Malwarebytes Plus Review: The Premium and VPN Bundle, Renamed

Fix it now

The bundle you may know as Premium plus VPN is now sold as Malwarebytes Plus: Privacy VPN, Premium Security and Browser Guard on one subscription. The antivirus half is reviewed on its own elsewhere, so the only question here is whether the VPN earns its place, and the answer depends on whether you would otherwise buy one at all.

1. Ask for it by name. Malwarebytes’ own VPN page calls the bundle Malwarebytes Plus – Privacy VPN, Premium Security and Browser Guard – so quote that rather than the older ‘Premium + VPN’.
2. Buy it if you want encryption on public networks and a different apparent location, bought in the same transaction as your protection software.
3. Buy it if the realistic alternative is having no VPN at all, which for most households it is.
4. Skip it if you already pay for a VPN you rate. You will not switch, and you would be paying twice for the same function.
5. Skip it if you need power-user controls or a specific unusual exit country, and check the published location list before assuming yours is on it.
6. Do not buy it for region-locked streaming. No bundled VPN should be sold to you on that basis.

Privacy VPN is also sold on its own inside the Malwarebytes app, and an existing Premium Security subscriber can add it to their subscription rather than rebuying the bundle.

If that decides it you can stop here. If you want to know what Malwarebytes actually publishes about the tunnel, read on.

Why it happens

Start with the name, because it is the thing most likely to cost you time. Malwarebytes sells this as Malwarebytes Plus, described on its own page as Privacy VPN plus Premium Security plus Browser Guard. The older shorthand of ‘Premium + VPN’ still circulates in reviews and comparison sites. Confusingly, Malwarebytes’ own pricing page uses neither name: it sells by plan size, for individuals, families and small businesses, and leaves the component names to the product pages. So the name on a quote will not tell you what is in the box. Ask which components the subscription activates, and get Premium Security and Privacy VPN both written down.

The VPN is worth judging on what the vendor publishes rather than on bundle marketing. Malwarebytes states that it supports the WireGuard protocol, which is the modern choice and the reason a tunnel connects quickly and is less punishing on a phone battery than older implementations. It publishes an estate of more than 150 servers across more than 60 locations worldwide, and the client runs on Windows, macOS, Android and iOS on plans up to twenty devices.

The privacy claims are unusually specific, which is to Malwarebytes’ credit. The published position is that it does not track, log or store user activity, and it names what it does not collect: browsing activity or sites visited, DNS requests, bandwidth usage on your device, network details including your original IP address, session information including connection timestamps and session counts, and any telemetry from the VPN application itself. That is a more detailed statement than the industry-standard ‘no logs’ line, and it is the statement to compare against when you look at other providers.

What no published claim can tell you is how it performs on your connection, and this review measures nothing. What is safe to say is what a tunnel does in principle: it changes the path your traffic takes, so distance costs you latency before it costs you bandwidth. That is felt first in video calls and games and last in downloads. A nearby exit is usually unremarkable; one on another continent is not.

Be equally clear about what a VPN is not. It does not stop malware, it does not make a phishing page safe, it does not patch an unpatched machine, and it does not make you anonymous to services you are signed in to. The protection half of this bundle is the half that addresses those problems, and if the VPN is what attracted you, you are buying the accessory and getting the product.

Region-locked streaming deserves a plain answer rather than a hedge. Streaming services detect and block commercial VPN address ranges continuously, and keeping ahead of that is a continuous engineering effort. Nobody should sell you a bundled VPN on the strength of it. If that is your requirement, it is a reason to shop for a specialist service and to accept that even there the position changes.

The structural argument for the bundle is real and it is administrative: one subscription, one renewal date, one device pool covering both halves. The structural weakness is the same fact seen from the other side. You cannot buy VPN seats for the phones and protection seats for the laptops; you buy one number and it covers both, and both stop working on the same day if you let it lapse.

Full reference

What Malwarebytes publishes about the VPN

Everything in that table comes from Malwarebytes’ own page. Things it does not publish – split tunnelling, multi-hop, port forwarding, obfuscation for restrictive networks, configurable DNS, router support – are absent from this review rather than asserted as missing. If one of them is a requirement, ask before you buy; an unpublished feature is not the same as a confirmed absence, and neither is it something to assume.

Where the bundle sits against the alternatives

What to check before you commit

1. Confirm the SKU is Malwarebytes Plus, and that the quote lists Premium Security as well as the VPN.
2. Read the current published location list and confirm the country you actually need is on it.
3. Count the devices across both halves, because they share one allowance rather than having one each.
4. If a published audit matters to you, look for the vendor’s current position on it before buying rather than relying on any review’s summary.
5. Note the renewal date. Introductory and renewal terms are set separately, and both halves stop on the same day if the subscription lapses.

Who should not buy this

• Anyone who already pays for a VPN they like. Two tunnels is not twice the privacy; it is twice the bill.
• Anyone whose reason for wanting a VPN is a specific streaming catalogue.
• Anyone who needs a feature Malwarebytes does not publish. Ask first; do not assume the bundle quietly includes it.
• Anyone buying it as a security upgrade. The VPN adds privacy on untrusted networks, not detection.

Questions people ask about this