Combo Cleaner Antivirus Full Review: Polish Your Mac
Combo Cleaner by the Lithuania-based RCS LT company is in its basic form acts as a disk cleaner for Mac devices that can be installed for free. However, Combo Cleaner has a premium version that acts as an antivirus to protect your device against all types of attacks, keeping you safe from viruses, malware, and much more.
Pros
Cons
Content
Quick Stats
How does Combo Cleaner fare against its competitors, and is it worth it?
Keep reading to find out.
Security and Protection
When buying an antivirus, the major point is how secure the product is, so we ask the question: Can Combo Cleaner protect our devices from viruses, malware, and other causes of harm?
To answer that, we check the following regarding security and protection:
1. Third-party lab test results
Combo Cleaner, unfortunately, lacks third-party testing lab data in the major testing labs we follow, including AV-Test, AV-Comparatives, and SE Labs.
2. Firewall and IDS protection
Combo Cleaner lacks intrinsic firewall protection. Instead, Combo Cleaner uses the Mac Firewall to monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic providing users with an intruder detection system (IDS) to protect users from possible threats that might harm their devices.
3. USB Rescue ToolKit
Combo Cleaner lacks a USB rescue toolkit. A USB toolkit is a useful tool that can be used to initiate a cloud-based scan during the booting phase of your device, when your device is infected and can't be started, or if it's infected with some malware or virus that requires your system to be booted to be used.
While this feature is typically important for Windows devices, it isn't as important with Macs due to the built-in recovery mode, although they differ in functionality.
Plans and Features
Combo Cleaner provides users with two main products: Combo Cleaner Free and Combo Cleaner Premium. Here is a quick summary of the features:
| Plan | Combo Cleaner Free | Combo Cleaner Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Virus, spyware, and malware protection | N/A | Included |
| PC specific malware scanner | N/A | Included |
| Scan for PC performance problems | Included | Included |
| Firewall Protection | N/A | N/A |
| System tuneup tool | Included | N/A |
| Device support | macOS | macOS |
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1. Combo Cleaner Free
Combo Cleaner Free is not really an antivirus, but rather a system tune-up tool, which provides the following features:
- Disk cleaner functionality that includes:
- Junk file elimination: By utilizing a robust scan algorithm, combo cleaner scans all your files fast. This provides you with a list of application cache, logs, browser data, and other useless files, all of which can be removed to free storage and improve functionality.
- Smart scan function: With a single click provides you with a fast scan that memorizes areas that don't need to be scanned a second time, saving time on your next scan.
- External hard drive scan: Provides users with the ability to scan their external hard drive for junk files, which is very useful for backups and storing data.
- Junk file elimination: By utilizing a robust scan algorithm, combo cleaner scans all your files fast. This provides you with a list of application cache, logs, browser data, and other useless files, all of which can be removed to free storage and improve functionality.
- Duplicate file finder: Which finds identical copies stored in various places on your hard drive. It supports many file formats and is considered to be fast and precise in its detection, and can also clean files on both local and external hard drives.
- Big files finder: A feature that subcategories your files according to size, with the three main categories being Up to 1GB, 1GB to 5GB, and more than 5GB.
2. Combo Cleaner Premium Antivirus
The Combo Cleaner Premium Plan is the premium version that provides users with more features in addition to the ones provided to the free version, most importantly of which is the antivirus protective function. The function provided include:
- Professional Mac Antivirus: An antivirus equipped with award-winning virus malware and adware scan engines. While the free version can scan your device for viruses, it doesn't remove it unless the premium version is purchased. The professional Mac Antivirus provides users with:
- Adware scanner: Prevents pop-ups and unwanted ads when surfing the internet.
- Malware scanner: A scanner developed by a dedicated team working on the clock to provide the best protection possible against the latest malware.
- PC-specific malware scanner: A Mac can act as a virus/malware carrier. When downloading files that can infect a PC, Combo Cleaner removes threats that might affect other PC devices with its extensive database.
