nevertheless, it’s great for large families — you can add up to 50 devices under one subscription (10 per person). However, to get access to the parental controls, you have to upgrade to a family plan after purchasing any of the standard plans.

With Aura’s parental controls, parents have the ability to:

• Implement web and app filtering with customizable rules for website and app access.
• Manage screen time with specific app time limits.
• Protect children from cyberbullying in over 200 online games.
• Monitor and block apps on both Android and iOS devices.
• Access reports of blocked websites your child attempts to visit.

Aura’s content filtering feature is basic but effective. It provides two preset modes tailored for different age groups — Child mode with extensive default restrictions and Teen mode for blocking explicit and mature content. It also offers the flexibility to customize these settings further, blocking content across 25+ categories.

I would like to see Aura include important features like location tracking, uninstall protection, and YouTube monitoring — Qustodio and Norton Family offer all these features.

Aura’s Safe Gaming feature helps protect kids while they play online games. It keeps an eye out for things like bullying, mean language, and other harmful behavior that can happen during gaming. This feature will alert you if it spots anything troubling, helping to make sure kids have a fun and safe time while playing games online. While this is a nice feature, I find it very disappointing that it’s the only desktop feature available with the parental controls.

In conclusion, Aura’s parental controls deliver on basic needs. They make it easy to monitor and control your child’s use of mobile apps. However, it doesn’t cater to all parental concerns, particularly if your child is a desktop user or if you’re looking for more advanced controls like location tracking.

Read the full Aura Parental Controls review here

Aura Ease of Use & Setup — Good Desktop App (But Little in Terms of Customization)

Aura provides a super minimal app with a clean interface for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Installation and setup only took about 5 minutes on my Windows PC. After logging into my Aura account and navigating to the downloads page, I simply selected my operating system and downloaded the installer. Once installed, Aura automatically started my first full scan, and any time the app updated, it ran another full scan automatically.

Aura has a clean look — you can turn on the VPN and enable real-time malware protection from the home screen. The sidebar on the left side of the screen allows you to access controls for the antivirus scanner, VPN, and Aura’s settings. However, none of Aura’s controls provide a lot of options.

You can pick from 3 different scan types in the antivirus window and whitelist safe files in the malware scanner’s settings. But that’s about it.

Aura doesn’t let you schedule malware scans, adjust real-time protections, or look at previous scan logs. Competitors like Avira allow you to look through previous scan logs, schedule various malware scans, adjust anti-phishing protections, and much more.

Besides that, the app’s settings are very minimal, allowing you to decide if Aura opens on startup, whether or not Aura can give you notifications, and whether the VPN should automatically connect if your device connects to an unsafe network like a public Wi-Fi hotspot — and that’s it.

Aura’s desktop app doesn’t include the password vault or ID theft protections. You can only access these features through the web dashboard, which is very easy to navigate. The VPN also has a sleek interface but no customization options. Competitors like Norton and Avira incorporate most of their features in a single intuitive app.

I also had an issue when setting up a family plan. I added a family member to my plan by giving Aura his email address. He received an email from Aura asking him to activate his account, but at the end of the process, the site took him to the checkout page and wouldn’t let him log in. My account was supposed to cover 5 adults, so this was obviously wrong. I had to contact customer support to get this issue resolved.

Overall, Aura’s desktop app is decent, but there’s room for improvement. It’s missing many of the features included with your Aura account, it doesn’t provide many basic customization options, and the app only includes the antivirus and VPN features. However, the interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, and I never had any problems or experienced any glitches during my tests.

Aura Mobile App — Simple Android App, but the iOS App Isn’t Great

Aura’s mobile app is very simple and easy to use, but it isn’t as good as top competitors like Norton and McAfee. The iPhone app includes the password manager, VPN, and a fully functional mobile version of the vault where you can add items to benefit from Aura’s dark web monitoring. The Android app has all these elements, plus an antivirus scanner. You can even get an AI-powered spam call and SMS filter as an add-on.

The Android antivirus scanner is incredibly easy to use because of its simplicity — it’s a simple malware scanner. Press the big scan button on the main screen to start a manual scan of all the files on your smartphone.

