Considering a multi-seat deployment?
MIKAGE is free for businesses too. No license keys and no seat counts — install it on every PC you need. This page honestly answers the questions businesses usually ask.
Designed to run alongside Windows Defender.
MIKAGE doesn't register itself with Windows Security Center as an antivirus product, and it doesn't hook file operations at the kernel level. It's a userspace-only detection engine. Many third-party antivirus products register with Security Center, which causes Windows to automatically disable Defender's real-time protection -- MIKAGE skips that registration entirely, so it runs alongside Defender as an additional detection layer without disabling it.
That means you can add a layer of hash matching, 19,000+ YARA rules, and heuristic analysis without touching your existing security operations -- Defender policies, exclusions, and reporting stay exactly as they are.
Free for business use.
Every feature — multi-layer detection (hash, YARA, heuristics), real-time monitoring, the AES-256-GCM encrypted quarantine vault, and access to the latest signatures — is free for businesses and individuals alike. The site is funded by advertising, so there are no seat, time, or feature limits.
We recommend piloting on a few PCs first, then rolling out once you're comfortable with it.
What happens with false positives or missed threats.
| False positive (a legitimate file is flagged) | You can restore it from the quarantine vault. If you suspect a false positive, please contact us. |
|---|---|
| Missed threat (something gets through) | No antivirus product, MIKAGE included, guarantees 100% detection. We recommend using it as one layer of defense alongside other measures -- backups, tamper detection (EDR), network scanning, etc. |
| Support channel | As an independently developed product, we don't currently offer a formal enterprise SLA (guaranteed response times, etc.). Contact [email protected] and we'll respond promptly and in good faith. |
Signature updates and continued development.
The signature database is synced on our side from several public YARA rule collections (Elastic, ESET, Google Cloud Threat Intelligence, and others) and combined with our own signature database for distribution.
A changelog is published on our About page. Most recently, we found and fixed a bug where a non-detection helper rule bundled in a public YARA collection was incorrectly flagging every file as "malicious" (full write-up here). We maintain a practice of discovering and publicly disclosing our own product's bugs, along with the fix.
Transparency as an independent developer.
MIKAGE is developed and operated by a sole proprietor, not a company. To avoid the "we don't know what it's actually doing" problem that's especially damaging for security software, we publish concrete information about the developer, the open-source software we use, how the detection engine works, and our changelog on the About page.
The detection engine is built on the open-source defensive antivirus engine "PRX-SD" (MIT / Apache-2.0), and the base engine's source code itself is public. It's not a black-box proprietary engine -- it's built on a verifiable foundation, which you're welcome to factor into your evaluation.
Roll it out to as many PCs as you need.
No license keys or seat tracking. On Windows there is an installer (.exe) and an MSI package (.msi) that works well with deployment tools; on Linux there is a .deb package.
Common questions from business buyers
Is it really free?
Yes, including business use. There are no contracts or invoices.
Do we need to manage license keys?
No. MIKAGE works without any license key.
Is there a limit on the number of PCs?
No. Install it on every PC you need.
Can we try it first?
Every feature is free, so you can evaluate it directly on your own machines.
Do we need to change our Windows Defender settings?
No. Since MIKAGE doesn't register with Windows Security Center, you can use it as-is without changing your Defender configuration.
Are signatures updated automatically?
Not yet. You'll need to manually click "Check for updates" in the app, or run the included command-line tool yourself. For multi-seat deployments, we recommend building regular manual updates into your operations. Automatic updates are a development priority going forward.
Start with a small pilot.
It's free, so you can try it on a few PCs before rolling it out.
Download for free