. Pros Remote management. Webcam protection.
Decent phishing protection. Ransomware protection. Simple parental control. Cons No independent lab test results. Parental content filter foiled by secure anonymizing proxy. Lacks exploit protection, download reputation check, keylogger protection, and other advanced features found in the Windows edition. Bottom Line Sophos Home Premium offers Mac antivirus protection at a low price, but it lacks many advanced features found in the Windows edition and doesn't have verification from independent testing labs.
In the consumer marketplace, Sophos isn't the best-known name, but it's well-regarded by CISOs and other business-level security experts, and its endpoint protection software earns good scores from the independent testing labs. Sophos Home Premium, available for macOS and Windows, brings that same business-grade within reach of ordinary consumers. You can get basic protection on both platforms for free. Upgrading to the Premium edition, reviewed here, gets you a wealth of advanced security components on Windows.
Sorry, Mac users, most of those high-end features don't show up in the macOS edition. Even so, it offers decent protection at a very reasonable price. Pricing and OS Support The most common price for Mac antivirus is just under $40 per year to protect one Mac. Half of the current products fit that model. With most of those, you can upgrade to protecting three Macs for $59.99 per year., also costs $59.99, but that subscription gets you unlimited licenses to protect all the macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS devices in your household. While it's not free, Sophos is a bargain compared to most of its commercial competitors. A $60 subscription lets you install premium protection on up to 10 devices running Windows or macOS.
That's just $6 per device, which is quite a deal. Mac users tend to accept operating system updates as they arrive, which is excellent for security. For those who haven't quite kept up, Sophos supports macOS versions back to El Capitan (10.11) to the latest. Also requires El Capitan, as do McAfee and BullGuard. If for some reason (old hardware?) you can't upgrade to the latest macOS, don't fret. Webroot supports versions back to Lion (10.7), and goes even farther, with support for Snow Leopard (10.6) and later. Online Dashboard Differences With any version of Sophos Home, be it Free or Premium, Windows or macOS, you can click to open the online dashboard, or just log into the dashboard from any browser.
Jul 19, 2018 - Here, we share our Sophos Home Premium review and reveal how it. PC, Mac, phones and tablets), which is very reasonable and compares.
If you haven't used up all 10 of your licenses, you can just click a link to either install on the current device or send a link by email. Here's a nice touch: When the email recipient clicks that link, it both installs the product and connects it to your account for remote management. The dashboard's Status page looks the same for Mac and Windows devices, with panels for Antivirus Protection, Web Protection, Ransomware Protection, Privacy Protection, and Malicious Traffic Detection.
However, when you dig in for more detail it becomes obvious that on Windows offers more. Both platforms include behavior-based ransomware protection, but Master Boot Record Protection is Windows-only. Under Web protection, Windows users get Download Reputation analysis, which showed its worth in my testing, and Safe Online Banking to protect from keyloggers; those features don't show up for Macs. And the Exploits page, home to the most high-tech features, is entirely absent.
Features Shared With the Free Edition Please read my review of for an in-depth view of the core antivirus features shared with the Premium edition. Otherwise, you can also keep reading for a summary of my findings. I follow four independent antivirus labs that test Windows products, and two of those also put Mac antivirus to the test. Unfortunately, Sophos doesn't participate in testing with either lab, so I don't have any third-party verification of its efficacy. To be fair, the labs change their test sets regularly, and around half of the Mac antivirus products I track no longer show up in reports from either or AV-Test.
![Antivirus Antivirus](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125565383/376824337.png)
By contrast, Bitdefender, Intego, and took certification from both labs and earned the very best score from both. Kaspersky also got both certifications, but missed perfection by a half-point in the performance test. A full scan of the MacBook Air I use for testing took over two hours, much longer than the current average. I still recommend at least one full scan after installation, to clean up any preexisting problems, but perhaps after that you can rely on real-time protection to fend off any new attacks.