- Adware scanner: Prevents pop-ups and unwanted ads when surfing the internet.
- Privacy scanner: With a privacy scanner, you can rest assured that your private data in the form of browsing history, cookies, and other forms of saved data on your device. Privacy scanner provides users with:
- Privacy guard: Enables users to delete information stored when surfing the web, such as cookies, history, and cache.
- Improves performance: By removing these files, the browser functionality improves, and your web surfing experience becomes faster and better.
- Privacy guard: Enables users to delete information stored when surfing the web, such as cookies, history, and cache.
- App uninstaller: Provides users with a way to remove even the hardest to remove apps, including the residual files that are sometimes left behind after the normal uninstallation process. Not only does it remove these files, but also it removes hidden files that try to go undetected on your device.
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Extra features
Among the major extra features provided by antiviruses, Combo Cleaner stands as follows:
-
Password manager
Combo Cleaner doesn’t provide a password manager as part of its plans.
After all, apple's macOS has its own iCloud Keychain, making a password manager redundant.
-
Online banking
Combo Cleaner provides safe online banking.
With safe online banking, users would be able to do online transactions in safe environments without the risk of losing their information to a man-in-the-middle attack or other attempts at stealing data. Combo Cleaner redirects users to real sites if they go to a fake one automatically, adding to the online security.
-
Parental control
Combo Cleaner antivirus doesn’t have the parental control feature.
Parental control is another feature available on macOS devices as a built-in feature. It allows worried parents to take care of their children and make sure they are surfing safe parts of the internet, and when are they allowed to do so. Hence Combo Cleaner doesn't really need to include it.
-
VPN
Combo Cleaner doesn't provide a VPN service.
A VPN serves to encrypt your data when surfing online, making your data near impossible to crack. It can play a great role in security, in addition to IP masking, which can be used to protect your location or bypass certain geo-restrictions such as with Netflix.
-
Backup
Combo Cleaner doesn’t provide online backup.
With the iCloud online storage, which is intrinsically available on macOS, the need for backup storage becomes obsolete.
User Experience
Combo Cleaner's user experience is a positive one, and that is shown in many ways, be it in the form of the scan speed amplified by the Smart Scan feature, which shortens scanning time by skipping files it already knows are safe, or the simple interface which doesn't need much expertise. On the downside, customer support is only available via ticketing and email, which might be an issue for some users.
1. Ease of use
The user interface is friendly with a green smart scan button to start scanning it in the middle with surrounding icons to easily navigate through the application.
2. Customer support
In terms of customer support, the following methods of contact are available for users when they are in need of help:
- Email and ticketing system
Pricing and Payments
Combo Cleaner prices per plan summarized in a table:
| Plan | Combo Cleaner Premium |
|---|---|
| 1 device | $7.99/month (billed $47.95 every 6 months) |
| 5 devices | $13.99/month (billed $83.95 every 6 months) |
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Payment methods
Combo Cleaner payment methods include:
- Major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover).
- PayPal.
Free trial
Combo Cleaner doesn't provide a truly free trial other than the money-back guarantee.
Money-back guarantee
Combo Cleaner provides a 30-day money-back guarantee of risk-free use, so you can try the premium version and decide if it's the product for you or not until you make up your mind. So go for it; you got nothing to lose here!
Final Verdict
Is Combo Cleaner worth it? In terms of protection, Combo Cleaner is a bit hard to assess. They have had great results defending against viruses, which is considered near perfect. However, they haven't undergone much third-party lab testing; it may have managed to bypass 10 or 15 virus samples; we find that to be not enough of a sample to make a complete decisive judgment, unlike with the products that went through the huge amount of samples third-party labs expose antiviruses to.
That being said, it is still a good choice with the results it has. However, you might get a better deal with Intego by possibly getting a higher level of protection as Intego has undergone extensive third-party testing.