Best Identity Theft Protection of 2024

Although relatively new to the identity theft protection space — it was founded in 2019 — Aura is already a fan-favorite.

Aura plans start at a low price of $12 a month for individuals, 60 percent off of the service’s regular price. You’ll get a lot for that price, and even though it’s the cheapest option, it has the same features as the more expensive plans. The only difference is the coverage. The more expensive plans cater to families and couples, while the $12 subscription caters to individuals. Take a look at the features:

• Account monitoring
• Personal information monitoring
• Dark web monitoring
• Lost wallet remediation
• Three-bureau credit monitoring
• Monthly credit scores
• Financial transaction monitoring
• 401K monitoring
• $1,000,000 identity theft insurance
• Password manager
• Antivirus
• VPN

If you’re familiar with identity theft protections, you’ve no doubt heard of LifeLock. They were one of the pioneers in this space, and some would argue that they brought identity theft into the everyday person’s lexicon.

A few years ago LifeLock merged with Symantec — the people that brought you Norton antivirus software, and have since launched NortonLifeLock, which gives consumers the best of both worlds.

With so many top-tier services on offer, we understand it can be difficult to decide which product or products might be right for you. To help you decide, you can read our comparison of NortonLifeLock and Identity Guard.

NortonLifeLock’s service is a little pricey, but you can get up to 25-percent off on your first year of service, and as a bonus you get a VPN at no extra cost. To learn more about what they’re offering, including ways to save on premium identity protection, check out our guide to NortonLifeLock’s services and pricing plans.

Identity Guard is one of our favorite identity theft protection services on the market today for a reason. Depending on the plan you choose, you’ll get a full suite of robust protections the company has refined over 20 years of safeguarding households from fraudsters, including tax fraud alerts to protect you from the growing threat of COVID-19 unemployment scams. And now, for a limited time only, you can grab a premium Identity Guard package for 33% off.

And when we say robust protections, we mean robust. When we tested Identity Guard’s top-tier protection plan, we found:

• Data Breach Notifications
• 3-Bureau Credit Monitoring
• Bank Account Monitoring
• 401k & Investment Account Monitoring
• Home Title Monitoring
• Dark Web Monitoring and More

IdentityIQ takes identity theft monitoring seriously — particularly their credit monitoring. One of the things that immediately impressed us is that IdentityIQ offers 12 triple-bureau reports per year — basically, one every month, which is an unheard of amount in an industry where most competitors are only offering one per year. This is great news because incongruities in your credit reports are the earliest warning signs that your identity might be compromised. And right now you can get it for 10 percent off the regular price.

Beyond that, IdentityIQ offers daily credit monitoring that will alert you to changes in addresses, personal information, the appearance of delinquent accounts, and the opening of new credit accounts or loans taken out in your name. They also monitor for unique items like fluctuations in collection balances, charge-offs, and new authorized card users. This comprehensive posture will all but ensure you’re going to know quickly if something suspicious is going on.

McAfee provides identity theft protection services without in-depth financial monitoring, which allows the company to offer its plans at highly affordable rates. In place of financial monitoring, McAfee provides a suite of online security tools including antivirus and a VPN.

McAfee uses a proprietary algorithm to provide users with a Protection Score. This score takes into account information like how often you run antivirus scans on your devices, how safe your passwords are, and whether or not you’ve suffered a breach in the past. Basically, it lets you know whether there might be some holes in your security and offers you some helpful suggestions for improving your online safety overall.

McAfee’s identity monitoring software scans both the web and dark web looking for signs that someone might have stolen your identity. If the company does find signs of a breach, it offers data cleanup and security freezes on your accounts to help minimize the damage. Finally, McAfee provides $1 million worth of restoration coverage for identity theft.

Note that one of the biggest advantages of using McAfee is that you get access to the company’s award-winning antivirus software and an unlimited VPN. These tools help keep you safe now, so that you’re less likely to suffer identity theft in the first place. The company’s philosophy seems to be to protect customers on the front end and use theft monitoring as a sort of insurance just in case things should go wrong.

ID Shield swiped up a gold CyberSecurity Excellence award in 2021 for stepping up to the plate with its Coronavirus Privacy and ID Theft Protection Resource Center for families coping with the heightened risk of ID fraud during the pandemic. That makes sense. Keeping families — and children — safe has always been a priority for ID Shield.

