The following are my thoughts on Kaspersky Labs Antivirus compared to Symantec. Price = wow. Kaspersky aims to be competitive. With a two or three year commitment on your AV licenses you can likely cut your AV cost in half over Symantec - at least in my region (Great Plains).
The performance is good. The scan rate is as good or better than Symantec, and the reported detection rate is also as good or better than Symantec. Though I should point out that any antivirus product fails to detect (an arguably high) percentage of current malware.
On a personal laptop, Kaspersky is equal to Symantec. It is usable and user friendly. On the corporate level, Kaspersky isn't quite as intuitive. Rolling out a Symantec Corporate Edition server and joining clients to it is very straight forward. Symantec did an awesome job. Kaspersky isn't quite as intuitive, but it is ALMOST as good. Installing the server is no issue - but if you are not doing a remote installation of the clients then it will take a bit of knowledge about the product to get things going. An hour or less of reading will help you to understand the software pieces that you need to get things up and going. Ultimately, you install the Antivirus client and then an additional networking agent to communicate with the policy server. I think that Kaspersky takes care of this if you use the automated rollout tool, but if you are installing manually from the machine, you have two pieces to install whereas Symantec only has one installer. The only thing I DIDN'T like about Kaspersky's centralized management is that scheduled tasks and client management are handled through the windows task scheduler and related ports - ports commonly used by virus to propagate across a LAN. Symantec will work from behind host firewalls so long as their special TCP port is open. So they both require ports to be open for communication - but is the ports that Kaspersky requires that make me a slight bit nervous.
I can give Kaspersky a cautious two thumbs up. If your tech budget is tight this is certainly a product worth looking into for some cost savings.
