LifeLock Review: Don’t Buy Before you Read This!

LifeLock has long been among the big names in the identity theft protection business and if until now, if you’ve wanted close to impenetrable online ID protection and budget has not been a priority then, choosing LifeLock would have made sense.

But now Aura blows it clean out of the water, providing vastly superior monitoring, far better value for money and way more reliable customer service.

You should get Aura if:

You should get LifeLock if:

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Read more: Aura vs LifeLock: Latest Comparison

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LifeLock Review: Is It Worth Getting?

LifeLock Video Review

Editor’s Ranking

Monitoring and Alerts: 3/10

LifeLock’s monitoring is a bit of a mixed bag. On putting in my information, I was initially greeted with zero alerts: not a good sign.

About two weeks after initially signing up, however, 6 alerts appeared. These are all things I would have expected to see crop up, though disappointingly it wasn’t everything. The compromised name, address, and phone number are useful information to have, but it’s also some of the easiest information to find publicly.

There are a number of data breach alerts I expected to see from various sites that simply did not pop up.

This tells me a few things about LifeLock’s alert system. It is very good at tracking your basic personal information via various sources, it is very slow (perhaps on purpose, so as not to throw up false alerts?) and its data breach monitoring is extremely ineffective.

For this reason, it sadly falls short of many of LifeLock alternatives and competitors in the realm of monitoring. That said, it’s also a bit better than the average of what I’ve looked at and does offer a wide range of monitoring that does seem accurate. It’s just a shame the data breach, and presumably dark web monitoring that goes along with it, are so lackluster.

It’s worth noting that the breadth of their monitoring is also very good but only with Ultimate Plus. While their data breach monitoring will be lacking at every level of service, the addition of home title monitoring and 401(k) and investment monitoring makes LifeLock one of the top services around in terms of how many different types of monitoring it offers. 

Threat Resolution: 2/10

LifeLock offers reasonable threat resolution options with its service, which are broken down into two primary features.

The first – and probably most important – is access to their ID restoration team and overall customer support. This customer support is available 24/7, unlike some identity theft protection services (except Aura), who vary on their hours but are typically at least closed on Sundays, and by midnight every evening.

Access to day or night customer service is an indispensable tool when it comes to correcting the problems brought about by identity theft sooner rather than later.

That said, when I did (finally) connect with them, we found the ‘expertise’ of their threat resolution care people vague and we had more questions than answers after the call.

Furthermore, although they claim to offer US-based support, this is dubious as it certainly sounded like the person on the other side was from India/the Philippines…

Alongside that, LifeLock offers a variety of credit freeze and credit lock options, which you can use to either preemptively head off any potential problems stemming from identity theft, or reactively “staunch the bleeding” by preventing criminals from actually doing anything with your information, like opening new credit cards, taking out loans, and so on.

While credit freezes are an almost universal feature offered by identity theft protection services, and allow you to shut down the opening of new lines of credit through a fairly cumbersome process (you need access to a separate website for it), credit locks are simpler to manage.

LifeLock offers an Identity Lock service that lets you lock down your Transunion credit score with a single click, and unlock it the same way. You’ll still need to freeze your Experian and Equifax files on your own, but it makes things easier.

Insurance: 5/10

LifeLock’s insurance plan is unusual among similar services. Most have a flat $1 million insurance plan; this covers both stolen wealth and expenses like lost wages.

LifeLock, on the other hand, varies the insurance by the level of your plan.

All three offer up to $1 million in coverage for the fees required to hire lawyers and experts. However, only their highest tier plan (Ultimate Plus) offers this for stolen funds or other expenses (the aforementioned lost wages, as well as things like childcare service you wouldn’t normally need).

The lower tier services, Standard and Advantage, offer $25,000 and $100,000 respectively in stolen fund reimbursement and expense compensation.

Family Plans Insurance

For 2 adults

For 2 adults and 5 kids

As you can see, the Standard plan is not really worth considering and the Advantage plan only a little bit better. Predictably, insurance for kids is pretty low as it’s expected they won’t have much to steal to begin with.

Ease of Use:  7/10

LifeLock provides a competent website. It’s not the best out there, but it lacks any glaring flaws as well. 

A quick look at the dashboard:

The information is laid out well enough, though you have to scroll to see everything on the dashboard. This gives it a hit compared to something that uses the width of the screen a bit better.

Other than that, however, everything is good. Each of the tabs is clearly labeled, and navigating between them is quick and easy. Everything transitions quickly after initial loading, with no apparent processing time on transferring between tabs.

You get a lot of relevant information up front, and absolutely no fluff. All of this is information you’ll want to be able to immediately lay an eye on.

Basically, while there’s room for improvement in presentation, there’s nothing that’s really wrong with the site either. Good stuff.

I can’t say the same thing about the desktop and mobile apps, unfortunately. Neither are unusable or anything, but they’re just kind of clunky and redundant overall . This goes especially for the desktop app, which exists mainly to control the Norton 360 security package, and has little to do with the monitoring service at all except to link back to the main website.

Additional Services: 10/10

This is where LifeLock truly shines, and I think is their main focus.