Why would that be important? Glad you asked. Although they don’t have established financial lives, children are a prime target for identity thieves. The barriers to accessing their identities are usually few and far between, and the fraudster’s crimes usually go undetected for years. If you have children, you’re going to want to keep them protected.

Thankfully, IDShield has you covered in that regard. With their top-tier family plan, you’ll get triple bureau credit monitoring, social security number alerts, dark web surveillance, bank account monitoring, and a whole host of other features to keep you and your loved ones safe.

Along with its total credit monitoring and award-winning restoration services for scam victims, ID Shield now offers a virtual private network (VPN) and password manager, for complete online privacy.

With all these new features, understanding which IDShield plan is right for you can get a little tricky, so we’ve created an easy-to-follow guide to IDShield’s pricing for individuals and families to help you out.

While they’re not as well known as the identity theft protection services mentioned above, you really shouldn’t overlook ID Watchdog. This is a really solid service with a lot of great features, including up to $1 million in 401(k) and Health Savings Account (HSA) identity theft insurance. With health and employment fraud scams sweeping across the country, safeguarding our health plans should be on all of our ID protection checklists.

When we reviewed ID Watchdog’s services, we found they really take credit and finances seriously. Their premium tier of service gives you access to your triple-bureau credit report while scanning all three bureaus for significant disruptions that might indicate identity theft. They also offer a multi-bureau, one-touch credit lock that effectively prevents bad actors from taking out lines of credit or applying for loans in your name. While this functionality isn’t unique to ID WatchDog, it’s not exactly common either.

We weren’t exactly blown away with ID Watchdog’s user experience, but those stale design choices can be forgiven easily given their comprehensive protection and great benefits. To help you determine if this service is right for you, we created a guide to ID Watchdog’s pricing and service structure.

Allstate Identity Protection’s plans cover traditional industry terrain, but they are bringing some unique offerings to the table, too — namely their “digital footprint” tool. This is honestly something we’ve never seen before. Allstate’s 30-day free trial on any package you choose is a good incentive to check it out.

Allstate’s digital footprint tool compiles a list of all your active and dormant accounts, as well as keeps an eye on all your online activity, giving you a comprehensive visualization of your online presence. This is helpful in revealing which companies are collecting your data, and will also reveal any vulnerabilities in your security posture. This is a really interesting feature that’s not comparable to anything else on the market.

That said, they do also offer some mainstays of the identity theft protection world. They offer proactive financial account monitoring as well as common identity theft protections like Social Security number tracing, dark web monitoring, and credit alerts. Keep in mind, though, that they only keep an eye on one credit bureau — that’s a tick in the cons category for us.

However, they make up for that by offering another rarely-seen perk — stolen tax return reimbursement. A favorite vector of attack by identity thieves is to gather enough information to file a phony W-2 along with fraudulent taxes in your name — and walk away with a hefty refund while leaving you to prove to the IRS you aren’t a tax cheat. Allstate has you covered against W-2 fraud and against unemployment fraud with their brand new Unemployment Fraud Center.

When we tested and reviewed Zander, we found it to be a bit of an unusual service, but certainly worth including on our list. Their philosophy is that by the time your credit is impacted by identity theft, the damage has already been done. So, instead of focusing on that side of things, they instead prioritize identity protections like financial account monitoring, social security number alerts, and dark web scanning.

While we’re not entirely convinced credit monitoring isn’t worthwhile (it is in our opinion!), we do have to commend them for their efforts to protect their users’ identities in other ways. Their dark web monitoring is comprehensive, and the list of personally identifying information Zander protects is exhaustive.

They also do a great job with their notifications and education. With some services, you’ll get a ping that, say, your email address has shown up in a dark web marketplace, or your account activity is unusual. Zander takes it a step further and tells you if the alert should be cause for alarm, and lets you know what steps you should take to mitigate risk. They also offer a well-stocked library of resources to help you understand identity theft and prevent it from occurring.

There’s a unique advantage that stems from Zander’s lack of credit monitoring: Zander is the most affordable identity theft solution on the market today. As a company, Zander has also done a lot to help families struggling through the pandemic, and has been awarded for its work. To learn more about their ID theft service, check out our complete guide to Zander’s pricing and security features. To learn more about what they offer, check out our guide to Zander’s pricing and services.

What immediately impressed us when we reviewed IdentityForce was how well it was designed. We’ve put a lot of these services through their paces, and many come up short when it comes to user experience. Not so with IdentityForce. Everything feels intentional, and we never had to go hunting for specific functionality — everything was at our fingertips.

