Sophos Antivirus for Mac Home Edition is a complete antivirus solution for your Mac, and it gives you the ability to review files identified as threats before they are removed. With this free program in place, you can have confidence that your Mac is not vulnerable to threats from most viruses and malware. Pros Straightforward interface: Through this app's streamlined interface, you can easily see how your scan is progressing and what threats the program has detected. And when the scan is complete, you can view a list of quarantined items and decide whether or not to delete some or all of them.

• Sophos Antivirus Free Download For Mac

Decent detection: Sophos did detect several legitimate threats through scanning. They were clearly displayed in the Quarantine Manager, and we could view the results of scanning even while the scan was still in progress. Cons Long scans: The program takes a long time to scan. In fact, our initial testing scan wasn't even halfway done after 20 minutes, which seems excessive when compared to other similar programs.

Freezing issues: The app froze several times during testing, usually when it was close to finishing a scan. Since the scans take so long to begin with, this was especially frustrating.

Bottom Line Sophos Antivirus does its job even if the process isn't always terribly smooth. It does do a decent job identifying threats, and results are clearly displayed in the Quarantine Manager. The program is free to use without limits. Sophos Home protects with both signature based and signature-less/behavioral-based (zero-day) detection including on-demand malware scan, on-access malware scan, malicious URL blocking, phishing protection, and potentially unwanted app detection. Users of Sophos Home can easily manage security settings for computers located anywhere from any web browser. Add computers in seconds, manage policies, and perform scans on any computer under management. The management tools are tamper-resistant with auto-logout and password protection.

Sophos Antivirus Free Download For Mac

And there are no ads, pop-ups, or prompts to enter credit card information. Sophos Home protects users from online threats and unsuitable content. Users can block access to sites that may contain inappropriate content or malicious software. Web Category Access lets you control access to certain types of websites, deciding what to allow, warn, or block, customizable for each computer. As a free product, Sophos Home is supported by our Sophos Community.

Through the Sophos Community, users can ask questions and receive answers via moderated forums. They can also find answers to questions using Sophos Home FAQs and knowledge base articles.

Sophos released its latest version of what it simply calls (free) and (paid) just before we began testing, and as such it may have a leg up on competitors that have revisions in progress. As it stands, the set of features, cloud-based configuration, and price make it the outstanding entrant in the field. On its anti-virus performance, it’s not perfect, but it’s close.

To install Sophos Anti-Virus so that it is managed by Enterprise Console, see the startup guides on the Enterprise Console page. Apr 13, 2016 - Free to try. Perform malware scan with the ability to detect both Mac and Windows threats. Bitdefender Antivirus. Fast scanning.

AV-TEST found it detected 98.4 percent of macOS malware, over 95 percent of macOS PUA, and over 99 percent of Windows malware. Those scores could be marginally better, but these databases are constantly being updated. During our real-world tests, it knocked out macOS malware as soon as it was unzipped from an encrypted archive.

It also prevented us from loading web pages with malicious software via the WICAR test site. Note: This review is part of our. Go there for details about competing products and how we tested them.

Macworld Sophos Home Premium did an excellent job of knocking out malware during our spot-check testing. Sophos doesn't have a full standalone app to manage its operation. Rather, you use the cloud-based Web app in a browser to handle configuration, operation, and remote management of other systems. Sophos appears in macOS as just a system menu item with a few options, such as the ability to perform a manual scan. Because the software protects a system in real time, the scan function is needed only if protection is otherwise paused. The cloud-based approach allows Sophos to push updates to its interface without requiring a user download, and it has the most robust remote management of any of the software packages we tested. Only Sophos seems to put all controls in the cloud, while other AV software that offer Web-based controls have just a subset, such as initiating a remote scan.

Macworld Unlike other antivirus suites, Sophos utilizes cloud-based controls. Sophos markets this as a way to help family members, especially ones not at the same address. That’s apparent both from the licensing, with a $50 a year fee covering up to 10 computers (Mac and PC), and from how the license owner can send a link for another person to install and join the family group without additional steps for setup. Then the administrator can configure and run scans remotely. As one of only two companies offering ransomware-specific file monitoring, Sophos rises to the top with a proviso: We were unable to independently test the feature separately, although we had it demonstrated for us by the company and examined said demo in-depth. (More on that in a moment.) That's because Apple's silent XProtect feature has definitions for all known ransomware, blocking it from running.

XProtect uses virus signatures, so cannot protect against new ransomware malware or variants, but will block anything already discovered. Macworld The demo Sophos showed us used an in-house ransomware test package developed by its research side. We examined script on our own, and it’s straightforward—we didn’t find any weird gotchas or wired demos in it. As the demonstration virus infected files, the originals were retained and not deleted, and by the time three files had been hit, Sophos Home Premium halted the attack and alerted the user. It’s possible to have legitimate software that encrypts or modifies a set of files, and thus the software provides an alert and won’t allow the putative file to delete documents. Sophos Home also includes outbound network blocking to known malicious servers, malicious website blocking, web filtering for parental control, and alerts for mic and webcam usage. Sophos handles the web and network stuff via its kernel extension, which examines all traffic and allows central management of options.

The bottom line Sophos Home Premium is the best in show, providing effective malware protection, PUA protection, ransomware monitoring, and additional features that often require separately licensed software. Its cloud-based configuration and generous licensing makes it possible to protect a household and an extended family, giving it an edge over its nearest competition. If you're considering Sophos' free version, it's quite good but lacks enough of the Premium version's features that we recommend the instead. Version tested: 2.0.2 Editor's note: Updated 4/20/2018 to clarify how we evaluated the performance of Sophos's ransomeware detection.