Seqrite at ₹1,250 vs Kaspersky at ₹5,200: the labs score them level anyway

01The INR gap is real: ₹1,250 against roughly ₹5,200 per endpoint a year

Start with what a buyer can actually see. Seqrite’s own product page lists its editions with the word “Enquire” where a price would be, and Kaspersky India’s Next page offers a purchase form rather than a figure.²⁰²¹ The INR that exists in public is reseller INR. Techjockey lists Seqrite Endpoint Protection SME at ₹950 and Business at ₹1,250 per user for one year, with the 5 to 50 and 51 to 100 user bands, and Enterprise Suite at ₹2,550.¹ TechBag’s endpoint guide records the partner list for the Core tier at ₹799.²

Kaspersky’s comparable rung is Next EDR Foundations, the prevention tier with root-cause analysis that replaced Endpoint Security for Business Select. The published price is a euro one, €287.50 for five users a year, which the guide converts to about ₹26,000, or ₹5,200 a user.² The cloud-only SMB product, Endpoint Security Cloud Select, is listed at US$4.17 a device a month, about ₹4,260 a year.³ Indian partners quote below these in volume, but a quote is not a list, and a committee compares lists.

02The labs score them level, but only one of them turns up everywhere

AV-TEST’s business Windows 11 round for January and February 2026 tested 15 products. Kaspersky Endpoint Security 12.11 and Seqrite Endpoint Security 18.00 both scored 6 of 6 for protection, performance and usability, both were named Top Product, and so were twelve others; only Symantec fell short.⁴ The June 2025 Windows 10 round tells the same story: Kaspersky Endpoint Security 12.9 and Seqrite 18.00 at 18 of 18 among 19 products.⁵ For the 2025 year AV-TEST gave Seqrite Endpoint Protection its Best Performance award for corporate users, and gave Kaspersky Endpoint Security Best Usability and Best Advanced Protection.⁶⁷

Read those awards as what they are. Seqrite’s is for system load: its agent slowed office PCs less than the industry average in every 2025 performance test. Kaspersky’s advanced-protection award comes from the ATP series, ten live ransomware and infostealer scenarios, where it was error-free across the year.⁷ AV-TEST’s standard protection test is now so widely passed that it separates nobody; the ATP series and the other labs are where differences show.

That is where the comparison stops being level. AV-Comparatives ran two business tests in 2025, March to June and August to November, with 17 vendors in each; Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business Select scored 99.1% real-world protection with one false positive and 100% in the malware protection test in the first factsheet, and took the Approved Business Security Product award in both runs.⁸⁹¹⁰ Seqrite is in neither list. At MITRE, Kaspersky EDR and its managed service were evaluated in Round 2, published April 2020, and the company has not entered since; the 2025 Enterprise round had eleven vendors and Kaspersky was not one of them.¹¹¹² Seqrite has never entered a MITRE round.

03Where the telemetry goes: Pune or Zurich, and what the US ban does and does not mean in India

“Next-gen” endpoint protection is a cloud product wearing an agent. The agent on the laptop blocks what it already knows; for everything else it sends hashes, URLs and sometimes whole suspicious files to the vendor’s reputation cloud and waits for a verdict. That step is not optional, and it is where the residency question lives. Kaspersky’s own transparency page states that threat-related data from users in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and eighteen Asia-Pacific countries, India among them, is processed and stored in Switzerland, with malicious and suspicious files in a Zurich data centre; the move for the Asia-Pacific group dates from November 2020. The page lists thirteen Transparency Centers and records that the Woburn, US centre closed in July 2024.¹³ Seqrite’s product page says nothing about hosting; TechBag’s guide records its cloud console as India-hosted and its on-premises console as the default, from a vendor-document check in August 2026.²

Now the ban, stated precisely. On 20 June 2024 the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security issued a Final Determination prohibiting Kaspersky Lab and its affiliates from providing anti-virus and cybersecurity software to US persons; it was published in the Federal Register on 24 June 2024.¹⁴ New US agreements were barred from 20 July 2024, and from 29 September 2024 Kaspersky could no longer provide signature or code updates in the United States or license its software for resale there.¹⁵ Kaspersky denies wrongdoing. None of this has legal force in India, where the company reports that 2025 B2B sales grew 31%, Kaspersky Next sales more than fivefold and industrial cybersecurity 648%, figures from its own June 2026 release and not independently audited.¹⁶

04When each fits, honestly

Strip out the brochure language and the decision has three inputs: whether the console and the reputation lookups must stay in India, whether anyone will operate an EDR, and whether the company has US exposure. Price is the fourth, and it is the one input where the answer is already known.

Our earlier version said Seqrite for SMBs and Kaspersky for enterprises. The published record says something more useful: Seqrite is the right buy wherever prevention is the job and India is the boundary, at any size; Kaspersky is the right buy wherever detection and response is the job and the company has no US exposure. A 1,500-endpoint Indian manufacturer with no US customers and a two-person IT team is a Seqrite account. A 300-endpoint fintech with a SOC retainer and a US client is, uncomfortably, neither; it should be reading the endpoint guide for the vendors that document a Mumbai region.