Scanning my Android phone only took about 10 minutes, and it detected almost all of the files I downloaded to test its mobile scan. This is a decent malware detection rating but not as good as the 100% malware detection scores achieved by competitors like Norton and Bitdefender.

All other features have the same interface on both Android and iOS, giving you access to:

• Password manager. Very minimal password manager that’s missing a lot of features offered by the top standalone password managers.
• Identity theft protections. Aura offers a wide range of identity and financial protections for US users, including credit, bank, and investment account monitoring, data protection, dark web monitoring, social security monitoring, and more.
• Call Protection. Effective AI call screener that blocks most spam and scam calls (paid add-on).
• Wi-Fi security (VPN). Simple VPN that can block malicious websites, ads, and trackers. Unfortunately, it’s missing basic VPN features like split-tunneling and a kill switch.
• Parental controls. Basic but user-friendly parental controls that filter and block content and manage screen time (family plans only).

It would be nice to see Aura include additional features like app scanning, privacy monitoring, an app analyzer, and anti-theft tools.

Aura’s iOS offering is minimal, so I recommend iOS users check out our list of the best antiviruses for iPhones and iPads — the best iOS security apps provide additional features like location tracking, secure browsers, and more.

However, Aura is a decent choice for Android users looking for a super simple antivirus scanner and nice extras, like easy access to Aura’s vault.

Aura Customer Support — Live Chat, Phone Support, a Knowledge Base & More

Aura offers customer support via phone, live chat, email, knowledge base, and FAQs. I had good experiences with the live chat and phone support, both of which are available 24 hours per day, but only in English.

Each time I contacted email support, it took almost a day to get a response. When I did get a reply, it simply said to call phone support. This is unacceptable, and I would expect to be able to use email support instead of being forced to call the phone line every time I have a simple question about the service. Top competitors like Norton and McAfee have support teams that reply to email requests within a few hours, and they actually answer user questions.

The phone support agents I talked to were all friendly and knowledgeable. I was really happy that I didn’t have to wait long to connect to a rep, no matter when I made the call. When I had an issue adding someone to my account, I had to wait on hold for a while, but when the agent came back, he informed me that a new link had been sent to my family member, who could then create an account.

The same was true of live chat. I got swift answers to questions about various features that the website didn’t describe in depth. The representative explained exactly what they did, leaving me satisfied. He did say that a few of my questions would need to be answered by a phone support operator, but this isn’t unusual.

The FAQ page Aura offers has a blend of simple and detailed responses. Nonetheless, it’s somewhat inferior to Norton’s extensive FAQ page, which includes useful video guides and a vibrant community forum.

The 24/7 phone support from Aura is great, as is live chat. The email support is almost negligible, unfortunately. While Aura’s FAQ can be useful for answering basic queries, it lacks video instructions or user forums, unlike its top competitors. Nonetheless, English-speaking users of Aura will appreciate the availability of live phone support around the clock.

Is Aura Worth the Cost?

It depends on what you’re after. Aura’s powerful antivirus scanner and excellent identity theft protections are a good value, but its parental controls, password manager, and customization options aren’t great, and it’s missing many of the features included with the top antivirus suites in 2025.

Aura’s antivirus offers a nearly perfect malware-detection rate and uses a huge database of known threats — it ranks with advanced competitors like Norton and Bitdefender.

Aura’s identity theft protections are also very good. They scan credit reports, dark web sources, court proceedings, bank statements, and much more to immediately notify users if their personal information is being used without their consent. Norton LifeLock provides a similar set of protections.

However, Aura has some major drawbacks that I can’t ignore. Its password manager is just ok, its VPN is pretty basic (it lacks a kill switch and split-tunneling), and it’s missing important features like a firewall, Wi-Fi network protection, and convenient antivirus scan scheduling tools. In addition, the parental controls are basic — especially on desktops.

The Antivirus Plus plan includes basic identity monitoring tools. If you want extensive protection like identity theft insurance, credit monitoring, and more you’ll need to get the Ultimate plan.

All of the annual plans come with a 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can try them risk-free.

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