Aura vs. Identity Force: Which One Has The Better Service

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Brandon King
Editor
May 26, 2023

Comparing Identity Force with Aura was an interesting one – but our thorough investigation has shown Aura has a lot more to offer (and at a great price with our promo code) with much higher theft insurance if you want to protect your family and better support when you need it – whenever you need it. 

Identity Force 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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You should get Aura if:
  • You want a family plan that covers more than 2 adults.
  • You want higher theft insurance of up to $5M ($1M/adult).
  • You want experienced, US-based resolution experts reachable 24/7/365.
  • You want outstanding, comprehensive coverage (like that of Identity Guard).
  • You want Extra Benefits – a VPN, Antivirus, Password Manager and Parental Controls.
  • You want all the above but at a Really Low Price.
14 Day FREE Trial
You should get IdentityForce if:
  • You don’t want 24/7 Customer Support
  • You don’t need Home Title or 401(k) Monitoring
  • You’re not interested in any Added Benefits
  • You want a Budget-Friendly Service with Excellent Threat Monitoring, Resolution, and Credit Monitoring

But First, Why Should You Trust Us?

You can learn more about our testing process here.

Identity Force vs. Aura – Head to Head Comparison:

Editor’s Ranking Table

Overall Score

Best Identity Theft Protection

Monitoring & Alerts

  • Aura found 15 unique dark web alerts, the maximum in our test

  • Found 7 unique dark web alerts

Threat Resolution

  • White Glove support standard on all plans

  • Excellent customer service

Theft Insurance Per Adult

  • $5M Theft Insurance total on the Family plan with 5 adults

  • $1M per adult on all plans

  • $1M total Theft Insurance on all plans

Customer Support

  • Aura wins with their US-based 24/7 support

  • IdentityForce matches Aura with their excellent US-based 24/7 support

Additional Services

  • VPN

  • Antivirus

  • Parental Controls

  • Password Manager

  • VPN

  • Password Manager

  • Antivirus

  • Parental Controls

Cost

  • Aura offers an incredibly low price and highest bang for your buck

  • More expensive than Aura with lesser protection

Renewal Price Increased After 1st Year?

  • No. You lock in the price for life

  • No

Promo Code



Our Video Comparison

Monitoring and Alerts: Winner – Aura

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

  • Advanced Fraud monitoring
  • Change of Address monitoring
  • Court Records monitoring
  • Dark Web monitoring and data analysis
  • Sex Offender monitoring
  • Payday Loan monitoring
  • Bank and Credit Card monitoring

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. Identity Force came back with 19 dark web alerts and 7 unique dark web alerts.

Unfortunately for Identity Force, 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 Identity Force), 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, Identity Force 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

aura dark web sites alerts

Each Aura alert can be expanded for more detail

aura dark web sites alerts detail

This is what Identity Force’s Alerts page looks like:

Identity Force’s Alerts page:

Identity Force’s Alerts page

Threat Resolution: Winner – Aura

Aura
IdentityForce

Expertise

  • Aura's knowdlegeable support experts answered my call within 1-2 minutes

  • Excellent, knowledgeable support experience

US Based Support?

  • Yes

  • Yes

Customer Hours

  • 24/7/365 Support

  • 24/7/365 Support

Concierge Resolution

  • Available on ALL plans

  • Available

Lost Wallet Protection

  • Yes

  • Yes

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.

aura get help

By contrast, Identity Force 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

Aura
IdentityForce

Theft Insurance Score

Theft Insurance 

  • Up to $5M Theft Insurance on the family plan  ($1M per adult)

  • $1M Theft Insurance per Adult on Individual & Couple plans

  • Maximum $1M Theft Insurance total on all plans

Identity Force 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 Identity Force can compete with.

Family Plans: Winner – Aura

Identity Force 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 Identity Force’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's dashboard

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.

Identity Force’s dashboard layout is just a mess.

Identity Force's dashboard

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

Additional Services

  • VPN

  • Antivirus

  • Parental Controls

  • Password Manager

  • VPN

  • Password Manager

  • Antivirus

  • Parental Controls

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.

Aura Parental Controls

Identity Force 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

Promo Code

Best Identity Theft Protection

Individual Plan Cost

  • $9/month 

Aura only offers one plan but offers the same benefits as Identity Guard's Ultra plan

  • $23.99/mo or $239.90/yr - UltraSecure & Credit plan the only one now available)

Couple Plan Cost

  • $17/month 

  • Covers 2 Adults

  • No Couples plan per se (See Family plan below)

Family Plan Cost

  • $25/month 

  • Covers 5 adults & unlimited kids

Aura only offers one plan but offers the same benefits as Identity Guard's Ultra plan

  • Covers 2 adults & unlimited amount of kids

  • All family plans include Childwatch ID Protection

Renewal Price Increased After 1st Year?

  • No. You lock in the price for life

  • Yes

Promo Code

Identity Force 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 Identity Force 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

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

However, Aura Identity Protection is, simply, better. It’s also fairly inexpensive, but has performance that dwarfs what Identity Force offers.

There just aren’t really any reasons to pick Identity Force over Aura, which it does pain me to admit. I really like Identity Force 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.

Read Also: Truth About Aura: Legit or a Scam?

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

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