Allstate Identity Protection review

Allstate Identity Protection is offered and serviced by InfoArmor, Inc. – a subsidiary of The Allstate Corporation – and provides a comprehensive suite of identity protection plans designed to safeguard your personal information and assist in the recovery in the event of identity theft.

It stands out with its proactive approach, providing you with real-time alerts for social media monitoring. If your account is hacked, you receive an immediate notification, enabling you to act swiftly before a small breach becomes a full-blown crisis. But is it the right choice for you? Read on to find out.

Allstate Identity Protection: Plans and pricing

With an understanding that each individual and family has unique needs, Allstate Identity Protection offers both individual and family plans available across several tiers, each tailored with distinct features and pricing to cater to a variety of requirements.

Among the options available, the Essentials Plan is an excellent starting point for individuals and families looking to secure their identities. Typically priced at about $9.99 per month for individuals and $18.99 per month for families, this plan features essential identity monitoring services along with financial fraud protection.

Customers benefit from one-bureau credit monitoring and access to 24/7 full-service remediation support, ensuring help is always available when needed. Additionally, the plan includes lost wallet assistance and significant reimbursement coverage, offering up to $1 million in identity theft expense reimbursement and up to $50,000 in stolen funds reimbursement.

For those seeking enhanced protection, the Premier Plan offers a step up with a monthly cost of around $17.99 for individuals and $34.99 for families. This tier builds upon the Essentials Plan by adding features such as financial account transaction monitoring and social media monitoring, which are crucial in today’s digital landscape. Furthermore, users benefit from stolen tax refund advances and increased coverage for stolen funds reimbursement, which can go up to $500,000, giving families added peace of mind.

The most complete option available is the Blue Plan, usually priced around $19 per month for individuals and $36 per month for families. This comprehensive plan includes family digital safety tools and a cybersecurity toolkit featuring antivirus software and a virtual private network (VPN).

Additional benefits include robocall and ad blockers, three-bureau credit monitoring with credit lock/freeze assistance, and an amplified stolen funds reimbursement of up to $1 million, as well as up to $1 million coverage for stolen 401(k) funds.

All plans share common features designed to provide proactive monitoring and support. Customers receive dedicated 24/7 remediation specialists who can assist with identity theft issues, along with identity theft expense reimbursement and privacy management tools to help individuals maintain control over their personal information.

Besides these tiered plans, there’s a special monthly plan called Identity Restoration, costing $3 per month for individuals and $6 per month for families, designed specifically to help users through the identity restoration process. While this plan does not include any protection or monitoring features, it can assist you with full-service identity restoration if you experience an identity breach. You also get $25k in identity theft coverage with this plan.

One impressive thing about Allstate is that its family plans can cover up to 11 members, including yourself. This means the per-member cost can go as low as $32.73 per year per person, even on its highest-tier plan. Moreover, all the plans except the monthly-only one come with a 30-day free trial, letting you trial the service risk-free before committing.

Allstate Identity Protection: Features

Allstate offers one of the most jaw-dropping collections of features we have seen across the industry. Of course, you get excellent identity monitoring, which thoroughly examines multiple sources across the dark web along with public databases for your Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and financial account information.

Additionally, Allstate's wide range of restoration features and insurance offerings reflects the confidence the company has in its own capabilities. While most platforms offer home title and auto title fraud reimbursement, Allstate goes above and beyond by offering stolen tax refund reimbursement, which compensates you if someone files a tax return in your name and claims a refund.

You also get up to $1 million in insurance coverage if funds are stolen from your 401(k) or HSA accounts, as well as reimbursement for fraud involving deceased family members.

In case your identity is breached or you become a victim of a scams, you get full support from Allstate Identity Protection through its Full-Service Identity Restoration service. If identity theft strikes you the company provides a dedicated Privacy Advocate to oversee the complete restoration process. The process involves working with creditors to freeze your credit and resolve any fraudulent accounts that have been opened.

Allstate also offers pretty robust credit monitoring features, including three-bureau credit monitoring on its highest-tier plan. You can access reports from all three bureaus and view your credit scores and trackers directly from the Allstate dashboard.

One particularly impressive feature is the ability to lock your TransUnion credit report with just the click of a button through Allstate. Besides this, you can set transaction alerts on your credit cards and bank accounts, and Allstate will send you a notification every time a transaction exceeding a specified threshold (say, $1,000) is made on your account.