In addition to the identity theft protection benefits, LifeLock comes equipped with the full Norton 360 security suite, the control panel for which is shown below.

This offers a number of services, some of which are very useful and valuable, and some of which are less so.

As a quick rundown, Norton 360 security offers:

Of these, the VPN and antivirus software are the valuable costly options, while the others are of limited usefulness. VPNs and antivirus protection both cost money, and can add up over time to quite a bit in monthly fees. Norton’s options are competent and, importantly, included in the price of the service without hiking it up much.

This inflates the value of LifeLock quite a bit over what other services offer on its own.

The other options? They’re fluff, mostly. Everything there is available for free via some other means, such as their “pc optimization” tool being a much slower, less comprehensive version of something like CCleaner, or is otherwise only minimally useful (like the parental controls).

Cost: 3/10

LifeLock sits in a bit of a weird spot in terms of price. In absolute terms, it’s one of the most expensive services out there. Even when you take into account our 25% discount (off the first year), the prices are fairly hefty, as you can see below.

Additionally, that price is only for your first year, you’ll have LifeLock 30 days free trial and then the price will jump up by a substantial 25% after your first 12 months with the service, after which you’ll be paying normal prices.

However, LifeLock has a few advantages that other, naturally cheaper options don’t, which still makes Lifelock (almost) worth your money. The first is the addition of those services mentioned above: the VPN and Norton antivirus software.

Those alone could make up the difference in price between LifeLock and another option, so if you need both anyway (which many people do) you’re actually saving money in the long term.

The second advantage: the aptly named Advantage plan. You can save a lot of money per month by foregoing the Ultimate Plus plan, and going with Advantage.

While Ultimate Plus offers a lot, some of those features will be irrelevant for a subset of users. If you don’t own a home, you have no need for home title monitoring for example.

You can essentially sneak an extra 33% off the service by simply opting out of the plan that offers features you don’t need. While this guts the insurance plan to a tenth of what it normally would be, $100,000 in coverage is still quite respectable, so if you don’t stand to lose more than that in assets it should also be enough for many peoples’ purposes.

So while LifeLock is expensive on paper, it offers enough variety in its service plans and overall value that it becomes surprisingly easy to justify the cost.

Still, there’s a cheaper option with even better protection out there – Aura…

LifeLock Family Plans

In terms of rating, consider this a subset of cost, but LifeLock’s family plans are worth talking about as their own separate entity.

The pricing on these is odd in some areas, particularly if you try to take advantage of the 25% off discount, which makes it difficult to look at the individual prices for these plans. As a result, it may be better to look at LifeLock’s baseline prices and mentally apply the discount yourself.

As you can see, the LifeLock family plans encourage you even more heavily to take the annual approach. You can get coverage for two adults and 5 kids for an entire year for a LOWER monthly cost than just two adults with their Ultimate Plus plan.

In terms of coverage, everything else is the same. You get the same monitoring options and accuracy, just applied to multiple people at once.

LifeLock’s family plans also, notably, appear to have no restriction on what is considered to be a household. This means you can cover multiple people who might be living in different locations under the same plan. If you and your spouse are currently working in different cities, for instance, or if you want to cover a child who’s gone off to college as one of your adults.

This gives a lot of flexibility in the coverage, and helps a lot with selling their family plans over some other options.

Even outside the raw prices being pretty good deals overall, the  value shouldn’t be understated. While the Select plan is a bit suspect (essentially costing the same as buying two accounts), the Advantage and Ultimate Plus plans are significantly cheaper than having two separate adult and individual accounts, making them a great way to save money.

Finally, if you’re a single parent with a kid (or kids) you can also just add LifeLock Junior to an individual plan, it is instead a flat $5.99 per month per child ($65.99 a year, so a tiny saving there), with no sort of tier scaling.

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Final Score: 5/10

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LifeLock has its benefits to be sure and if you’re a single parent it may make sense. LifeLock is a fairly good identity theft protection service offering a wide variety of different tools and services included in their identity theft protection, including some which can be quite costly per month on their own, making the service fairly good value for money. And their Transunion Credit Lock option is great.

Sadly it also has a few glaring flaws. Chief among these is the monitoring services, which are hit or miss. Some are more accurate than others, and the data breach protection in particular is a massive disappointment, as it seems to lack the depth and accuracy of competitors.

The cost if you want decent cover doesn’t earn it any points either.

So when all is said and done, we still recommend Aura over Lifelock by far. Why? Apart from the fact it is cheaper, and the price is locked in for life, Aura has superior monitoring power, better customer service and offers much higher in theft insurance, especially if you have a family.

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Citations:

1. https://www.cnbc.com/select/what-are-the-three-credit-bureaus/

2. https://blog.avast.com/avast-nortonlifelock-merge

3. https://www.zdnet.com/article/nortonlifelock-sees-second-straight-quarter-of-double-digit-growth/

4. https://www.slu.edu/human-resources/benefits/pdfs/lifelock-fact-sheet.pdf

5. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/nortonlifelock-developments-in-avast-merger-and-improved/429464