Aura vs. IdentityForce: Which One Has The Better Service

Comparing IdentityForce with Aura was an interesting one – but our thorough investigation has shown Aura has a lot more to offer with much higher theft insurance if you want to protect your family and better support when you need it – whenever you need it. 

IdentityForce is a great budget-friendly option if you’re looking for the peace of mind of an identity theft protection service but can’t afford a more robust service, or simply don’t need the additional features. We’ll compare the two in more detail…But of the two, Aura Identity Protection is the better service.

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But First, Why Should You Trust Us?

You can learn more about our testing process here.

IdentityForce vs. Aura – Head to Head Comparison:

Editor’s Ranking Table

Our Video Comparison

Monitoring and Alerts: Winner – Aura

IdentityForce actually offers a pretty impressive suite of monitoring tools, covering most of the basics. These include:

The monitoring is also lightning fast (it took 1 minute), and exceptionally accurate, giving no false positives that I’ve seen and enough detail to follow up on any alerts and double check or take action if needed. IdentityForce came back with 19 dark web alerts and 7 unique dark web alerts.

Unfortunately for IdentityForce, Aura takes this a step further. While a bit slower on average (it takes about an hour for an alert to hit as opposed to the minutes or even seconds of IdentityForce), that difference is negligible in the grand scheme.

In exchange, everything else about it is better. It has more detail and a higher breadth of coverage, offering things like home title monitoring, as well as 401(k) and investment monitoring at its highest tier of service.

These are more niche monitoring tools for sure, but if you own a home or are already planning ahead for retirement (as you should be), these are invaluable tools. All of this is well worth a bit of loss in speed, though if you find you don’t have a need for those more advanced monitoring tools, IdentityForce is still very impressive, and easily competes with other alternatives to Aura ID theft protection on the market.

Alerts pages

This is what Aura’s Alerts page looks like:

Aura’s main Alerts page

Each Aura alert can be expanded for more detail

This is what IdentityForce’s Alerts page looks like:

IdentityForce’s Alerts page:

Threat Resolution: Winner – Aura

This comes down to one major factor: availability.

The backbone of any identity theft protection service’s threat resolution suite comes down to its customer service. In terms of competence, I have found very little difference between the services I’ve tested; all of their representatives are friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable, either on their own or as a team; I’m not going to fault one person for not knowing the answer to a question if they can kick it up the chain and I can get an answer from someone else in a reasonable time.

I could give a slight edge to Aura here, as they tend to have more experienced representatives on average (their average customer support team member having about 7 years of experience), but that’s not what really clinches this.

The main difference, as I said, is availability. Aura’s customer service team is available 24/7, with no holidays. If you’re in a crisis you can contact them any time of the day or night and have it sorted out.

By contrast, IdentityForce only has availability between the hours of 8 AM and 5:30 PM (EST) every day. Now I do mean every day, they are open all 7 days of the week, but while that availability is quite good (far better than the average service), it can’t compete with 24/7 availability.

Theft Insurance: Winner – Aura

IdentityForce has a very good insurance plan: $1 million in coverage for lost funds and expenses, separately.

This is what I’d call the industry standard, and would usually result in a tie. Aura, though, offers something I haven’t seen in another service: it offers a total of $5 million in lost funds reimbursement on top of the $1 million in expenses – for each adult enrolled in a family plan on the same account. 

That’s…a lot of coverage, and it’s not something IdentityForce can compete with.

Family Plans: Winner – Aura

IdentityForce drops the ball on family plans somewhat, because they are more limited – the Family Plan covers only 2 adults and an unlimited amount of children (as long as they are under the age of 18). 

If you want their Childwatch plan for kids alone, you need to buy one per child, running you a total of $27.50 per year, per child (making it better to just get the Family plan anyway if you have more than one or two kids). 

By contrast, Aura has one of the most flexible and inexpensive family plans on the market, allowing up to 5 adults and an unlimited amount of children. 

Whatever combination you can think of, it works, with the only restriction being that all children on the plan need to be under the legal guardianship of the account holder.

This is an insane amount of value, and makes Aura the best option for family protection on the market by an extremely wide margin.

Ease of Use: Winner – Aura

I’m not a huge fan of either of these website layouts, but where I feel Aura’s is primarily disappointing, I think IdentityForce’s dashboard is actively pretty bad.

They both have the same issue, to different extents. They’re a bit cluttered, and have a lot of wasted space.

Aura shunting its alerts up to the top right corner, and filling the page with mostly useless buttons (five out of seven of these options will be pressed and then never touched again) is annoying, but mostly harmless. Navigating its features list is slightly cumbersome, especially compared to its predecessor (Identity Guard), but it’s largely functional.

IdentityForce’s dashboard layout is just a mess.

It’s very cluttered, much of it is taken up by the largely useless sidebar full of articles, and I’m overall not a fan of how its tabs are organised. The only thing of value on the dashboard is showing the alerts; everything else is just fluff.

Both of these services could stand to go back to the drawing board here, because  this just isn’t appealing or very easy to use compared to many options on the market.

Additional Service: Winner – Aura

This is a bit of a wash, but the edge goes to Aura. It provides a WiFi security feature, which acts as an extremely limited VPN, alongside an antivirus service. Both are subpar, but much better than nothing, and I won’t fault them for giving you something for free.

In addition, Aura also offers Circle parental controls as part of their Family plan, which I was definitely interested in as a parent.

IdentityForce likewise has a lacklustre VPN service, but no antivirus; instead they have pre-filled forms you can send off to cut down on solicitations from some businesses. 

On the whole, I’d rather have the okay antivirus than the forms (which you can seek out on your own for free anyway), so Aura takes it.

Cost: Winner – Aura

IdentityForce is a perfect confluence of being very cheap, but also very good. It only has one “true” tier of service that includes all of the identity theft protection features, plus optional credit monitoring.

You can easily forego the credit monitoring on IdentityForce to save $5 per month and not feel the sting, because you can get credit monitoring for free from a plethora of places like Credit Karma; I don’t really factor it in as a major feature of identity theft protection services at all. If you do want the credit monitoring, it’s better to go with Aura. More to the point, it’s better to go with Aura under several circumstances, primarily if you need the extra monitoring features…or if you need a more comprehensive family plan.

Final Verdict – Aura Wins

IdentityForce is an extremely good little budget identity theft protection service, with an excellent price point and equally good performance.

However, Aura Identity Protection surpasses IdentityForce in personal information monitoring, encompassing areas such as financial transactions, social media, and medical identity fraud. Moreover, Aura stands out by providing a comprehensive service that includes a family protection feature, enabling coverage for the entire family with a single plan. In addition to its affordability, Aura outshines IdentityForce in terms of performance, making it the superior choice.

There just aren’t really any reasons to pick IdentityForce over Aura (and at a great price with our promo code) , which it does pain me to admit. I really like IdentityForce as a small service, but sometimes ‘the little engine that could’ gets matched up against a high-tech bullet train and it turns out it just…can’t. No matter how much you root for the underdog, it’s not going to catch up in this instance.

Other Comparison Article:

Citations:

1. https://news.syr.edu/blog/2022/12/05/changes-to-identityforce-access/

2. https://www.lsuhsc.edu/administration/hrm/identity_protection.aspx

3. https://www.lsu.edu/hrm/pdfs/identityforce_portable_benefit_datasheet.pdf

4. https://nasafcu.com/personal/financial-planning/identity-theft-protection

5. https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_intrusta/177482/aura%20%281%29.pdf