Aura Identity Theft Protection Review

Aura Pros and Cons

First Impressions

Aura’s website is very simple to navigate.

We were impressed by just how easy it is to navigate Aura’s website. A number of other identity theft companies we’ve reviewed could take a lesson. Browsing through the various packages and options is very straightforward. That speaks well for the company’s organization and commitment to customer service.

Aura’s identity protection comes with three plans: Individual, Couple, and Family. The Individual subscription covers one adult, the Couple subscription covers two adults, and the Family subscription covers five adults and an unlimited number of kids.

Aura also has an additional subscription called Kids. We consider it separate from the Individual, Couple, and Family subscriptions since it doesn’t come with identity theft protection. Instead, it only provides access to parental controls and child safety tools (like predator and cyberbullying alerts).

Aura Plans and Pricing

We provide more details later in our guide to Aura’s pricing packages, but a few quick notes here right off the bat.

Aura can be a bit pricey, but it’s not always about bottom-line cost. We prefer to think in terms of value, and Aura offers plenty of that. For instance, the Family plan covers up to five adults. That’s a pretty healthy number and should be enough for most families. On top of that, you can protect an unlimited number of children’s Social Security numbers as long as they’re part of your household. For reference, most identity protection services with family plans only cover two adults and a limited number of children, so if you’ve got a larger family, Aura can be a bargain.

Plus, Aura’s Family subscription comes with some unique parental controls you won’t find with other ID theft services. The parental controls allow you to monitor what your children are up to online, filter out content, and set screen time limits. And it also provides child safety tools, such as cyberbullying and predator alerts.

Don’t have children? Aura offers some benefits for you as well. The company understands that identity theft is closely tied to our online behaviors, so it offers some extras that help. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) secures your internet traffic, and also protects your privacy by hiding your real-time location. Meanwhile, antivirus software protects you from online scams and viruses, adding a further layer of protection to your identity.

In addition, Aura lets you protect up to 10 devices per user. That means if you’re on the Couple plan, you and your partner share a 20-device limit. If you’re on the Family plan, the number of devices you can protect depends on the number of registered users, not counting children. For example, 30 devices if there are three members, 40 devices for four members, and so on. We lead a pretty sophisticated digital existence, but even we can’t imagine needing more protection than that.

Finally, we also want to mention that Aura comes with a free 14-day trial, and also backs all long-term plans with a very generous 60-day money-back guarantee. So, you can basically test the service risk-free.

Aura: Purchasing and Setup

The purchasing process for Aura was a breeze. We selected the Individual plan, and then went about setting up our account.

Aura first asked us to provide our email address. Then, we entered our personal information, such as our names, addresses, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, and birth dates. If you care about your privacy and it’s your first time using an ID theft protection service, providing that much personal information might make you anxious. But take it from us – none of that is unusual. These services need to know about you if they’re going to keep you safe.

Signing up for Aura

It’s only at this point that you’re asked to pick your payment method: credit/debit card or PayPal. You’ve got a couple of choices in terms of payment plans. If you’re sure Aura is the right protection service for you, you can purchase an annual plan. That saves you some money in the long run. Of course, it means paying the full price upfront, and that’s not for everyone. In addition, paying one month at a time allows you to test out the service and get comfortable with it before making a long-term commitment.

Once you’ve purchased your plan, you’ll move on to the easy setup process.

Aura’s Dashboard

Dashboard controls can be intimidating at first because they give you so much control. If you’re a novice at protecting your identity, you may not know the ins and outs of keeping yourself safe, and learning it can be overwhelming. Ultimately, though, the dashboard is refreshingly simple.

The first tile was our credit profile. This automatically configured itself based on the personal information we entered during the setup process, but it took a while for it to come online. We get it: Aura has to connect with the credit bureaus and compile a tremendous amount of information. Aura says the configuration can take up to a few hours — but, for us, it took more like half an hour. We clicked on ‘activate’ to start the setup process.

Aura started by asking us for information that only we would know, information specifically drawn from our credit file — things like past addresses and approximate payments we made to specific loans in our past. We liked that they were being cautious about verifying our identity. Once that process was complete, Aura officially activated our credit monitoring.

We were immediately impressed with Aura’s credit monitoring features. The company kept an eye on all three of our credit files – Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Why do you need three? Because if an identity thief tries to take out a line of credit in your name, it might ping one service but not all of them.

Aside from keeping an eye on your credit, Aura also gives you the ability to lock it down. You should always keep this function engaged unless you’re actively applying for a loan or shopping around for a mortgage.

What is a credit lock? It essentially makes it impossible for a lender to access a credit file — in Aura’s case, your Experian file — when it’s engaged. This means a thief looking to open a line of credit in your name will immediately be stopped in their tracks. This is a really powerful tool against fraud, and one we recommend to everyone concerned about keeping their identity intact.

Aura also offers a credit score tracker, which shows your progress over time, and gives you information as to why your score is what it is. This is a great tool for anyone looking to re-establish their credit after a financial hardship or boost their credit to secure a loan at a lower interest rate.

