None of us is immune to hackers and data breaches. There’s really only one way to protect yourself: invest in a high-quality identity theft protection service.
Aura recognizes that you’re far better off if your data doesn’t wind up on the internet in the first place, so it offers proactive protections – a VPN for your privacy and antivirus software to fend off data-stealing malware. Plus, Aura offers all its customers with up to $1 million in identity theft insurance. That way, if something should go wrong, you’re completely covered.
The thing is, protection like this doesn’t come cheap. You pay a premium price when you sign up with Aura. Do you need all that protection? What exactly are you getting for your money? Is it worth it? As always, we have the answers. We spent a full month with Aura, and you’ll find all our findings broken down into easy-to-follow sections below.
Pro Tip: Don’t think your children’s identity can be stolen? Think again. Children are among the most at-risk for identity theft, because the crime is unlikely to be discovered for years. Check these five sobering child identity theft statistics for more information.
Aura Pros and Cons
PROS
Affordable comprehensive coverage at $12 per month with the annual plan
Top-notch customer service and fraud resolution
Includes VPN, antivirus, and a password manager
CONS
Only one tier of protections
Can be difficult to navigate for novice users
First Impressions
Aura’s website is very simple to navigate.
When you’ve been working in this industry for as long as we have, you can tell a lot about a company just by browsing its website. Aura’s is packed with useful information in an intuitive format with straightforward language. It’s almost impossible to get lost. This detailed info is why we had no problem sharing all of our personal information with Aura to test out its service.
Likewise, Aura’s pricing structure is simple and direct. The company offered us three plans, and there’s no trying to figure out which one offers this or that feature. All of them are identical except for the number of people they cover. The Individual plan covers one individual; the Couples plan covers two adults; the Family plan covers families – in this case, that means up to five adults and an unlimited number of children.
Actually, there is a fourth subscription option – the Kids subscription. This isn’t really a plan, though, but a set of tools designed to help parents keep children safe. Sign up, and you get handy features like parental controls and safety mechanisms for protecting your kids from cyberbullying and online predators. Ultimately, you’ll need one of Aura’s three other plans. In other words, the Kids subscription is essentially an add-on.
Do a bit of comparison shopping, and you’ll discover that there are identity theft protection services out there that cost a bit less than Aura. Identity Guard, for example, charges around 30 percent less than Aura across the board. Value is rarely about raw numbers, though. Aura plans offer more than enough features and extras to justify its higher price.
For instance, Aura’s Family plan covers up to five adults. That’s enough to include a couple of grandparents and an aunt or uncle. As for kids under 18, Aura lets you protect an unlimited number of children’s Social Security numbers. Most identity protection services with family plans only cover two adults and a handful of children. If you’ve got a larger family, Aura can actually save you money.
Pro Tip: Aura comes with a free 14-day trial, and also backs all long-term plans with a generous 60-day money-back guarantee. So, you can basically test the service risk-free for over two months.
Aura also throws in some valuable extras you don’t get with other ID protection services. For example, if you sign up for Aura’s family plan, you get access to a whole suite of parental controls that let you monitor what your kids are up to online, filter out adult-only content, and even set screen time limits. Additional safety features protect them from cyberbullies and online predators.
Don’t have kids? You can still benefit from choosing Aura. It offers some extras to help us increase our odds of beating identity thieves. Aura’s VPN secures your internet traffic and protects your privacy by hiding your real-time location. Meanwhile, Aura’s antivirus software protects you from online scams and viruses.
Every user on your plan can protect up to 10 devices. If you’re on the Couples plan, you and your partner share a 20-device limit. If you’re on the Family plan, you get 10 devices for every registered user on the plan.
Aura: Purchasing and Setup
What’s the setup process like? It takes a little time – Aura needs to know a lot about you if it’s going to track your identity online. As with everything else about this company, though, everything was straightforward and easy to navigate.
After signing up for a plan and providing our email address, Aura guided us through a questionnaire. That’s where they gathered all of our personal information, including our social security number, birth date, and address. Normally, we recommend limiting the personal information you hand over to companies, but identity theft protection services need that info to identify risks.
That said, you need to do your homework – or trust us to do it for you – before handing over this information. We thoroughly read through Aura’s privacy policy, assessed their data security measures, and went through their history with a fine-toothed comb. This process typically takes about five hours, but we consider it essential before handing over our personal information.
Signing up for Aura
When it came time to check out, we had a choice of payment methods – credit card or Paypal. Even better, we had a choice of payment plans. We were just signing up to do a review, so we only wanted a single month of service. Luckily Aura lets you dip your toe in like this. However, we recommend an annual plan to save some money since you can always use the money-back guarantee if you decide against Aura after trying it.
At this point, we were ready to move on to our identity theft dashboard, the place where all the real magic happens.
Aura’s Dashboard
The first time you use an identity theft dashboard, it can be overwhelming. There are a lot of settings and information about your identity to take in. Don’t worry, though. Aura cleanly organizes this information into tiles, so it’s easy to understand your identity’s status and make adjustments to your protections.
Credit Profile
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. Consumer Reports estimates that about 1 in 3 people has significant errors in their files that can lead to diminished credit scores.2
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 longer to set up and undo.3 You can have either set up by calling the major credit bureaus.
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
Identity Monitoring
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
We should point out that we’ve only come across one identity theft protection service that offers a list of services as comprehensive as Aura’s – Identity Guard. If you’re interested in Identity Guard, we’d suggest checking out our complete Identity Guard review for more information. You can even compare these two companies head-to-head using our Aura vs. Identity Guard guide.
The proof is in the pudding, though, as they say. What did we find in our pudding? As soon as we had entered all our information, we got 23 notifications about places on the dark web listing our credentials.
Alerts from Aura
Considering how thoroughly we protect our identity, 23 notifications is a lot. Most of those hits didn’t match us, though, and a few others were related to old email addresses we no longer use. Either way, it shows how thoroughly Aura scanned for our information. Most identity theft protections we test come up with at most a dozen alerts.
Three of Aura’s Most Unique Features
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
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’s VPN
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.
We tested the VPN on our iPhone and Windows laptop. It provided us with a fast enough connection for smooth browsing, but it couldn’t quite keep up with 4K streaming. We also ran it through eight IP and five DNS leak tests. It passed each with flying colors. That means it kept us concealed at all times, which is the main purpose of a VPN anyways.
Aura’s VPN passed all of our leak tests.
Aura’s Password Manager
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.
Aura: Our Final Verdict
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.
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.
Max Sheridan brings over two decades of writing experience to our team. He has spent 1,000-plus hours researching VPNs, identity theft protection, and various topics in cyber technology. Previously, Max was an investigative journalist, and he is also a published novelist. He earned a B.A. in Classics from the University of Virginia and an M.A. in Classics from the University of Illinois. He currently lives in Nicosia, Cyprus.
Updated August 13, 2025
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