ESET Protect

Who owns it

ESET is a Slovak company, founded in Bratislava in 1992 by Miroslav Trnka, Peter Pasko and Rudolf Hruby on the NOD antivirus engine they had built since 1987, and it remains privately held by a board of shareholders drawn from the founders, their families and the current executives. It claims 850 researchers across eleven research and development centres; the countries are not listed on its site and we found no Russian or Chinese one. UK sales run through ESET Software UK Limited in Bournemouth (Companies House 07184889) with a separate ESET Research UK Limited.

What it costs

Prices are in pounds excluding VAT, read on 9 September 2026 for 25 devices on a one-year term. ESET Protect Entry is the plan we score: £843.00 for 25 devices, which is £33.72 a device a year, with Windows, macOS, Linux and file servers all covered from the same device count through the ESET Protect Cloud console. It carried no promotion on the day. Protect Advanced was £1,098.00 list (£43.92 a device) but £768.60 with the 30 per cent first-term offer, so Advanced was cheaper than Entry in year one while adding ransomware remediation, mobile threat defence, full-disk encryption, cloud sandboxing and cloud workload protection, none of which Entry has. Protect Complete, £1,350.00 list (£54.00 a device, £945.00 on offer), adds Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace app protection, mail server security and vulnerability and patch management. Protect Elite, the only tier with EDR (ESET Inspect) and the MDR service included, is quote-only. EDR is a paid add-on on Advanced and Complete with no price shown and is not available on Entry at all, so there is no self-service route to EDR at a published price. Self-service runs to 100 devices; above that it is Contact Sales. A 30-day money-back guarantee is stated and plans "renew at the regular price".

What you get and what to watch

Licences are managed in ESET Protect Hub (ESET Business Account for accounts opened before August 2024), which renews, upgrades and adds devices without a sales call. The console offers over 170 built-in reports and a custom notification editor. An on-premises console exists in the wider range. The integrations marketplace is referenced but we could not read a named list of RMM partners, and no public API documentation or MCP server was found in this pass. Standard technical support is free with every product; Premium Support with an SLA is an add-on except on Elite.

At AV-Comparatives' Business Security Test for August to November 2025, ESET Protect Entry blocked all 461 real-world cases (100 per cent, six false alarms) and scored 100 per cent in the malware protection test with no false alarms on business software, rated "Very Fast". ESET reports five consecutive years in the MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise evaluations to 2025 with ESET Inspect. It was not in the June 2026 AV-TEST business cycle and SE Labs blocked our read. We found no breach of ESET and no regulator action, though the session's search budget ran out before a full incident sweep, so that section is thin. Trustpilot is 4.6 on 32,609 invited reviews with 1 per cent one-star, a consumer profile whose complaints are auto-renewal and licence transfers. Not yet tested by Saaskly: assessed on published pricing, the independent test labs, vendor documentation and third-party reviews.