Aura’s credit score tracker

The tracker is down at the bottom there. It doesn’t have any information in it yet, but after you use the service for a few months, you’ll see the dot move, plotting out your (hopefully) increasing score.

Moving on to the next tile, you’ll be able to link your accounts to Aura, which will then monitor them for suspicious activity, like large withdrawals or money being shuffled around. Aura uses Plaid — a third-party middleman which uses heavy-duty encryption to connect vendors to bank accounts — to connect to your accounts.

Aura uses Plaid to connect to your financial accounts

Once we selected our bank and entered our username and password, we were ready to go. Once connected, Aura monitored all our connected accounts for transactions beyond a certain threshold that we set.

Setting Aura’s alert thresholds

Moving right along, the next section is all about identity monitoring. This covers everything from dark web marketplaces, public records, new accounts being opened using your information, and data broker sites. For that last one, Aura even offers to get your information removed from risky data broker sites, reducing your information’s exposure.

To monitor for your identity, Aura uses the information you provided during the sign-up phase, but you can always add more information later on. In fact, we recommend that you do. Aura can only monitor what it knows, so you have to make sure to give Aura all the pertinent details about yourself.

Additional information Aura can monitor

We should point out that we’ve only come across one identity theft protection service that offers a list of services this comprehensive – Identity Guard. You can check out our Identity Guard review for more information, or you can compare these two companies head-to-head with our Aura vs. Identity Guard guide.

And Aura’s monitoring works very well. After we entered all our information, we instantly had 23 notifications about places on the dark web listing our credentials.

Alerts from Aura

It is worth noting that most of these hits didn’t match us. There were a couple of additional entries that were so old they were no longer a danger to our identity. On the one hand, that means you have to remember not to panic if you get 23 alerts or more. On the other hand, it demonstrates how thorough Aura is. Maybe their filters could be more rigorous, but we’d rather have too many notifications than wonder if one or two might be missing.

Three of Aura’s Most Unique Features

Once you have Aura installed and set up, the software does the rest. You get regular alerts any time the service thinks there’s a problem with your identity. Aura goes a step further in protecting your identity by offering a set of proactive measures to make sure your personal information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Aura’s Antivirus

Aura’s antivirus and VPN functions

Aura provides access to a really good antivirus for Windows, macOS, and Android. This is software that protects your devices from malware infections, which can compromise your personal and financial data.

The antivirus service provides comprehensive protection against all types of malware, including ransomware, adware, trojans, spyware, and rootkits. The antivirus program also provides real-time web protection, which means it blocks scam and phishing websites.

Aura’s VPN

Aura also offers a VPN (Virtual Private Network) for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. This is an online app that encrypts your internet traffic, making it unreadable. This prevents hackers from intercepting your traffic and stealing your personal information.

On top of that, the VPN also hides your IP address (which reveals your location). Basically, you surf the web via the VPN, so only its IP address will be visible. This way, malicious actors won’t be able to track your IP address. What’s more, ad trackers won’t be able to associate it with your online preferences either.

We tested the VPN on our iPhone, and it worked pretty well. It provided us with smooth browsing speeds. Also, it passed all of our leak tests — this means it didn’t reveal our real IP and DNS addresses, so our browsing remained private. However, it didn’t really let us choose a server to connect to. It works if all you need is to conceal your browsing activity, but it doesn’t effectively provide other useful VPN features such as changing your device’s IP address location.

Aura’s VPN passed all of our leak tests.

Aura’s Password Manager

Aura offers a strong, easy-to-use password manager, which secures your logins and helps you generate strong passwords.

Passwords are usually the point of attack for identity thieves because they can unlock additional personal information. As a result, it’s always a good idea to use a different password for every account you open. Your Netflix password shouldn’t match your banking password, for example, or your Amazon password.

Trouble is, none of us has the brain capacity to keep track of dozens of different passwords for the dozens of accounts we all maintain. A password manager solves the problem. You only have to remember one password – the one that opens the manager – and the manager does the rest.

Aura: Our Final Verdict

Overall, we loved Aura. Their credit protections are comprehensive, their identity monitoring is robust, and their bonus features — the malware protection, the password manager, and the VPN — put them head and shoulders above many other identity theft protection services we’ve reviewed so far.

Just as important as the features Aura offers, though, is the fact that the company makes it easy to control our own identity protection. The website and app are designed to feel sleek and modern, a stark contrast to most identity theft services, with dashboards that feel like they were rolled out circa 1995. We find that the easier it is to navigate a company’s pages, the more likely we are to make the right decisions with respect to our security.

That said, Not every service is right for every customer. Be sure you breeze through our guide to this year’s best ID theft prevention products before making your final choice.

Aura FAQs

*The score you receive with Aura is provided for educational purposes to help you understand your credit. It is calculated using the information contained in your TransUnion or Experian credit file. Lenders use many different credit scoring systems, and the score you receive with Aura is not the same score used by lenders to evaluate your credit.