How these comparisons are made

Part of the comparison library · Reviewed 22 September 2026

A method page is only useful if it describes what the publisher actually does, including the parts that are unflattering. This one sets out the scope of the library, the evidence it accepts, the rule that decides ordering, the commercial arrangement that funds it, and the things it deliberately does not do.

Scope, stated narrowly

Prospect Works is a comparison library covering consumer security software as a category, published by BuildWise s.r.o.. It is not a market survey. It does not attempt to list every antivirus product sold in Australia, and it does not rank products against one another.

Coverage of specific commercial products is limited to vendors with which the publisher has an affiliate arrangement. At present that is one vendor, TotalAV. This is the single most important fact about the library's scope, which is why it appears on the homepage, on this page, on the about page and on the disclosure page rather than in a footnote. A site that covers one paid product and presents it as the outcome of a market comparison is describing a race it did not run.

What the library does instead is compare approaches: the protection built into operating systems, free third-party products as a class, paid subscription suites as a class, and the non-software measures that sit underneath all three. Those comparisons can be made honestly without surveying every vendor, because they turn on how the categories differ structurally rather than on which product scored higher in a test this site did not run.

What counts as evidence here

Four sources are used, in this order of preference.

Australian government and regulator publications

The Australian Cyber Security Centre for security guidance, Scamwatch for scam patterns, the ACCC for consumer law, the OAIC for privacy, and the eSafety Commissioner for online safety. Where one of these bodies has published on a point, its wording governs and this site links to it rather than paraphrasing it into something stronger.

Platform vendors' own technical documentation

Microsoft, Apple and Google documentation for statements about what their operating systems include. A vendor is authoritative about its own product's mechanics and is not authoritative about a competitor's.

Independent testing organisations

AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives are the two long-running laboratories that publish comparative results with their methodology attached. Readers who want detection-rate evidence should read their published tests directly, because the date of a test and the sample set it used determine what the figure means. This site links to them and does not reproduce their numbers.

The vendor's own published product information

Used only for statements about what a product is and which platforms it runs on, and treated as marketing rather than as verified fact for anything else. Claims about effectiveness are not repeated from a vendor's own page.

What decides the order of coverage

Pages and, within pages, options are ordered by how often the underlying question changes a household's decision — not by commercial value. In practice this means the option that costs nothing is presented first almost everywhere in this library, because for a substantial share of readers it is the correct answer and the cheapest correct answer should not be buried below a paid one.

The commission arrangement does not alter that ordering, and it is worth being concrete about what that claim means and what it does not. It does not mean the arrangement has no effect: it determines which paid product is covered at all, and a library funded by a different vendor would describe a different product. What it does not do is change a judgement. No page has been rewritten to be more favourable, no caveat has been removed to improve conversion, and the pages recommending against a purchase for particular households were written with the arrangement fully in place.

What this site does not do

• No testing. There is no laboratory here, no malware sample set and no benchmarking rig. Any site publishing original detection figures should be able to describe its sample sourcing, and most cannot.
• No scores or star ratings. A composite score compresses incomparable dimensions into one number and hides the weighting that produced it. This library states the dimensions separately and leaves the weighting to the reader.
• No “best of” lists. With one paid vendor covered, a ranking would be a ranking of one.
• No prices. Subscription pricing changes, varies by term and region, and differs between the first term and renewal. A price reproduced here would be wrong within months, and a wrong price is a misleading claim regardless of intent.
• No testimonials or user reviews. This site publishes no quotes from readers or customers, invented or otherwise, and hosts no review or rating widget.
• No data collection. There is no form, no newsletter and no analytics. The privacy policy and cookie policy describe exactly that, and nothing more.

Dates, updates and corrections

Every page carries a review date. That date changes when the substance of the page changes — a fact corrected, a source replaced, a judgement revised — and not when wording is tidied. A review date that advances monthly without any change to the text is a signal of automation, not of currency.

Pages are reviewed when one of three things happens: a linked source publishes materially new guidance, a platform vendor changes what its operating system includes, or a reader reports an error. Corrections to matters of fact are made promptly, and where a correction changes the meaning of a paragraph the page notes what changed rather than replacing the text silently.

Errors can be reported to info@prospectworks.online. A message that identifies the page and the sentence, and says what the correct position is, will be acted on faster than one that does not. The publisher's full identity and postal address are on the contact page for anyone who needs to write formally.

How a page here is built

Each page begins with the question a reader would actually type, not with a product. The question is then broken into the parts that can be answered from a published source and the parts that are judgement, and the two are kept visibly separate: sourced statements carry a link, judgements are written in the publisher's voice and marked by their phrasing. Where a page reaches a conclusion that does not apply to every household — and most conclusions in this category do not — the conditions under which it holds are stated alongside it.

Tables are used where a reader needs to compare several things on the same axis, and avoided where they would imply precision the underlying evidence does not support. Cells describe the usual case and say so. Where a dimension genuinely varies by product or plan, the cell says that the reader must check the vendor's own documentation, which is less satisfying than a tick and more accurate than one.

Conflicts of interest, in full

There is one, and it is the affiliate arrangement described above and on the disclosure page. Beyond it: no vendor pays for placement on this site, no vendor reviews or approves pages before publication, no page is sponsored, and no advertisement is sold. The publisher has no ownership interest in any security software vendor and does not accept payment for links inserted into existing pages.

If that changes — if a second affiliate arrangement is added, or a different funding model adopted — this page and the disclosure page are updated in the same change that introduces it, before any link goes live. A disclosure written after the fact is not a disclosure.