Sophos is among the many Mac antivirus utilities that aims to smack down any Windows malware that shows up. The point is to ensure the Mac doesn't become a carrier for Windows infections. When I plugged in a USB drive containing my Windows malware samples, Sophos spent nearly 10 minutes popping up warnings, far more warnings than the number of samples.
In the end, it eliminated 86 percent of the Windows malware, which is better than most, but not as good as, which eliminated 100 percent. Sophos includes a simple parental control content filter, configured through the online dashboard. In testing, it missed some naughty sites that the Windows edition caught. If you choose the option to display a warning rather than block all access to unwanted categories, Sophos can't handle HTTPS sites. That means a clever child could foil the content filter by connecting through a secure anonymizing proxy.
Why spend time writing malware to steal personal data when you can just trick people into handing it over? That's the concept behind phishing websites, which masquerade as financial or other secure sites. If you enter your password on the fake site, the fraudsters own your account. In my real-world phishing protection test, Sophos detected 82 percent of the verified frauds. The phishing protection built into Chrome and Firefox scored better than Sophos.
Work on any browser, regardless of the operating system. Phishing protection, on the other hand, isn't always platform-independent. Tested at the same time, with the same samples, Sophos for Windows scored 91 percent.
That's better, but McAfee detected 100 percent of the samples, both on Windows and macOS. Ransomware Protection Upgrading to Premium gets you for your Mac. Ransomware is like other malware in that your antivirus really ought to detect and eliminate it on sight. With most types of malware, even if the antivirus flubs its job, it's likely to take care of the problem after an update. But with ransomware, the damage is done. Your files are encrypted, and you may never get them back. That's the rationale behind adding an extra layer of behavior-based ransomware detection.
In my Windows-based testing, Sophos fended off all but one of the real-world ransomware attacks I tried (after turning off other real-world protective layers). It even balked, an unpleasant attacker that encrypts your entire hard drive, making the computer unusable. On the Mac, Sophos uses the same CryptoGuard technology to identify file-encrypting ransomware by its behavior, but it doesn't offer the Master Boot Record protection needed to foil Petya., Bitdefender, and Trend Micro also protect your Mac-based data against ransomware attack, but they take a completely different approach.
Rather than looking for ransomware behavior, they ban all unauthorized programs from modifying files in protected folders. This technique can be effective, but it only works on the contents of folders that you've flagged for protection. Webcam and Mic Spyware Protection A webcam is standard equipment on most Macs;, to prevent misuse of the webcam, is not. Yes, malware exists that can turn on your webcam without activating the telltale light, so some creepy coder can peek at you when you think you're all alone. Sophos offers webcam protection on Windows and Mac; it adds microphone protection on the Mac. With Windows, all you get is a transient notification that a program is using the camera. On the Mac, the notification persists until you click to allow or stop the program's access.
But don't click either choice. Instead, click the body of the popup message. Doing so opens the main Sophos window and gives you the option to click Always Allow. This whitelists the program, so you don't have to respond the next time you launch it. This kind of smart webcam protection is more often found in Windows-based products. For example, lets you whitelist known program on Windows; on the Mac, it just offers an on/off switch for the webcam.
With Sophos, Mac users get full control over webcam use, while Windows users just get a transient notification. Better on Windows From the Sophos Home Premium online dashboard, you can install and manage antivirus protection on up to 10 PCs or Macs.
Either way, you get more than with the free version of this product, but on Windows the difference is more pronounced. Windows users get exploit protection, defense against whole-disk ransomware, and defense against keyloggers, among other things. With a Mac, your upgrade buys you ransomware protection, webcam safety, and not much more.
Yes, Sophos is inexpensive, and its webcam security more nuanced, but you just get more for your money using it on a PC. Mac users might as well stick with the free edition. For Mac antivirus, our Editors' Choice products are and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac. They both get high marks from two independent labs, where Sophos has no current scores. Bitdefender offers ransomware protection.
Kaspersky defends against webcam spyware, and includes a full-scale parental control system, much more complete than what you get with Sophos. You won't go wrong picking one of these two to protect you Macs.