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We spent two months testing Aura’s identity protection capabilities and digital security tools including their antivirus, VPN and password manager.
Updated December 15, 2025
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No one is completely safe from cybercriminals or data breaches. Our expert advice? The best defense against modern identity theft is a strong identity theft protection service.
Aura takes a proactive approach, focusing on prevention over recovery. Their plans include tools like a VPN to protect online activity and antivirus software to block malware. If identity theft does occur, Aura provides up to $1 million per user in coverage to help restore your finances.
This level of protection comes at a premium. Is it worth the cost for you? After extensive testing, we’ve broken down everything you need to know about Aura’s features, pricing, and overall effectiveness.
Pro Tip: Think your kids are safe from identity theft? Unfortunately, they’re not. Children face heightened risk because this type of crime often goes undetected for years. It might only get discovered when they apply for their first credit card or student loan. Check out these five sobering child identity theft statistics for more information.
Aura’s website is very simple to navigate.
We found it easy to navigate Aura’s website, with clear language and intuitive menus that make it easy to understand their services.
Aura’s pricing is just as simple. Their three main plans—Individual, Couples, and Family—offer the same comprehensive protection; the only difference is how many people are covered. For families, the optional Kids+ add-on provides parental controls, content filtering, and protection against cyberbullying and online predators, requiring a main plan to activate but adding significant value for households with children.
Here’s a complete overview of Aura’s plans and pricing.
| Features | Individual | Couple | Family |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account Monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Antivirus Software | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| VPN | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 3-Bureau Credit Monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Credit Lock | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Home Title Monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Criminal Record Monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Restoration Services | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Identity Verification Monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Annual Credit Report | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Parental Controls | No | No | Yes |
| Child Safety Tools | No | No | Yes |
| Cost per Month | $12 per month | $20 per month | $30 per month |
| Cost per Year | $108 per year ($9 per month) | $204 per year ($17 per month) | $300 per year ($25 per month) |
You can find cheaper identity protection services, but few match Aura’s comprehensive coverage. For example, Identity Guard’s entry-level plan starts at $8.99 per month but lacks three-bureau credit monitoring. To get similar features, you’d need their Ultra plan, which costs considerably more.
Better yet, compare Aura’s Family plan to LifeLock and you’ll see that Aura protects unlimited kids whereas LifeLock limits their protection to five kids. For a larger family, that extra protection is necessary. Plus, Aura costs about $30 less per month. To be fair, LifeLock offers a bigger insurance policy.
Pro Tip: Aura offers a 14-day free trial to test their service. Once you pay for a subscription, you have a 60-day money-back guarantee. That gives you over two months to decide whether their protection meets your needs.
Aura stands out for its security extras rarely included in identity protection plans. Family subscribers get parental controls to monitor online activity, block inappropriate content, manage screen time, and protect against cyberbullying and predators.
Even without kids, Aura offers valuable tools: a VPN to encrypt your connection and mask your location, plus antivirus software to block malware, phishing, and malicious sites. Plans cover up to 10 devices per person—20 for couples and 10 per registered member for families—ensuring comprehensive protection across all devices.
It took us a while to get started with Aura. They need a lot of personal details to effectively monitor your identity. At least the process was clear and user-friendly.
After selecting our plan and providing an email, Aura walked us through their intake questionnaire. This collects essential personal data including Social Security Numbers, birthdates, and addresses. While we recommend limiting personal information shared online, identity protection services require these details to work effectively.
Before sharing sensitive information with any identity protection service, we always verify their security credentials. We thoroughly examined Aura’s SOC 2 Type II certification, their 256-bit AES encryption standards, and their zero-knowledge architecture. This due diligence typically takes us about five hours.
Signing up for Aura
Payment options include monthly or annual billing. We recommend an annual plan as it offers a discount and includes that 60-day guarantee. Payment methods include major credit cards and PayPal.
With setup complete, we accessed Aura’s dashboard to monitor and manage our identity protection.
Aura’s Dashboard
We’ve found many identity protection dashboards overwhelming initially due to the amount of information and numerous settings to configure. However, we didn’t have this experience with Aura. The tile-based interface presents your protection status clearly, and it’s simple enough to make adjustments.
The first tile contains information about our credit profile. To get it started, we clicked ‘Activate’ and then Aura asked us questions about our credit history to confirm our identity. For instance, they asked us about past addresses and specific loan payments we’ve made. This shows how seriously Aura takes security.
Once we’d established our bona fides, it was on to configuring our account. That took about half an hour. Not bad considering that Aura had to connect with the credit bureaus and compile an enormous amount of information about us.
Pro Tip: You should always keep an eye on your credit files — go over them at least once a year. Approximately 26 percent of consumers have at least one significant error on their credit reports that could impact their credit scores.1
More importantly, Aura monitored our credit files from all three major credit bureaus — TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. This ensures that we would find out about any new lines of credit under our name immediately, so we could take action if it’s fraudulent.
Aura doesn’t just monitor your credit. It also gives you the tools to control your credit. For instance, you can lock your credit down. This is a great way to ensure no one can tamper with it. You can always unlock it if you need to apply for a loan or shop for a mortgage.
Pro Tip: There are two ways to block your credit file — a lock and a freeze. A lock can be instantly toggled on and off, while a freeze takes at least an hour to undo.2 That’s why we prefer credit locks. You’ll need to sign up for each credit bureau’s credit lock program, but then it’s easy to toggle on and off.
