Aura vs. Identity Guard – Which One Will Keep Your Family Safe?

Based on my testing, Aura wins hands down. It took everything Identity Guard was good at and improved it even more….

So, what’s the difference between Aura and Identity Guard?

Identity Guard is an Aura product. Aura and Identity Guard are excellent at threat monitoring, resolution, and customer service. However, Aura took the already high bar and surpassed it by offering higher identity theft insurance and white-glove fraud resolution, and added services like VPN and antivirus as standard across all their plans. Not to mention, Aura somehow does this at a better price.

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Identity Guard vs Aura: What You Need To Know

When it comes to identity theft protection, Identity Guard is, or was, the gold standard. However, it seems they felt they could do better. Aura is Identity Guard’s answer to LifeLock.

If you’re looking for a little more from your identity protection service that offers several extra features, antivirus, and a password manager, that help improve your internet hygiene and preemptively protect against online threats, Aura will likely be the better choice. It does start a little higher per month, but it offers more features, even on its lower-priced plans.

Identity Guard doesn’t even include identity restoration services in all of its plans. And, its extra features are very limited. There’s a password manager and a safe browser, but that’s it.

Aura, on the other hand, offers a full suite of tools to help keep you and your family safe online. These include a VPN, antivirus software, an email alias tool, automatic data broker removal services, and parental controls with safe gaming.

So, if you want a bare-bones identity protection service that works, you might want an Identity Guard, but if comprehensive security is important to you. Aura’s identity theft is the better choice.

Aura shines by making all the monitoring features standard on all their plans

Dark Web Monitoring & Alerts

Identity Guard is the gold standard here. Thankfully, Aura is still hard-hitting where it counts.

Not surprising since they are both based on the same technology from Identity Guard.

Within about 30 minutes of putting in the test information, Aura populated a list of alerts. This is actually a bit slower than my experience with Identity Guard, but that could be due to any number of factors, and ultimately isn’t really an issue since the effective difference between 5 minutes and 30, or even an hour, is pretty much inconsequential for alerts like this.

All of the alerts are accurate and give enough detail to do something about it if you click on them. It’s also easy to navigate to the alerts page and get back to where you need to be if you want to view the ones you’ve already seen.

This is what Aura’s Alerts page looks like:

This is what the Identity Guard Alerts page looks like:

Credit & Financial Monitoring

And, of course, for both Identity Guard or Aura the breadth of monitoring is still there, with all of the features you’d expect:

Aura makes these features standard on all their plans, while these are only included in Identity Guard’s Ultra package. For the record, though much of it, save the home title and 401(k) and investment monitoring are included in the Value and Total packages as well.

I can’t really think of anything Aura could do better, as it’s pretty much a carbon copy of Identity Guard in this regard. And for the record, that’s the highest praise I can give for its monitoring.

As you might expect I don’t have anything to mention about Identity Guard specifically either, since they are exactly the same in both breadth and performance. Aura just gives you more in every plan.

Aura offers 24/7 US based support 365 days a year, differentiating it from Identity Guard

Here we hit the first place where Aura blows Identity Guard out of the water. One of my biggest complaints with Identity Guard was always that they had limited hours for their customer service. They were good hours, running from 8 AM to 11 PM (EST) on weekdays, and 9 AM to 6 PM on Saturdays. However, those hours are limited, and the lack of availability on Sundays could sometimes be a pain.

It solves that problem completely, offering 24/7/365 customer support, meaning you can reach them any time of the day or night to get a competent, friendly customer service agent on your case.

I presume, though am not entirely sure, that the same general rule applies to Aura as Identity Guard: they tend to retain their customer support representatives a bit longer than the industry average (about 7 years), so the average level of experience and knowledge is much higher than among competitors.

In addition, they of course offer the same secondary options, like wallet restoration, to help ensure you can quickly and easily cancel and reorder credit cards and whatnot.

I’m very impressed with this upgrade to their customer service.

On the whole, when I called both services, I was connected to a competent person within 1-2 minutes. It was very impressive for Aura since I called at midnight on a Saturday.

On the individual plans, the insurance plan is largely identical between these two services. No muss, no fuss, $1 million in insurance for both lost funds and expenses, separately.

However, on the family plan, Aura offers $1M per adult for a total of $5M in theft insurance, blowing Identity Guard and its alternative company out of the water.

So if you have a Family plan with Aura, both you, your spouse, and up to three qualifying adults are covered up to $1M each!

A very nice to have, indeed.

Both services offer the same benefits and terms for Lost Wages, Elder/Spousal/Child Care, and Travel Expenses.

Aura, again makes it standard to have White Glove Fraud Resolution on all their plans, while Identity Guard only offers it for the Ultra plan.

Both Aura Identity Theft and Identity Guard’s family plans allow you to include up to 5 adults and unlimited kids. This is extremely generous compared to the 2 adults and 3-4 kids norm in the industry.

Aura’s family plan differs from Identity Guard in the higher theft insurance coverage (up to $5M versus $1M) and the additional services included.

Aura’s inclusion of Circle – the parental controls app in their family plan is also a great feature.

There is a wide gulf of difference here between Aura and Identity Guard. Where Identity Guard had pretty much nothing in the realm of additional services, Aura has plenty.

Aura offer a VPN service and antivirus plan bundled into their membership packages. This gives you more identity theft protection than you’d have otherwise, and these are nice services to have for free, essentially.

I don’t think either service is the best on the market, but having any kind of VPN or antivirus is better than nothing, and having a “free” antivirus is usually good enough to obviate the need to pay for a more expensive one.

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

I like how Aura has really streamlined the pricing here. They offer the same benefits on all plans. What changes is how many members you want to be covered.

As you can probably tell, the prices here are close to identical, except at the Value plan; presumably because of the addition of the VPN and antivirus making it so they have to hike the price of their lowest plan. But otherwise, there’s only the rounding of a cent here to make the biggest difference. Family plans are cheaper for Aura at the Total and Ultra plan levels as well, leaving little reason to go with Identity Guard over Aura.

This, likewise, is probably the intent. Aura seems intended as a complete replacement for Identity Guard in every way, so it’s aggressively priced to make sure it can bring people in.

Oh, and it’s important to note: the Value and Total plans remain a less-than-ideal value for most users, though the Value plan is an interesting one for Aura since you at least get the VPN and antivirus along with the subpar monitoring of your personal information.

Finally, an extra bit of temptation to use Aura comes in the fact that Aura offers promo and discount codes, a 2-week free trial, and a 60-day money-back guarantee if you don’t like it. Only 2 weeks on the trial is a bit stingy compared to other services out there, but it’s a lot better than nothing.

Citations:

1. https://www.aura.com/identity-theft-protection

2. https://www.identityguard.com/legal/id-insurance-summary-1

3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2021/07/22/yes-the-world-does-need-another-consumer-digital-security-offering/?sh=43ab49b43742

4. https://www.ncpers.org/identity-fraud-protection