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Today, Netgear announced the latest generation of its “Netgear Armor, powered by the Bitdefender” subscription service. The gist is that you can now get more out of the service if you want to pay more in annual cost.
Netgear Armor, powered by Bitdefender: A brief history
Debuted in early 2019 as “Netgear Armor,” the feature was first available as an add-on in Netfgear’s Orbi mesh systems.
In 2020, Netgear partnered with BitDefender, and “Netgear Armor” became the “Netgear Armor, powered by Bitdefender” subscription service. The partnership resulted in more protection-related features, a VPN option, and the expansion of the service to Netgear’s Nighthawk product line.
At $69.99/year, the service was designed to protect your entire home network by stopping online threats at the router level. It also includes antivirus software and a mobile app to protect up to 50 devices even when they are out of the home network.
In 2021, Netgear added more protection features to NAPB and hiked the price to $99.99/year. Since then, this service has always included the following at the router level, or local protection, which can be managed via the router’s interface, including Nighthawk and Orbi mobile apps:
- Active Vulnerability Scans on all the connected devices in your home
- Instant Alerts that inform you via notification of detected/blocked threats.
- Web Protection helps you browse more safely by alerting you and blocking potentially harmful web pages.
- Anti-theft Protection helps safeguard your data in case of loss or theft (available only to Android and Windows Devices).
- Sensitive Data Protection: It blocks attempts to send login and banking information, SSNs, and more over unencrypted connections.
- Anomaly Detection: A machine learning algorithm monitors and learns the usual behavior of your connected devices and blocks any unusual activity.
- Brute Force Protection: This feature prevents connected smart devices from bots that attempt to compromise your passwords with unlimited concerted attempts.
- DDoS Protection: Protects your network against crippling denial-of-service attacks.
- Exploit Prevention/IDS: Protects your data and devices from malicious intrusions.
Additionally, those using the Netgear Armor app (available on Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS) get on-the-go security outside the home, including:
- Account Privacy: Monitors 10 email accounts for potential breaches
- VPN: Allows limited custom location selection and blocks limited unwanted ads
- Web Protection: Blocks suspicious websites
- Scam Alerts: Scans SMS and Calendar for malicious links
This Netgear Armor mobile app is also where the service evolves.
Netgear Armor, powered by Bitdefender in 2025: More support and a new tier of service via Armor Plus
Today, Netgear announced that those opting for the existing “Netgear Armor, powered by Bitdefender” will receive an extended warranty on the hardware—from the standard one-year to a three-year, according to Netgear—and 24/7 priority tech support at no additional cost.
Addtionally, there’s an all-new Armor Plus service tier, which costs $$149.99/year and includes all the benefits of Armor and unlimited VPN for up to 50 devices, unlimited Adblocking, and unlimited Anti-tracking.
| Netgear Armor | Netgear Armor Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription Cost | $99.99/year | $149.99/year |
| Local Protection (at router level) | Yes | |
| On-the-go Security (via app or software) | Yes | |
| Extended Warranty (*) | Yes | |
| 24/7 Tech Support (*) | Yes | |
| Unlimited VPN | No | Yes |
| Unlimited Adblocking | No | Yes |
| Unlimited Anti-Tracker | No | Yes |
(*) Newly added features for existing subscribers.
It’s worth noting that the VPN service is a third-party VPN and unrelated to the VPN server feature available on Netgear’s routers.
Availability
Netgear says the additional benefit of Netgear Armor and the new feature of Armor Plus are available immediately.
Overall, the newly added extended warranty and 24/7 tech support are bonuses for existing Armor subscribers. Whether they are enough to make the subscription worthwhile depends on how much you trust third-party software.
Netgear routers were great 10 years ago. I remember my old R7000, what a workhorse it was. But there was a point where they started introducing things like Disney Circle and several other services, some of them were turned on by default after firmware upgrades. At the end, these things degraded the CPU performance to a crawl if not turned off on the R7000.
The router worked well with various types of Tomato, DD-WRT and other clean custom firmware.
All consumer routers these days offer some kind of services like these, but AFAIK they are tested more deeply before release to not affect the performance of the hardware.
Let’s hope Netgear runs nowadays a better QC-process, it was not the case between 2016-2020
Good observation, Thor. I personally had to stop using Netgear after they removed the remote access feature.