Symantec vs. Intego

[duffcalifornia]

Hey everybody. I apologize if this isn't strictly Casper Suite related, but getting information on this is hard to find from something that isn't a sponsored blog post.

We currently use Intego VirusBarrier as our Mac AV client, while our Windows folks get Symantec. Since we have an abundance of licenses for Symantec, I've been tasked to see if Symantec is a "good enough" alternative since there's a pretty substantial cost difference between the two.

Can anybody speak about their experience using Symantec? Even better, if you have experience with both products, that would be super helpful

[mpermann]

@duffcalifornia we've been using Symantec Endpoint Protection on our Macs for several years now. Haven't really had any problems deploying it or with it causing issues on the Macs. I don't know how effective it is though. It doesn't seem to care much about the standard malware you can find on the Mac. As in it doesn't find it or remove it in my experience. I've never used Intego VirusBarrier so I don't know if it can detect and remove common malware either.

[blackholemac]

@duffcalifornia Both products do the malware removal task very well. We use SEP for Mac at my district and I've been pushing Intego to my private clients for years. In general, they both function just fine. I would not put my private clients on the consumer-facing Norton product, but the Symantec Endpoint Protection enterprise product doesn't really harm our Macs and does have good mass deploy tools. Intego has business-friendly tools as well. If you want to keep Intego, maybe you talk to their rep to negotiate a better price, but if you are leaning toward moving to Symantec Endpoint, you should be fine there. I will note that if you move to Symantec that the Mac platform is obviously NOT their bread and butter business. I've had some OS upgrades I've had to hold off on previously until Symantec got their new versions together, but for macOS Sierra, they had their client out right on time.

Another note on that topic to watch for...release schedules in general. Sometimes, you Windows guys will be fine and want to keep a current build of the product, but you might need a newer version of the SEPM server to accommodate a new client build needed on the Mac. The best advice I can give you there is keep a dialog open with the folks managing antivirus in your org. I will usually give them a heads up just before I need a new build and then they get it scheduled and I end up being fine to deploy.

[gachowski]

Yep, Don't move unless you can control updates to the SEPM server. As Brian said above that is how Symantec updated the macOS client. The SEP macOS client installers check to the OS so you can't really install an older one, on a new OS.

Symantec has matched Apple release for the past three or four upgrade, I have stopped worrying about.

: )