#Test sophos antivirus mac for free
#Test sophos antivirus mac for mac
#Test sophos antivirus mac android
#Test sophos antivirus mac software

On the other end of that scale was Malwarebytes' miraculous 16-second time Kaspersky (41:20) and Norton (25:49) landed in the middle of the pack. Sophos Home Premium took seemingly forever to complete a systemwide scan, though, completing the task in 2 hours and 56 minutes, the longest of all seven programs, all of which were tested on the same Mac.

#Test sophos antivirus mac software

MORE: Which Antivirus Software Has the Least System Impact? Still, that's the lowest score we saw in that category, below the 16% hit from Norton and well below Kaspersky's 53%. Sophos Home Premium's Quick Scan slowdown was slightly larger, as the machine finished that test in 3 minutes and 56 seconds, a hit of 10%.

#Test sophos antivirus mac for mac

That's the great overall news for Mac users: most of the time, you'll never notice that you've got antivirus software running. That's a passive hit of 5%, which isn't bad, but that was much more than other macOS antivirus products' passive system impacts, which ranged from 2% to zero. With Sophos Home Premium installed on our MacBook, but without any active scans running, the VLOOKUP test finished in an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds, 10 seconds longer than what we saw without any antivirus software installed. Our test machine was a 2017 MacBook Air with a 1.8-GHz Intel Core i5 CPU and approximately 54GB of data stored on a 128GB SSD. We assessed this by running our custom Excel VLOOKUP benchmark test, which matches 60,000 names and addresses on a spreadsheet. Sophos Home Premium for Mac left a relatively high impact on our test system's performance during passive, background usage, but had a relatively low impact during active scans.

#Test sophos antivirus mac for free

Sophos doesn't, but you can download such extensions for free from Avast, Bitdefender or Kaspersky. Sophos' competitors pack browser plugins to flag untrustworthy search-engine results. 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 parents' log if they proceed. Not only can you block a user account from visiting entire categories of websites, but the software keeps records of each attempt to navigate to an unapproved page. The Sophos Home online account includes parental website filters. Chief among them is remote management from the Sophos Home web page, so you can check on your machine - and up to nine other Macs or PCs linked to your account - from the field. The two other antivirus brands whose Mac programs we recently reviewed, Malwarebytes and McAfee, have not had their Mac-malware detection abilities recently evaluated by either independent lab.

#Test sophos antivirus mac android

(All those companies also make some of the best Android antivirus apps.) Avast, Bitdefender and Kaspersky got 100% in AV-Comparatives' June 2019 Mac tests, in which Norton was not tested.

Bitdefender, Kaspersky and Norton's Mac malware engines each got perfect 100% detection rates in both those rounds.Īll three of those rival brands, plus Avast, also got 100% scores in both AV-Test's April-May 2019 Mac evaluations. In the October-November round from that year, Sophos stopped 100% of Mac malware in the April-May tests, it stopped 98.4%. However, AV-Test did test Sophos twice in 2017. Neither of the independent antivirus testing labs whose results we normally rely on, AV-Test (opens in new tab) (in Germany) and AV-Comparatives (opens in new tab) (in Austria), had tested Sophos' Mac malware detection in their most recent surveys of Mac antivirus software at the time of this review. It uses its artificial-intelligence system and machine learning to apply lessons from its user base to recognize new malware strains.

Sophos Home Premium keeps Macs free of malware using traditional signature-based detection by matching suspicious files to known malware. If you're short on cash, the Sophos Home Free program that kicks in after Sophos Home Premium's 30-day trial period retains the premium plan's parental web filtering and remote management, as well as the core antivirus protections.īut you'll be limited to three machines on a single Sophos account, and will lose tech support, webcam protection and some sophisticated anti-malware features such as dedicated anti-ransomware protection.