The family plan is their most popular offering, and for good reason. Child identity theft is soaring in the U.S. New studies show that about 1.25 million kids were victims of ID theft in 2021, with the average payout per family climbing to $1,100.1 As social media expands into the metaverse, where seamless transactions demand instant access to our sensitive information, our unprotected children will be the softest targets. Thankfully, IdentityForce now includes up to $25,000 in reimbursement per child for cyberbullying, ransomware, and phishing attacks. It’s no wonder, the company has earned a Parent Rated Parent Approved (PRPA) Seal of Approval for eight years running.

Check out our roundup of IdentityForce pricing and services for more information.

As you’d expect, we found in our Experian IdentityWorks review that it has some of the best credit monitoring available since they’re brought to you by one of the big three reporting bureaus. Not only do they offer great reporting on your scores, but they also offer related tools like a robust credit score simulator and even an “Experian Boost” which adds utility and phone bill payment histories to your credit file. The average person sees a 12-point positive change in their credit score after this boost, which can make a huge difference if you’re trying to buy a car or a home.

They also offer a one-touch lock for your Experian credit file, which, as we mentioned before, is a powerful tool in preventing bad actors from establishing credit or securing loans in your name — super helpful functionality here that we’d really like to see more widely adopted.

And finally, Experian IdentityWorks also offers one of the best apps we’ve seen on the market today. It’s well-designed and intuitive and doesn’t just feel like a port of the desktop user experience. This intentionality is what sets it apart and makes it — dare we say — fun to use. And, to top it off, you can get complete family protection for up to 10 dependents.

Like most services on our list, Experian IdentityWorks has several different tiers of service. Read our Experian IdentityWorks pricing roundup to better understand which might be the right one for you.

The threat of identity theft is growing, and in response, some companies are offering protections to their team members and patrons as a perk. Costo is one of those forward-thinking organizations, offering Complete ID to help protect its members from bad actors and fraudsters.

And this isn’t some marketing ploy or cheap gimmick. Complete ID is powered by Experian, so you know the protections are going to be comprehensive. You get dark web surveillance, financial account takeover alerts, social security, criminal record and payday loan monitoring as well as triple-bureau credit monitoring, monthly VantageScore updates, and credit alters.

When we reviewed Complete ID, we found that their protections rival the best in the business — and you can see exactly how they stack up by reading our Complete ID vs. NortonLifeLock comparison.

As for the elephant in the room — yes, you do have to be a Costco member to be eligible for Complete ID. However, a basic Costco membership is about $60 per year, or $5 per month. Complete ID memberships start at $8.99 per month, so all said, you’d be looking at $13.99 per month total. That’s still significantly less than some of the more pricey services on our list — and you’ll be able to buy two dozen cans of baked beans for a nickel whenever you want. That’s a pretty good perk in our book. There are a few more ins and outs, but we explain it all in our Complete ID pricing guide.

Another service offered by Experian, IDnotify places on our list due to their exceptional real-time credit monitoring and financial tools. For folks looking to better understand why their credit score is what it is and what they can do to improve it, look no further — IDnotify has you covered.

However, that isn’t all IDnotify has going for it. Their premier tier of service also offers a complete suite of identity protections including some deep tracks not usually seen in common services including court record monitoring, payday loan monitoring, and change of address alerts. These are all helpful features for folks looking to ensure they are protected from every avenue.

While there are a few notable flaws we found in our IDnotify review — namely the sex offender monitoring is flawed and the app is a little wonky — we’d still recommend this service to anyone looking for complete protection from a reputable source, especially if you’ve got a family.

There are several tiers of protection offered, so be sure to read our IDnotify pricing resource to get a better understanding of what they bring to the table.

AllClear ID has been delivering industry-leading ID protection products and services since 2004. They mainly help businesses of all sizes keep their employees safe. But, on the individual side, one thing we noticed right away when we reviewed All Clear was the attention they paid to our privacy.

When you’re dealing with a company that’s asking for access to all of your most private information (bank accounts, social security number, logins, etc.), it’s important to have faith that they’re actually safeguarding it. Right out the gate, AllClear ID’s multi-factor authentication processes made us feel that we were truly in safe hands.

To get a better idea of exactly what’s offered with their plans and for what price, head over to our AllClear ID packages and pricing page.