Another impressive Allstate feature is its Digital Footprint, which provides a complete record of your online activity, including the sites you've shopped at and online accounts you've created or forgotten about. This enables you to see where your personal data exists across the web and how different companies use this information. Higher-tier plans also provide as essential features that include Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), password managers, antivirus protection, and browsing safety tools.

Lastly, there's the Family Digital Safety suite, which is included in the Blue plan and offers features like web filtering, screen-time management, and location tracking for family protection. Parents can use these features to detect cyberbullying and block inappropriate content and websites. They can also set screen-time limits for their children and monitor their location in real time.

Allstate Identity Protection: Interface

We hope you have a strong appreciation for the color blue, as Allstate Identity Protection prominently features a deep, calming shade of blue on both their website and mobile app.

The interface adopts a no-frills approach, reminiscent of TurboTax, prioritizing straightforward navigation over elaborate design. Users will find essential categories such as Digital Footprint, Credit Monitoring, Dark Web Monitoring, Financial Transactions, and Social Media Monitoring are clearly laid out on the left panel of the dashboard, making the platform easy to navigate and the most important features easy to access.

Allstate also offers mobile apps for both Android and iOS. While they are great for quickly accessing the dashboard and checking various alerts, these apps offer limited options for editing information within Allstate. We also noticed that updates for these apps are not very frequent, which may raise some security concerns.

For this reason, we recommend primarily using Allstate's web interface to manage your identity monitoring needs. Overall, while Allstate Identity Protection has a solid foundation, enhancing the user experience with more intuitive design elements and interactive tutorials could make it an even more valuable tool for safeguarding personal identity.

Allstate Identity Protection: The competition

Allstate offers one of the most affordable identity protection plans considering the vast range of features included. Even its highest-tier plan costs only $190 per year, which comes to around $15.83 per month.

Its most direct competitor would be Aura, which offers similar parental control features such as content filtering and screen-time limits, along with identity theft and credit monitoring features. Aura's bundled plans start at $12 per month and offer features comparable to Allstate.

One advantage of Allstate, however, is that it allows up to 11 individuals on its family plan, whereas Aura only allows up to five adults along with unlimited children. Aura does, however, provide a more comprehensive data removal service, scanning more than 200 data broker sites and submitting removal requests on your behalf. Additionally, its identity theft insurance goes up to $5 million, one of the highest coverage amounts in the industry.

Just as Allstate allows you to lock your credit directly with TransUnion, IdentityWorks allows you to do the same with Experian. The latter also offers comprehensive credit monitoring features such as a daily Experian FICO score tracker and quarterly three-bureau credit reports and FICO scores. That said, IdentityWorks is slightly on the expensive side, with plans starting at $24.99 per month.

If you're looking for something more affordable, you could consider Norton LifeLock, where plans start as low as $10.42 per month for individuals. It offers a good mix of two-bureau credit monitoring, one-bureau monthly credit reports and scores, along with direct assistance from identity restoration specialists.

Allstate Identity Protection: Final verdict

If you're someone who needs a comprehensive security suite instead of just an identity theft protection platform and also doesn't want to burn a hole in your pocket, Allstate is one of the best options you can choose. Its highest-tier individual plan costs only $190 per year, which comes to less than $16 per month. If you want to protect more than one family member, its highest-tier family plan costs only $360 per year and allows you to add up to 11 members. This brings the per-member cost down to around $32.73 per year.

At this price, you get comprehensive credit monitoring, identity monitoring, full-service identity restoration, up to $1 million in identity theft coverage, along with an additional $1 million in stolen funds reimbursement and 401(k)/HSA reimbursement. Additionally, there are several useful privacy management features such as Digital Footprint monitoring, ad blockers, scam alerts, and cybersecurity tools such as a VPN, password manager, antivirus protection, firewall, and webcam protection.

The list doesn't end there. There are also family digital safety tools that allow you to block malicious or harmful websites for your children and manage their screen time. All in all, Allstate offers one of the densest collections of features we have seen in the industry. However, if you're looking for something lighter and not as feature-packed as Allstate, platforms like Norton LifeLock and McAfee+ may offer better value for money.

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