The Best Alternatives to IDShield

IDShield is an excellent budget-friendly identity theft protection service, but it’s far from perfect. It has a lot of competition on the market, and it’s always good to know exactly what your options are even when you’re pretty sure you know which service you want to go with.

If you like IDShield, but maybe want to see what you’re missing out on, this should help solidify a decision for you.

See our full review of IDShield.

Best Overall: Identity Guard

In short, Identity Guard does everything IDShield does…but better. Or, at least, it does more which is in many ways the same thing.

In terms of monitoring, Identity Guard matches IDShield when it comes to both speed and accuracy, throwing up alerts quite quickly after an event occurs and throwing up no false alarms in my time with it. Likewise, it gives plenty of detail to help you follow up on any breach events.

This alone wouldn’t put it over the top from IDShield (since their performance in this regard is almost identical), but the primary difference is how much Identity Guard actually offers.

IDShield’s monitoring suite is overall pretty basic, with a few extras. IDShield covers all the most common threats out there like dark web monitoring, credit card monitoring, and user account monitoring.

Identity Guard though, at least at their highest tier of payment, provides more advanced tools such as home title monitoring, as well as 401(k) and investment monitoring to help keep your retirement plans secure.

So in terms of providing everything you would want to see from a service like this, Identity Guard has IDShield beat in almost every respect, except perhaps price.

IDShield offers much better performance than Identity Guard’s lower tier options (its Value and Total plans) for a similar price point. What it falls short of is Identity Guard’s Ultra plan, which is significantly more expensive.

Of course even this comes with caveats. Identity Guard offers 3 bureau credit monitoring with both its Total and Ultra plans, while IDShield tacks on a hefty price hike for that service, putting it at a fair bit more expensive than the Total option (though still cheaper than Ultra).

In terms of price it also falls behind when it comes to Family plans; Identity Guard simply offers much, much more bang for your buck there.

Read more: Identity Guard vs IDShield – The Comparison.

Best Additional Services: LifeLock 

LifeLock is pretty similar to Identity Guard in many respects, with similar overall performance.

In general, this makes it a step up over IDShield in the same regards as Identity Guard, save one: speed.

While LifeLock provides much better breadth of coverage overall and similar accuracy that Identity Guard provides over IDShield, it does it much more slowly. IDShield and Identity Guard provide alerts within seconds or minutes of a data breach. LifeLock, by contrast, takes a few days on average, and up to a week after the other services have already alerted you.

LifeLock is also significantly more expensive at every tier than both Identity Guard and IDShield…but this is where its primary strength comes in to make up for it.

LifeLock provides a plethora of other services rolled into its subscription fee, which help to make it a much better value than looking at the cost in a vacuum.

Primarily, it provides two major tools, and one minor one: a VPN service, an antivirus protection service, and a suite of PC health tools.

The VPN and antivirus are the real meat and potatoes here, and are overall pretty solid as these things go. The cost to get these alone is a bit higher than what you end up paying rolling them into the identity theft protection service (compared to buying a similar service and then the other two separately).

Both are valuable identity theft protection tools, enabling you to keep your information more private as you browse the web and to filter out incoming malicious programs.

The PC health tools are really more of a nice bonus. Everything they do is available for free (and better) from other programs, but having them all in one place is a neat benefit.

It’s a bit of a crapshoot whether IDShield or LifeLock is better on this one, and it all comes down to how much you value LifeLock’s additional services. If you were going to be paying for those things anyway, LifeLock does have much better breadth of monitoring without skimping on accuracy. 

But IDShield does cover most of the important stuff, and does it a lot faster and cheaper as well.

Best Budget Alternative: Identity Force

Identity Force exists in roughly the same market niche as IDShield, providing a trimmed down, budget-friendly service that provides pretty much everything you need without much of the chaff. 

Usually this slot would be reserved for something significantly cheaper than IDShield…but honestly the services that fall into that pricing niche are not really worth comparing to IDShield, as all are vastly inferior in performance for not much of a price drop overall.

Indeed, Identity Force is actually a decent bit more expensive than IDShield, but not by so much as to be an alarming price jump for similar performance, and it does have a few nice extras that IDShield doesn’t provide to make up for it.

In terms of raw monitoring performance they have similar showings and offer fast, accurate monitoring with many of the same options for monitoring breadth. Identity Force, like IDShield, also requires an extra payment to access credit monitoring, though this is an all-or-nothing deal. You pay for 3 bureaus or get no credit monitoring at all, as compared to IDShield who rolls 1 bureau credit monitoring into their baseline service.

Identity Force offers one really interesting thing to their customers nobody else does, helping it get a leg up: deceased family member remediation.

If one of your family members was enrolled in Identity Force’s service at the time of their death, their coverage carries over afterward. Should people attempt to use said family member’s identity for their own gain, Identity Force will notify you and provide all the usual protection services they offer for no additional charge.

This is unfortunately balanced out by one of the biggest annoyances I’ve had with one of these services: their retention department is pushy and relentless.

Of all the identity theft services I’ve tried and cancelled as part of reviewing them, Identity Force has been by far the most persistent in annoying the living daylights out of me afterward. I received multiple calls per week until I very firmly ordered them to stop calling me for any reason, and my spam email folder is filled to the brim with attempts to get me to sign back up, even months after cancelling.

No other service has pestered me with such a deluge of reactivation requests and the like, so be prepared to weather such shameless begging should you sign up for the service and later move on from it.

That said…the service itself is quite good, and worth considering over IDShield as a similarly priced competitor.

Read more: IDShield versus IdentityForce

Conclusion

These services represent what I consider to be the three main alternatives to IDShield for one main reason: they’re all pretty similar in the key aspects.

Like IDShield, all of these options provide excellent performance in the realms of monitoring and everything else that makes a service good. The rest are things that are mostly negotiable; benefits and drawbacks you might want to consider, but don’t necessarily need to.

None are unequivocally better than IDShield in all circumstances, but do provide incentives to switch to them instead.

Read Also: IDShield Promo Codes or Discounts.