Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Security Essentials

and are two popular online virus scanning services that you can use to scan any file for viruses. You just need to upload your files and these online virus scanners will scan those files with multiple antivirus software, and will report result of scan.

VirusTotal and Jotti are pretty good, and quite similar. So, I thought I would do a small comparison between Jotti and VirusTotal to see which one is better.

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Before we get to the part about how VirusTotal and Jotti are different, let’s see what are the similarities between both:

• Both VirusTotal and Jotti have a file size limit of 20MB.
• Both VirusTotal and Jotti use multiple antivirus software to scan files.
• Both VirusTotal and Jotti are completely free, and do not require any registration.
• You can use either of these in completely similar way: just upload your file, and these online virus scanners will scan those with multiple antivirus software.
• Both services have desktop clients as well: , and .

Now, let’s see differences between VirusTotal and Jotti:

Antivirus software used:

Both VirusTotal and Jotti use multiple antivirus software to scan files. However, VirusTotal uses many more antivirus software than Jotti. I uploaded a file in both VirusTotal and Jotti. Jotti used 19 antivirus software to scan files, whereas VirusTotal used 43 antivirus software. Also, VirusTotal has almost all the antivirus that Jotti used. Apart from that, VirusTotal has some of the popular antivirus software, that surprisingly Jotti lacks. A few of those are: McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro.

Clearly, VirusTotal wins in this regard.

Scan Options:

Jotti lets you upload files that you want to scan. VirusTotal lets you upload files, and it also lets you scan URLs. Jotti does not have the feature of scanning URL. I find URL scanning a useful feature, as you can use this to scan a file even before downloading it (only if  that file has a direct URL).

SSL upload:

When I am uploading a file to a website, I am extra cautious about security. VirusTotal provides an option to use SSL security while uploading the file, but Jotti lacks this feature.

The differences mentioned above are the only real differences I could find between VirusTotal and Jotti. However, VirusTotal beats Jotti in all three areas. Importantly, I believe VirusTotal is better than Jotti simply because it uses many more antivirus software that Jotti uses, and whole purpose of using such a service is to scan a file with multiple antivirus software. More the merrier.

Overall, VirusTotal is our winner of VirusTotal vs Jotti comparison. As I mentioned in my article about Jotti, Jotti is a good option to get second opinion about a file that you have already scanned with VirusTotal.

Let us know what you think about these two services.