Compare Sophos And Avast For Mac 2016

Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac isn't perfect, however. Even though it's pretty resource light, it wasn't the lightest in our tests. It just hit the sweet spot between resources and features.

• Compare Sophos And Avast For Mac 2016
• Malwarebytes For Mac

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Click over here to optimize and speed up your mac for FREE antivirus,sophos,mac,best mac antivirus,best free antivirus,antivirus 2016,b. Tim, In my experience (I'm an admitted Apple fan-boy and Mac owner since 1984) with both Sophos and Avira, I would say that the choice is really clear. Avira Antivirus Pro 2016 Sophos Enduser Protection Pricing Sophos Enduser Protection price Starting from $49 per month, on a scale between 1 to 10 Sophos Enduser Protection is rated 10, which is much higher than the average cost of Security software.

If you're looking to protect a family's worth of Macs with antivirus software without spending a dime, check out Sophos Home, which comes in a single bundles for both Mac and PCs. This free suite allows you to remotely manage up to 10 machines and even includes parental controls.

But while Sophos Home doesn't slow down your system as much as others, its malware-detection score -- which is OK -- is still behind many of its competitors' scores. We recommend Avast Free Mac Security as the best no-cost option, and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac ($40 per year) as our Editor's Choice and best antivirus for Mac overall.

MORE: Best Mac Antivirus Software

Costs and What's Covered

Sophos Home is free, and its Mac version requires a Apple computer running macOS 10.12 Sierra or one of the two previous versions (OS X 10.11 El Capitan and 10.10 Yosemite) with 1GB of RAM and 1GB of free disk space.

Up to 10 Macs or PCs can be linked together under a single Sophos account for remote management of a household.

Antivirus Protection

Sophos Home uses traditional signature-based malware identification and heuristic behavioral-based monitoring to identify suspicious files. It can thwart Windows malware as well help stop the spread of malware for that platform.

Not only does Sophos constantly scan your computer and its connections in the background, but its web interface enables on-demand scans from remote locations. The utility also scans unopened archive files such as ZIPs.

If you click Deep Scan, it launches the Home Network Security Scan. Despite the name, the main function of this component is to alert you when new devices join the network. It maintains its own simple list of devices.

Antivirus Performance

The Germany-based AV-Test testing lab evaluated Sophos Home for Mac's malware-detection skills and found decent, but far from perfect, protection.

In AV-Test's May 2017 studies, it found that Sophos Home detected 98.4 percent of Mac malware, which translates to catching 181 pieces of malware and failing to detect three. That's not terrible, but Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac, Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac and Norton Security Deluxe detected 100 percent of malware thrown at its Macs in those same tests.

Austria's AV-Comparatives lab tested a series of Sophos Home's competitors -- but not Sophos Home itself -- in July 2017. Two of the free options it tested (Avast Free Mac Security and AVG AntiVirus for Mac) detected 99.9 percent of malware, catching 686 out of 687 malicious files.

Special Features

Unlike other free Mac antivirus solutions, Sophos Home is rich with bonus features. Chief among them is remote management from the Sophos Home web page, so you can check on your machine -- and up to nine others linked to your account -- from the field.

Additionally, those with children coming of age will appreciate Sophos Home's parental controls. (Of the eight Mac antivirus products we tested, only Sophos, Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac provide them.)

Not only can you block an account from visiting entire categories of websites, but it keeps records of each attempt to navigate to a unapproved page. Alternatively, users can be allowed to visit a page after being given a warning that Sophos will make a note of their visit in the parent's log if they proceed.

Sophos' competitors pack browser plugins to flag untrustworthy search-engine results, but don't be annoyed that Sophos doesn't. Those extensions can be downloaded for free from those manufacturers, which include Avast, Bitdefender and Kaspersky.

Performance and System Impact

Sophos Home created a comparatively low impact on system performance. We assessed this using our custom OpenOffice benchmark test, which measures how long it takes to match 20,000 names and 20,000 addresses on a spreadsheet. Our test machine was a Late 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display with a 2.6 GHz Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 70GB of data stored on a 512GB SSD.

After we installed Avast Free Mac Security on our MacBook, the OpenOffice test finished in an average of 2 minutes and 24 seconds, 1.75 seconds longer than the same system took before the installation. That's a passive system hit of 1.2 percent, which is the middle of the bottom half of the range that we found.

By contrast, Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac rated 2.8 percent (a category high) and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac rated 0 percent (the lowest), but you really wouldn't notice any effect on your system.