Aura also offers a credit score tracker, which shows your progress over time and provides information about why your score is what it is. This can be a great tool for anyone looking to re-establish their credit after a financial hardship or boost their credit to secure a loan at a lower interest rate.
Aura’s credit score tracker
You’ll find the tracker at the bottom of the page. It starts out blank, but once you’ve used the service for a few months, you’ll see the dot move, and you can plot your own score as it (hopefully) improves.
The next tile let us link all of our financial accounts to Aura. That way, Aura could monitor them and alert us to any suspicious activity – large withdrawals, for instance, or unusual deposits. To ensure a secure connection between Aura and your financial accounts, they connect via Plaid, which uses heavy-duty encryption.
Aura uses Plaid to connect to your financial accounts
Once we selected our bank and entered our username and password, we were ready to go. Once connected, Aura monitored all our connected accounts for transactions beyond a certain threshold that we set.
FYI: We typically keep all of our transaction alerts at or around $300. That way we’ll know if serious money is moving, but we won’t be bombarded with alerts every time we buy lunch.
Setting Aura’s alert thresholds
The next tile explained Aura’s identity monitoring services. Basically, Aura monitors everything from public records to new accounts opened in your name to data broker sites and even the dark web. The company even promises that it can get risky data removed from broker sites, which can significantly reduce your risk of identity theft.
How does Aura monitor your identity? That’s where all that information you gave the company in the beginning comes in. Don’t worry if you skipped some of those questions. You can always go back and enter additional information. Aura can only monitor the aspects of your identity you’ve given it access to, but it’s easy to adjust your profile as your life changes.
Additional information Aura can monitor
Very few identity protection services are as comprehensive as Aura. Identity Guard is one of them, but like we said earlier, only when you subscribe to their premium plan. Check our Aura vs. Identity Guard guide to see which service will best fit your needs.
The real test came when we activated monitoring. Within minutes, Aura discovered 31 instances of our personal information on the dark web. While this sounds alarming, it demonstrates just how thoroughly Aura scans these hidden corners of the internet. Most services we test find a dozen instances at most.
Alerts from Aura
31 notifications is substantial. While most of those hits were old email addresses or partial matches, a few were legitimate concerns. Of course, we addressed them immediately. This level of detail shows how thoroughly Aura scanned for our information.
Once you have Aura installed and set up, the software does the rest. You get regular alerts any time the service thinks there’s a problem with your identity. Aura goes a step further in protecting your identity by offering a set of proactive measures to make sure your personal information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Aura’s antivirus and VPN functions
Aura provides access to a really good antivirus for Windows, macOS, and Android. This is software that protects your devices from malware infections, which can compromise your personal and financial data.
The antivirus service provides comprehensive protection against all types of malware, including ransomware, adware, trojans, spyware, and rootkits. The antivirus program also provides real-time web protection, which means it blocks scam and phishing websites.
Aura also offers a VPN (Virtual Private Network) for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. This is an online app that encrypts your internet traffic, making it unreadable. This prevents hackers from intercepting your traffic and stealing your personal information.
On top of that, the VPN also hides your IP address (which reveals your location). Basically, you surf the web via the VPN, so only its IP address will be visible. This way, malicious actors won’t be able to track your IP address. What’s more, ad trackers won’t be able to associate it with your online preferences either.
During our tests, the connection speeds impressed us for a bundled VPN service. We maintained about 85 percent of our base internet speed. That let us stream in 4K without buffering on most locations we tried. We also ran it through eight DNS leak tests and 10 IP leak tests to ensure our browsing activity was private. It passed every one of those.
Aura’s VPN passed all of our leak tests.
Passwords tend to be the primary point of attack for enterprising identity thieves. A password can unlock an account, which obviously puts that account at risk and other accounts you use that password on. Simply put, you can’t afford to lose a single password.
Aura’s password manager makes sure you don’t. First, it generates a strong, unique password every time you open an account. For most of us, that means lots and lots of passwords. One for Amazon, one for Netflix, one for your bank, one for your gym…you get the idea. Not only does Aura’s password manager generate passwords, but it also stores them securely. You only have to remember one – the one that unlocks the password vault.
Overall, we loved Aura. Their credit protections are comprehensive, their identity monitoring is robust, and their bonus features — the malware protection, the password manager, and the VPN — put them head and shoulders above most other identity theft protection services we’ve reviewed.
Aura also makes it easy to control your identity protection. The website and app feel sleek and modern with interfaces that are simple to navigate and use. Ultimately, more control over our protections and insights into our vulnerabilities helped us to make better decisions for our overall security.
Even so, not every identity theft protection service is right for every customer. Now that you’re an expert on Aura, we recommend you also check out our complete guide to this year’s best ID theft prevention products before making your final choice.
Yes, Aura monitors reports from TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian.
Yes, Aura keeps an eye on dark web marketplaces, chatrooms, and forums for your personally identifying information.
Yes, in our testing we found that Aura’s VPN worked well.
No, Aura’s VPN is not available for Chrome.
For individuals Aura costs $15 monthly. For couples, it’ll be $29 per month. For families of five or less, it costs $50 per month. And remember, you can save money if you pay one year in advance.
*The score you receive with Aura is provided for educational purposes to help you understand your credit. It is calculated using the information contained in your TransUnion or Experian credit file. Lenders use many different credit scoring systems, and the score you receive with Aura is not the same score used by lenders to evaluate your credit.
Library of Congress. (2024). Consumer and Credit Reporting, Scoring, and Related Policy Issues. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R44125
USA.gov. (2025). How to place or lift a security freeze on your credit report. https://www.usa.gov/credit-freeze
