Aura Identity Theft Protection Review

Aura Pros and Cons

First Impressions

Aura’s website is very simple to navigate.

We knew almost immediately that Aura was a top-tier identity theft protection company. 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 – everything you need to know to make informed decisions about your security – but everything is laid out in an intuitive format and explained in straightforward language. It’s just about impossible to get lost. Ultimately, we felt like Aura wouldn’t just do a great job of taking care of our identity; it would also give us the tools to take care of our own identity.

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.

Aura Plans and Pricing

Here’s a complete overview of Aura’s pricing packages.

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.

Plus, Aura throws in some 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. No more guessing how long they’ve been playing Fortnight. Additional safety features protect them from cyberbullies and online predators. Aura won’t put your kids to bed at night, but it can definitely make the job of parenting in a digital world easier.

Don’t have children? Aura offers some benefits for you as well. The company understands that identity theft is closely tied to our online behaviors, so it offers some extras that help. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) secures your internet traffic, and also protects your privacy by hiding your real-time location. Meanwhile, antivirus software protects you from online scams and viruses, adding a further layer of protection to your identity.

In addition, Aura lets you protect up to 10 devices per user. That means if you’re on the Couples plan, you and your partner share a 20-device limit. If you’re on the Family plan, the number of devices you can protect depends on the number of registered users, not counting children. For example, 30 devices if there are three members, 40 devices for four members, and so on. We lead a pretty sophisticated digital existence, but even we can’t imagine needing more protection than that.

One note: all of this price information applies to first-year plans. Aura charges nearly 80 percent more when you renew. That’s not unique to Aura. Other identity theft services use the same basic practice.

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.

Once we’d selected a plan and provided our email address, Aura headed straight into the questions. What’s our name? Where do we live? What’s our social security number, phone number, and birth date? There’s actually a lot of data you have to come up with, and if you’re not used to identity theft services, that might make you a bit nervous. In fact, we usually recommend limiting the amount of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) you turn over to a company. Identity theft protection is a unique service, though. The fact is, these companies can’t operate effectively if they can’t track you. And if you do your homework – or trust us to do it for you – you’ll quickly find Aura’s privacy protection is air-tight. The company has a spotless track record when it comes to protecting customer data.

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 options in terms of settings and information about the current status of your identity to take in. Here again, Aura does a nice job of simplifying this information so it’s easy to get an overview of your status and make adjustments on how you’re protected. Everything is arranged in tiles, with each tile giving you access to one aspect of your identity.

Credit Profile

The first tile contained information about our credit profile. We clicked on Activate to get our credit profile going. Aura started by asking us questions drawn from our credit history to which only we could know the answers such as our past addresses and specific loan payments we’d made. The point was to verify we were who we said we were, a cautionary measure that makes clear just how seriously Aura takes our security. Once we confirm our identity, Aura activates credit monitoring and configures a profile of our current credit status.

Configuration took a bit of time – a full half hour, in fact. To be fair, Aura has to connect with the credit bureaus and compile a tremendous amount of information. In fact, Aura warned us the configuration can sometimes take a few hours. Half an hour seemed like a win, but maybe that’s what the company was after?

We were immediately impressed with Aura’s credit monitoring features. The company kept an eye on all three of our credit files – Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Why do you need three? Because if an identity thief tries to take out a line of credit in your name, it might ping one service but not all of them.

Aside from keeping an eye on your credit, Aura also gives you the ability to lock it down. You should always keep this function engaged unless you’re actively applying for a loan or shopping around for a mortgage.

What is a credit lock? It essentially makes it impossible for a lender to access a credit file — in Aura’s case, your Experian file — when it’s engaged. This means a thief looking to open a line of credit in your name will immediately be stopped in their tracks. This is a really powerful tool against fraud, and one we recommend to everyone concerned about keeping their identity intact.

Aura also offers a credit score tracker, which shows your progress over time, and gives you information as to why your score is what it is. This is 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

The tracker is down at the bottom there. It doesn’t have any information in it yet, but after you use the service for a few months, you’ll see the dot move, plotting out your (hopefully) increasing score.

Moving on to the next tile, you’ll be able to link your accounts to Aura, which will then monitor them for suspicious activity, like large withdrawals or money being shuffled around. Aura uses Plaid — a third-party middleman which uses heavy-duty encryption to connect vendors to bank accounts — to connect to your accounts.

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.

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

Twenty-three isn’t an outrageous number, but it’s not nothing. And we’re no slouch when it comes to protecting our own data. We should point out that most of these hits didn’t match us. There were a couple of additional entries that were so old they were no longer a danger to our identity. The important point is that Aura is thorough. That’s what you want in an identity theft protection service. We’d always rather have more information than not enough. Still, don’t, you know, freak out if you get 23 – or more – alerts about your own identity.

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 it worked pretty well. It provided us with smooth browsing speeds. Also, it passed all of our leak tests — this means it didn’t reveal our real IP and DNS addresses, so our browsing remained private. However, it didn’t really let us choose a server to connect to. It works if all you need is to conceal your browsing activity, but it doesn’t effectively provide other useful VPN features such as changing your device’s IP address location.

Aura’s VPN passed all of our leak tests.

Aura’s Password Manager

Aura offers a strong, easy-to-use password manager, which secures your logins and helps you generate strong passwords.

Passwords are usually the point of attack for identity thieves because they can unlock additional personal information. As a result, it’s always a good idea to use a different password for every account you open. Your Netflix password shouldn’t match your banking password, for example, or your Amazon password.

Trouble is, none of us has the brain capacity to keep track of dozens of different passwords for the dozens of accounts we all maintain. A password manager solves the problem. You only have to remember one password – the one that opens the manager – and the manager does the rest.

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 many other identity theft protection services we’ve reviewed so far.

Just as important as the features Aura offers, though, is the fact that the company makes it easy to control our own identity protection. The website and app are designed to feel sleek and modern, a stark contrast to most identity theft services, with dashboards that feel like they were rolled out circa 1995. We find that the easier it is to navigate a company’s pages, the more likely we are to make the right decisions with respect to our security.

That said, Not every service is right for every customer. Be sure you breeze through our guide to this year’s best ID theft prevention products before making your final choice.

Aura FAQs

*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.