How we review

This page exists so that you can tell exactly how much weight our articles deserve. It is short, and the most important part of it is the list of things we did not do.

What our reviews are

Navoris publishes documentary reviews: we read the manufacturer's current published specification, we read the published results and methodologies of the independent testing laboratories, we read the terms attached to the purchase, and we set all of it out in plain language with the gaps marked.

The value we add is not measurement. It is translation, comparison and the removal of marketing language — plus a willingness to state what a product does not include, which the seller has no incentive to do.

What our reviews are not

• We do not run malware detection tests. Doing that credibly requires a laboratory, a live sample feed, an isolated network and a published methodology. We have none of those. Any site claiming detection percentages of its own without that apparatus is inventing them.
• We do not run performance benchmarks and we publish no timings of our own.
• We do not score products. No stars, no marks out of ten, no badges. A score implies a methodology; we would have to make one up.
• We do not collect user reviews and publish none. We have no way to verify that a submitted review is genuine, and an unverifiable review is worse than no review.

The sources we rely on, in order

1. The manufacturer's own current product pages — the authority on what a plan contains, what it costs and what the renewal terms are. Where our description and theirs differ, theirs prevails.
2. Independent testing laboratories that publish methodology: AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives, SE Labs. We link to the current round rather than quoting a stale figure.
3. Public-sector security bodies — ENISA, Europol, CISA and national agencies — for threat context, in preference to vendor marketing.
4. Primary technical documentation where a mechanism needs explaining.

How we handle numbers

A figure appears on this site only if it can be attributed to a source you can open, and dated. If we cannot source it, we describe the shape of the thing in words and say we could not verify a number. We would rather be less impressive than be wrong. Illustrative diagrams that show a shape rather than data — there is one on our main article — are labelled as illustrative in the caption itself.

How the funding affects this

We are paid affiliate commission on sales, which is disclosed on every page. It is a genuine conflict of interest. The countermeasures we actually apply are: publishing the missing features as prominently as the included ones; warning about renewal pricing; naming free alternatives; and refusing to score, rate or rank anything. Read the editorial policy for the full list.

Telling us we are wrong

info@navoris.online. Corrections procedure is in section 6 of the editorial policy.