Trend Micro Antivirus for macOS 2024 review

This post focuses on Trend Micro antivirus for macOS. It’s a good offering from a reputable company, but is it the right solution for you?

We thoroughly tested the app and all its included features to find out.

I recommend reading the entire review for all the details. If you’re pressed for time, however, you can read a summary of my thoughts below.

Trend Micro for macOS summary

Trend Micro antivirus for macOS is a good antivirus engine with real-time protection. The app includes a decent amount of exposed settings for the average user. However, it’s loaded with marketing for the company’s other products. That’s pretty common these days, with antivirus apps branching out to different areas of online security. But Trend Micro is advertising extra features as being free when they’re not—they cost money. So that should change.

The antivirus engine is the main event here, and on that front, Trend Micro for macOS performs well. While it hasn’t been recently rated on AVComparatives, it obtained a near-perfect score on AVTest. It also performed well in our tests. Although it didn’t detect any of our samples when zipped, it detected all of them immediately once uncompressed. This is a common result.

Its asking price is also fair. There is only one price and only one plan that covers one device for $29.99 a year, which is lower than most competitors.

Its customer service is also excellent, spanning an online knowledge base, email, and chat. The support I received from Trend Micro was prompt, courteous, and accurate, so there’s not much to complain about on the Support front. Its privacy policy is also clear and quite detailed—although it could collect fewer data points if it really wanted to.

Overall, Trend Micro is a great choice for an antivirus. My biggest beef is the in-app marketing fluff and Trend Micro’s definition of free.

If you can get over that, Trend Micro is recommended.

Trend Micro pros and cons

What are Trend Micro’s system requirements?

These are the system requirements Trend Micro lists for macOS.

So, you need macOS Catalina or later, a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, and at least 1.5 GB of free disk space.

I’m doing my testing on macOS Sonoma.

Signing up for Trend Micro

Trend Micro offers a free 30-day trial of its antivirus for macOS (no credit card required). I like it when vendors do that, as it’s a great (and risk-free) way to try out the software before committing some dollars. And that’s what I recommend you do here.

After your trial expires, you must sign up to keep using Trend Micro. The process is exactly what you’re used to. You select your plan, enter your details, and make a payment. Once your payment goes through, Trend Micro will email you the activation code you need to input into the app.

How to install Trend Micro for macOS

The installation process is your standard click-through installation.

1. Purchase a Trend Micro subscription or not (if you’re going for the free trial)
2. Download the Trend Micro installer for Mac from its Downloads page.
3. Locate the downloaded .dmg file in your Downloads folder and double-click it.
4. Double-click the Trend Micro Installer in the open window to begin the installation.
5. If prompted with a security warning, click “Allow” to allow the installation.
6. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the setup.
7. When prompted, enter your Mac’s administrator password to allow Trend Micro to install its components.
8. Towards the end of the installation, you’ll be prompted for an activation code with the option to start your free trial. Click Start Free Trial.
9. Once installation is complete, you’re prompted to install the Trend Micro Helper Tool, which the company defines as follows: “Apple introduced a more secure paradigm for performing tasks with elevated privileges. Without the Helper Tool, Antivirus for Mac cannot launch and scan your computer from threats.” Other antivirus products don’t require the installation of a separate tool, so it’s a bit surprising, but it’s not a big deal.
10. Once both the app and the helper tool are installed on your system, the antivirus will launch automatically.

Once launched, the antivirus must be updated before it can protect your Mac. From the main dashboard, click Update Now… After the update, antivirus protection is enabled on your Mac.

Let’s now turn to the app’s functionality.

The Trend Micro for macOS app

The main event in any antivirus app is its antivirus engine. But there’s more to it than just an antivirus. We’ll provide an overview of the app’s functionality.

Web Menu

The Web menu contains settings for Trend Micro’s Web-related protections. Three submenus are part of the Trend Micro browser extension, which supports Chrome, Firefox, and Safari (though Safari does not support all of its features—more on that below).

Privacy Scanner

The Privacy Scanner is part of Trend Micro’s browser extension and is included in the antivirus app. However, the Privacy Scanner component requires its own installation (it’s not bundled with the software).

The Privacy Scanner lets you sign in to Facebook, X, or LinkedIn via its interface. It will inform you of any privacy and security holes in your social media accounts as you use them.

