Norton 360 for Mac review: How well does Norton protect your Mac?

Outfitted by a giant marketing budget and instant name recognition, Norton 360 has long stood tall in the antivirus industry. And with more on the line now than ever in the face of larger and larger hacks and data intrusions (including a hack in August 2024 that compromised billions of accounts throughout the United States, Canada and the U.K. that compromised the private information of almost everyone I know), Norton 360 for Mac has its work cut out for it.

Like its previous versions, Norton 360 is easy to download and install from Norton’s website and the company offers a free 7-day trial in return for your credit and debit card information. 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 offers protection for one device. To protect more devices you need Deluxe ($49.99/£29.99) or Select $79.99 (called Advanced in the U.K. for £34.99). All those prices are just for the first year, the price then goes up to $94.99 a year for the Standard package. Beyond its antiviral elements, the software provides 110GB of cloud-based backup, a password manager, a basic VPN client, and Dark Web monitoring.  

Like most utility applications for the Mac, Norton 360 is simple enough to download, install, and assign full access to your hard drive. The software runs smoothly, and the issue of it being an infamous resource hog in years past seems to have been resolved. Norton’s add-on programs tend to work fairly well, and although its VPN is more basic than a dedicated client, it’s easy enough to configure your preferred country of origin and initiate a connection. The password manager is reliable and includes a downloadable recovery key, should it be needed, and there’s an admirable level of possible customization on the firewall, albeit you’ll need some technical knowledge going in so as not to get yourself in trouble. 

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

Features

Other utilities within Norton 360 for Mac include an intuitive Startup Manager module which offers a range of access to login items without getting too into the weeds. The File Cleanup module runs well but doesn’t feel like an original idea anymore, given that this is almost a de facto function for most utility programs these days. The software hunts down gigabytes of extraneous items in Application caches (both system and user), Downloads, and system and user Log Files, then offers a quick means of accessing them, choosing what to delete, and deleting these items. The Dark Web protection module also works well, and a quick scan noted that my information was available on the dark web via an Adobe hack, although I’d changed my password there long ago.

Where antiviral monitoring and scanning are concerned, the news is mostly good, if not ideal. It’s easy to create white lists and exceptions as well as schedule scans. Targeting an external volume such as a USB thumb drive is easy using the Custom Scan feature, and Norton 360 for Mac catches a good amount of viral activity, noting 25 individual infections on a test drive after scanning it. The software teams up well with macOS’s Gatekeeper, and between the two of them working together, the vast majority of test infections were scanned, flagged, and quarantined.

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

Norton 360 also arrives with extensions for your web browser of choice as well as Norton Private Browser, which is based on Google Chrome’s open-source code. These tools do a good job of warning you away from spam and phishing-based websites, but it’s not perfect and still allowed me to travel to questionable websites that appeared via my Gmail’s Spam folder. 

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

Foundry

Foundry

Foundry

Arguably the most disturbing issue was a bug in the Cloud Backup feature which prevented any web browser (including Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, and Norton Private Browser) from being able to successfully click the “Get Started with Backup” button and create an initial backup set for the cloud, thereby leaving the function useless. This seemed to indicate that the feature was little more than an afterthought, or another item to be tacked onto a bullet-point list of features.

Finally, the application still can’t perform scans on .zip files, or at least couldn’t find the sample infections I had stored on a test drive until the archive had been decompressed. 

Should you buy Norton 360?

There are some excellent elements to Norton 360 for Mac, and while the user interface is clean and friendly and the program ran briskly in both its foreground and background tasks with no crashes or slowdowns to speak of, there’s a lack of attention to detail that’s concerning. The fact that the Cloud Backup feature seems completely inoperable no matter which web browser is used is inexcusable, the OSX.Proton malware should have been flagged and quarantined and not needed to be removed by another utility, and as multiple Macworld reviews have pointed it out, one would expect Norton 360 for Mac to be able to scan .zip files by this point in its history.

While there exists a cadre of handy tools and modules here, it feels like Norton’s marketing budget and efforts have outrun what the QA and development teams were on pace to deliver on. Should these departments slow down, get themselves in order, and match what’s being promised with what’s being delivered, there’s a considerable product to be had here, but in the short term, you might want to stick with either Norton 360 for Mac’s free trial or consider an alternative application for your antiviral needs.