Aura vs Identity Guard (2026): Same Parent Company, Different Products

Aura and Identity Guard are owned by the same company. Almost no comparison leads with that, and it reframes everything that follows.

The background: Intersections Inc. — behind Identity Guard since the late 1990s — merged with iSubscribed in 2019, and the combined entity became Aura Inc. Aura the product was built from scratch as the parent company's new flagship. Identity Guard kept running as a separate brand at a different price point.

So this isn't really one competitor against another. It's a company's current thinking against its legacy product — which is why the feature gaps run so consistently in one direction.

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How we compared them

Every price and feature below was checked directly against Aura's and Identity Guard's own pricing pages on 1 September 2026, then cross-referenced against Security.org's independently maintained pricing breakdown. Both companies changed their pricing during 2026, so figures published earlier in the year — including our own previous version of this page — are out of date.

We're flagging that openly because stale pricing is the single most common problem with identity-protection comparisons, and it usually favours whichever product the page is selling.

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Current pricing, both products

Identity theft services quote annual billing as a monthly figure, which makes them look cheaper than the month-to-month price. Both are shown here.

Aura

Plan	Monthly	Annual (per month)	Covers
Individual	$15	$12	1 adult, 10 devices
Couple	$29	$22	2 adults, 20 devices
Family	$50	$32	5 adults, unlimited children & devices

Identity Guard

Plan	Individual (annual)	Family (annual)	Credit monitoring
Value	$7.50	$12.50	None
Total	$16.67	$25	3 bureaus, 1-bureau score
Ultra	$25	$33.33	3 bureaus, 3-bureau scores

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The credit monitoring gap is the thing to understand

This is the detail that changes the comparison, and it's easy to miss on Identity Guard's own pricing page.

Identity Guard's Value plan does not include credit monitoring. Not a limited version, not one bureau — none. What you get for $7.50/month is dark web monitoring, SSN and personal-data alerts, a password manager and $1M of identity theft insurance.

That's a legitimate product. It is not the product most people think they're buying when they buy "identity theft protection," because credit monitoring is the part that catches a fraudulent account being opened in your name.

Credit monitoring starts on Total at $16.67/month, which watches all three bureaus but only gives you a monthly credit score from one. Three-bureau scores and annual reports require Ultra at $25/month.

Now put that beside Aura, which includes three-bureau credit monitoring on every plan including the $12/month Individual tier:

	Cheapest plan with 3-bureau monitoring	Price (annual)
Aura	Individual	$12/mo
Identity Guard	Total	$16.67/mo

Aura's cheapest plan is $4.67/month less than the cheapest Identity Guard plan that monitors your credit — and it also includes a VPN, antivirus and a password manager that no Identity Guard plan offers at any price.

That single comparison does more work than the rest of this page.

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The VPN and antivirus gap

Identity Guard offers no VPN and no installed antivirus, on any tier, including the $25/month Ultra plan.

Its higher tiers include a Safe Browsing browser extension that flags known-malicious sites before you load them. That's genuinely useful, and we're not dismissing it — but it isn't a VPN, and the difference matters:

• A browser extension checks URLs inside one browser. Anything outside that browser — another browser, an app, a background process — is untouched.
• A VPN encrypts the whole connection. Every app, every browser, on that device. Your ISP can't see your traffic, and on public Wi-Fi neither can anyone else.

Whether you need a VPN bundled with identity protection is a fair question — plenty of people already pay for one separately, and a standalone VPN is often better than a bundled one. But if you don't have one and want a single subscription covering both jobs, Identity Guard cannot get you there and Aura can.

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Insurance: same floor, very different ceiling

Both companies include identity theft insurance, and at the entry level they match.

	Insurance
Identity Guard — all plans	$1M
Aura Individual	$1M per adult
Aura Couple	$2M per adult
Aura Family	$5M per adult

For a single subscriber on an entry plan, this is a wash. For a household it isn't close: Identity Guard caps at $1M no matter which plan you buy, while Aura's Family plan carries $5M per adult across up to five adults.

Worth keeping in perspective — identity theft insurance reimburses costs like legal fees, lost wages and re-filing expenses. It does not hand you a cheque for the amount stolen, and claims of this size are rare. Treat the ceiling as a tiebreaker, not a headline.

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Families: the widest gap on this page

This is where the two products separate most sharply.

	Aura Family	Identity Guard Ultra Family
Price (annual)	$32/mo	$33.33/mo
Adults covered	5	5
Children	Unlimited	Unlimited minors
3-bureau monitoring	✅	✅
Insurance	$5M per adult	$1M total
VPN	✅	❌
Antivirus	✅	❌
Parental controls	✅	❌

Aura's Family plan is cheaper than Identity Guard's top family tier while including three things it doesn't offer at all. If you're shopping for a household and comparing these two specifically, this table is the decision.

The one genuine exception is Identity Guard's Value Family plan at $12.50/month for five adults and unlimited minors. Per person that is very cheap — but remember it has no credit monitoring.

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When Identity Guard is genuinely the better buy

We'd be doing you a disservice if this page only pointed one way. Two situations where Identity Guard wins on the merits:

You already have credit monitoring, and you want dark web monitoring plus insurance cheaply. Plenty of people get free credit monitoring from their bank, their card issuer or a service like Credit Karma. If that box is already ticked, Identity Guard Value at $7.50/month — or $12.50/month for a whole family — buys you dark web monitoring, SSN alerts and $1M of insurance for less than anything comparable. Aura has no equivalently stripped-down tier.

You've already solved device security. If you run your own VPN and antivirus and are happy with them, Aura's bundle is partly redundant, and you're paying for tools you won't use. Identity Guard Total at $16.67/month is a reasonable narrow-purpose alternative.

Outside those two cases, the pricing consistently favours Aura — and it favours it more at the top of the range than at the bottom, which is the opposite of what people expect.

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Should you switch?

On Total or Ultra: the maths clearly favours switching. Aura's Individual plan at $12/month costs less than either, monitors all three bureaus, and adds a VPN and antivirus. On Ultra you're currently paying roughly double for less coverage.

On Value: it's a real decision rather than an obvious one. You're paying $7.50/month for a genuinely cheap bundle of dark web monitoring and insurance. Moving to Aura costs $4.50/month more and adds credit monitoring, a VPN and antivirus. If you don't have credit monitoring elsewhere, that's a straightforwardly good trade. If you do, it's closer.

One practical note: Aura's money-back guarantee applies to annual plans, which makes an annual signup the lower-risk way to try it — you get the better price and the guarantee, rather than paying the higher monthly rate to stay flexible.

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Bottom line

Aura is the better product for most people, and the reason is structural rather than marketing: it's the newer product the same parent company built to replace the older one. That shows up in what's bundled, and it shows up in the pricing at every tier above entry level.

The sharpest way to put it: Identity Guard's cheapest plan looks cheaper than Aura, but doesn't monitor your credit. The cheapest one that does costs more than Aura and still lacks a VPN and antivirus.

Identity Guard isn't a bad product, and its Value tier fills a real niche for people who only want dark web monitoring and insurance on a budget. But if you're comparing these two expecting the cheaper brand to be the value pick, the numbers say otherwise.

For the full plan-by-plan breakdown see Aura Pricing and Plans Explained, our Aura Family Plan review if you're shopping for a household, or is Aura worth it for the broader verdict.