The Privacy Scanner is only supported by Chrome and Firefox. While the extension can also be installed in Safari, the Privacy Scanner is not present.

To use the Privacy Scanner:

1. Click the Trend Micro toolbar. The Privacy Scanner window is displayed.
2. Select the social network you want to use and sign in.
3. As you go about your business, the Privacy Scanner checks your settings for any privacy or security issues and suggests various fixes.

Web Threat Protection

The Web Threat Protection is a three-fold feature. On one hand, it enables real-time protection against fake websites and threats as you browse. You can set the severity level to your liking. Just be aware that you risk overblocking if you set it to High.

The second part of the feature is found in the Trend Micro browser extension and rates the privacy and security of links you hover over on a web page. To use the feature, tick the Enable Toolbar on Web Browser box. Then, click the Advanced Settings button and tick the Rate links on web pages and Rate links on mouseover boxes in the displayed pop-up window.

Afterward, you can hover links in your browser and get Trend Micro’s ratings before clicking.

You can block certain web pages and trust other websites using the Trusted Websites and Blocked Websites buttons.

Website Filter

The Website Filter sub-menu allows you to select various types of web content to block. So, from here, you could block gambling sites, porn sites, etc. There’s even a category called ‘Web Advertisement’ that blocks ads.

It works quite well, and the Trend Micro extension will notify you when the Website Filter blocks content.

You can also block certain web pages and trust other websites using the Trusted Websites and Blocked Websites buttons in this sub-menu.

Scans

As its name indicates, the Scans menu is where you initiate on-demand and scheduled scans.

Trend Micro antivirus supports three types of scans:

• Smart Scan: This is Trend Micro’s denomination for Quick scans. A Smart Scan scans the most common locations for viruses and malware.
• Custom Scan: A Custom scan allows you to select specific files or folders and scan only those files/folders.
• Full Scan: This is a complete scan of your entire system.

You can also access the Scan Settings by clicking the Change Settings… button at the bottom. We’ll cover those when we look at the app’s settings.

I should mention that Trend Micro will scan for junk files when you run a Smart Scan to get you to purchase its “free” junk file cleaner, which costs money. It displays an ad after the scan…

I recommend clicking Do not scan junk files again after your first Smart Scan.

Folder Shield

The Folder Shield menu allows you to select folders that should be protected. Any time an untrusted program tries to access those folders, access will be blocked, and Trend Micro will display a notification.

To define trusted programs, click on the Trusted Program List link.

Use the + and – buttons below the list to add or remove trusted programs.

Logs

The Logs menu displays the app’s logs. Select a category from the Log Type drop-down menu to view the logs.

You can also view the list of quarantined files by clicking the List Quarantined Files… button.

Privacy Tools

Now, the content of the following two menus is somewhat deceiving. They list various add-ons and claim that they’re free. They’re not. Three out of five of these fluffy features are paid add-ons. The free ones are the ad blocker and the unarchiver.

I consider those features fluff. They’re not critical to the antivirus’ functionality, and there are excellent free alternatives. I wouldn’t recommend paying for these.

We’ll go over all of them.

In the Privacy Tools menu, you’ll find Trend Micro’s VPN and ID Security offerings.

VPN Proxy One Pro

The menu prompts you to Get VPN Proxy One Pro for Free. But when you click on that button, you quickly realize that free isn’t always free.

The link takes you to the Mac App Store, where the app contains In-app purchases. You get a 7-day trial. After that, the VPN will cost at least  $4.99 per month.

ID Security

ID Security is Trend Micro’s identification protection service. It again claims that it’s free. And, again, it’s not. It’s also mobile-only for some reason.

Utility Tools

This menu is a bit better than the previous one. It still lists add-ons as free when they’re not, but two out of three are genuinely free in this menu. Still, not only is “menu-marketing” annoying, but claiming add-ons are free when they’re not is disingenuous. And trust is important in the security space.

In any event, let’s take a closer look at these.

Cleaner One Pro

This is Trend Micro’s junk file cleaner. You know my mantra by now: It’s not critical; there are good free alternatives. Don’t pay for this.

As with the VPN, Trend Micro claims it’s free when it’s not. Clicking the Get Cleaner One Pro for Free button takes you here:

And it asks you for money.