During a full-system scan, the OpenOffice test finished in 2 minutes and 31.25 seconds, signifying a performance dip of 6.3 percent, the second lowest of those we found. Avira Free Antivirus for Mac's 12.8 percent is the highest, with Kaspersky's 4.5 percent the lowest.

Sophos Home's full-scans completed in an average of 40 minutes and 51 seconds, which falls in the middle of the times we recorded. By contrast, the longest time we saw was 72:45 (Kaspersky), and the shortest was 1:25 (recorded by Bitdefender). The average for all eight products was 36:30.

Interface

Sophos' main window allows you to perform on-demand scans and check the status of your machine, but most of its controls are found in the Sophos Home web interface. For example, while Sophos' on-machine main screen features an Exceptions button, clicking that only shows you which exemptions you've set for websites, applications and files.

To visit the web interface, click Home Dashboard in the main screen and click on your Mac to see its status. Here you can click Scan to perform a remote scan, or click Configure to set parental controls, change scanning preferences and set up exceptions.

Installation and Support

Clicking Download on the Sophos Home web page starts a download of the folder containing the suite's installer file. After opening that installer, it takes approximately 3 minutes for Sophos Home for Mac to be up and running.

As is the case with most free Mac antivirus software, Sophos does not offer any personal technical support with this product. Instead, you'll need to turn to Sophos' community forums and knowledge-base documentation to have your questions answered.

Bottom Line

Sophos Home for Mac is a solid plan for families, especially those on a tight budget. Not only does it pack remote management and parental controls, but its easy one-click scans make it simple enough for anyone to use.

If only its malware detection score were closer to (or at) 100 percent, it would be a serious contender. That's how tight the race to be the best Mac antivirus suite has gotten. Because of this, we prefer Avast Free Mac Security or the paid Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac.

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Compare Sophos And Avast For Mac 2016

Today's best Sophos Home deals

Editor’s Note: Since our last update, new features and tools have been added to Sophos' antivirus and internet security programs. We will test and review these additions the next time we update our side-by-side comparison of the best Mac antivirus software.

Sophos Home didn’t do as well as we’d hoped in our tests of the best antivirus for Mac. It only caught 78 percent of the 165 live malware samples we used, plus it was difficult to use. It did a better job at detecting Windows malware samples earning a 95 percent.

Part of the difficulty using Sophos is most of the program, including the dashboard, is online rather than on your desktop. There are a few functions you can access from the desktop program, mainly virus scans. But settings and other important functions are primarily accessible from your online portal.

Malwarebytes For Mac

As we tested Sophos Home, it did stop several malware threats as we downloaded them. However, there were still many that snuck through. Sophos located most of these when we performed a deep virus scan. When it found a threat, the program asked if we wanted to clean the threat. But rather than remove them for us, or even quarantine them, Sophos instead told us where to find them on our Mac computer and gave instructions on how to manually remove them ourselves. And if we weren’t successful, or found the instructions difficult to follow, the software then encouraged us to visit the Community Forums and ask other users for help. All this was done through the online portal.

When we followed Sophos’ instructions on how to manually remove malware threats, we were first instructed to disable its automatic virus protection. This triggered Sophos to reboot and required us to reenter our credentials to access both the program and our online portal. However, each time Sophos simply reverted to its default settings, including automatically reenabling the virus protection. Because we already knew how to find and remove all threats used in our testing, it wasn’t difficult for us to manually remove them. But because of the number of threats left by Sophos, we found it easier to install Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac, our top pick, and let it find and automatically scrub our system clean for us.

Another quirk we discovered while testing Sophos Home Mac antivirus is the program could only handle detecting and reports a certain number of threats at a time. Once we had manually removed these, Sophos would automatically continue finding and reporting additional threats.

This software does come with a few extra features that we found helpful. The safe browsing feature displayed a large message in the browser to warn us if we were trying to visit a site that has a malicious download or link. Sophos also has parental controls with several filter categories that make is easy to block and filter websites that are not appropriate for your family to see.

Sophos Home is a free program, so some features, like webcam and mic protections and advanced ransomware shields, are only available during the first 30 days of your subscription. After that you will need to purchase the Sophos Home Premium program to continue using these features. We did test and review Sophos Home Premium as part of our Mac Internet Security comparison.

Sophos is not an easy program to use. Its tools aren’t intuitively placed – most are only accessible from your online portal. It doesn’t securely remove malware threats for you and isn’t really helpful when it comes to walking you through removing them yourself. Sophos only stopped 78 percent of the Mac malware we used during testing, though it did a better job finding Windows threats.

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