Avast Business Antivirus Pro Plus: Retired, and What Replaced It

Fix it now

Avast Business Antivirus Pro Plus is no longer in Avast’s business line-up. What Avast sells now is Essential, Premium and Ultimate Business Security, all managed from the Avast Business Hub, plus Small Office Protection for up to 10 devices with no console at all – and the tiers do not divide the way the old ladder did.

1. Buy Essential Business Security for most small firms. It carries the management platform, Endpoint Protection, Ransomware and Data Protection, Phishing Protection, Web Control and USB Protection – the whole protection stack.
2. Buy Premium Business Security only if you want the Personal VPN for staff. That is the single published difference from Essential.
3. Buy Ultimate Business Security only if you want Patch Management. That is the single published difference from Premium, and Avast lists Windows Server 2022 down to 2008 R2 among the systems it patches.
4. Buy Small Office Protection instead if you have up to 10 devices and no intention of managing anything. Avast sells it as requiring no management, and the console starts at Essential.
5. Skip the range entirely if you need endpoint detection and response. Avast’s small business pages do not mention it, so nothing here will answer that question on an insurance form.
6. Skip a quote that itemises Patch Management as an add-on for Ultimate. It is published as included at that tier.

If you already hold a Pro Plus subscription, do not assume it maps onto a tier by name. Take the feature list you are using today and match it against the current matrix below before you renew anything.

If that names your tier, you are done. Below is the published matrix, what happened to the old Pro Plus extras, and the questions to get answered in writing.

Why it happens

The old range laddered by what it protected: workstations at the bottom, file and mail servers in the middle, and endpoint-user extras such as a VPN and secure file deletion at the top under the Pro Plus name. That is not how the current range works, and a buyer working from the old shape will pay for the wrong thing.

Avast now publishes three business tiers – Essential, Premium and Ultimate Business Security – and all three carry the same protection modules. Every one of them lists the online management platform, Endpoint Protection, Ransomware and Data Protection, Phishing Protection, Web Control and USB Protection. Only two things move as you climb: the Personal VPN appears at Premium, and Patch Management appears at Ultimate. Server protection is not a tier boundary at all; Avast describes the business products as protecting Windows servers and endpoints, and its Patch Management support list runs from Windows Server 2022 back to 2008 R2.

That is a better structure than the one it replaced, and it changes the buying advice completely. Under the old ladder the step that mattered was the one that added server cover, so a firm with a file server had to move up. Under the current one, the protection is the same on every rung and the two upgrades are both discretionary tools. If your staff would not open a VPN in a normal working week, Essential is the honest answer and nothing about your servers changes that.

What none of these tiers gives you is investigation. There is no published incident timeline, no fleet-wide hunting and no long telemetry retention anywhere on Avast’s small business pages, and endpoint detection and response is not mentioned at all. For commodity threats arriving by mail and download – which is what almost every small firm actually meets – prevention of this kind is the right defence and it works. If a customer questionnaire or an insurer asks whether you run detection and response, this range is not the answer and no tier of it becomes one.

Full reference

The published tier matrix

These are Avast’s own rows. The point of setting them out is how little moves between the columns.

Avast lists the Business Hub as optional for Essential and Premium and required for Ultimate. If you were planning to run Ultimate without a console, that is not an arrangement Avast offers.

Where the old Pro Plus extras went

Scale, platforms and what to confirm

Avast presents the business range for 1 to 100 or more devices and directs larger estates to sales. Windows and Mac endpoints are covered; Patch Management publishes support for Windows 11, 10, 8.x and 7 SP1 on x64 and x86, and for Windows Server 2022, 2019, 2016, 2012 and 2008 R2. Small Office Protection is the outlier, licensed for up to 10 devices across PC, Mac, Android and iOS with no management platform.

Three things are not published on Avast’s business pages, and all three change what you pay. Get them in writing rather than assuming the old answers still apply.

• How servers are counted against a licence, and whether they draw from the same pool as workstations.
• Whether multi-year terms are offered and what they cost, and whether a seat can be reassigned when a member of staff leaves.
• What happens to an existing Avast Business Antivirus Pro Plus subscription at renewal, and whether there is a migration path or simply a new purchase.

What it costs the endpoints and the administrator

Endpoint impact is ordinary for a managed agent: background scanning that yields to the user, and scheduled scans you should push outside working hours. On servers, plan the scan window around the backup window so the two do not fight over the same disks at two in the morning. We are not quoting an overhead figure, because none is published and one measured on our hardware would not describe yours.

The administrative load is deliberately light, and the failure mode is not technical. It is nobody reading the alert mailbox, and machines rebuilt six months ago never being re-enrolled. Put a monthly fifteen-minute review of the device list in someone’s calendar and most of the value of the product survives contact with a real office.

Questions people ask about this