Unarchiver One

This is Trend Micro’s unarchiver software. Like other unarchivers, it allows you to compress and extract files, such as .zip, .rar, .gz, etc.

While I still consider this to be fluff in an antivirus app, at least it is actually free. And it should be just as good as any other unarchiving software.

Clicking on the Get Unarchiver One for Free button opens the Mac App Store, and you can download the app if you like.

AdBlock One

AdBlock One is Trend Micro’s authentically free ad blocker. As mentioned above, it can be downloaded from the Mac App Store.

It also works very well.

Without AdBlock One

With AdBlock One

But given the fact that we already have ad blocking included in Trend Micro’s Website Filter, this one seems redundant.

Let’s now move on to the antivirus tests.

How does Trend Micro for macOS handle viruses?

As mentioned above, Trend Micro hasn’t been recently rated on AVComparatives, so we don’t have that data to share. But it scored very highly on AVTest.

For our in-house tests, I started with malware samples from the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR). Trend Micro’s real-time engine detected all four EICAR samples, but only when unzipped.

The same thing occurred when running a custom scan. Trend Micro detected and quarantined all four EICAR samples (when unzipped).

I then moved on to our malware sample tests. The result was predictably the same: it detected all of them, but only when unzipped, at which point it immediately quarantined the files. This occurred in all scan modes.

Trend Micro’s performance impact

Below is an overview of Trend Micro’s impact on system resources when running quick (smart) and full scans:

Trend Micro scans 

Quick (Smart) Scan

Full Scan

As is quite common now, I had no trouble using my computer during TrendMicro’s scans. And that’s a good thing, seeing as its full scans can be pretty slow.

How much does Trend Micro for macOS cost?

You’ll like Trend Micro‘s pricing scheme if you like simple and streamlined pricing. There’s one subscription available for one device at one price: $29.99.

At roughly $30 per year for antivirus protection, I’d say Trend Micro’s price is fair. And it’s lower than many of its competitors’ pricing. You certainly won’t get a headache trolling through different plans to determine which one to get.

Trend Micro support options

Support from Trend Micro comes in one of three ways:

• Online knowledge base
• Email
• Chat

To get support, click the TrendMicro menu bar icon and select Open Help…

This takes you to Trend Micro’s support page, where you can choose the support channel you want.

While it isn’t the clearest of presentations, from here, you can browse the knowledge base, start a support chat, or send a support email. To send an email, click Submit a Request under Refund and Cancellation. That brings up the email contact form (which can also be accessed through its chatbot – see below):

After getting past Trend Micro’s bot, I opted for chat and got a quick and accurate response to my questions.

I was then transferred to a human agent who promptly answered my question.

And while Trend Micro appears to collect a lot of user data, its privacy policy is quite comprehensive and detailed. Could it collect fewer data points? Probably. However, most of the collection revolves around protecting you from viruses and malware in real-time, so it must collect at least some data.

At least it’s being transparent and provides clear instructions on how to turn off the collection where possible.

All in all, my support experience with Trend Micro was positive.

Do I recommend Trend Micro antivirus?

Yes, with a ‘but’…

And here’s the ‘but:’ you’ll have to come to terms with an app full of marketing fluff. It’s my biggest gripe here. An app loaded with ads takes away from the security sheen of its antivirus (especially when misrepresenting those products as being free when most of them are not).

Once you get past that, you get an excellent antivirus engine that supports real-time protection. It may not have detected our samples in compressed format, but this is very common with antivirus apps and doesn’t represent much of a security risk.

Its prices and support are very good, and the extra features that are genuinely free work quite well, though it lacks a password manager and parental controls.

If you can get over the somewhat disingenuous in-app marketing, Trend Micro will serve you and your Mac well. Trend Micro is recommended.

Antivirus testing methodology

We’ve structured our antivirus testing methodology to provide reliable data on the software’s effectiveness at malware protection and performance.

Our testing process includes:

• Using malware test samples from EICAR
• Testing live malware samples, including Adware and Trojans
• Comparing our own tests with independent antivirus lab test results
• Measuring the impact on PC performance

In addition, we analyze pricing, ease of use, compatibility, and additional features.

If you want to know more about how we analyze antivirus software, we have a dedicated post on our antivirus research and testing methodology.