Sophos Antivirus For Mac Vs Avast

Sep 18, 2017 We recommend Avast Free Mac Security as the best no-cost option, and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac. Unlike other free Mac antivirus solutions, Sophos Home. Avast vs Sophos Mac security apps on test Posted: March 11, 2016 The recent ransomware attack on Apple Macs has brought security to the forefront of the Mac community and you might be thinking it is time to install Mac security software to keep your computer safe from malicious threats.

Today's best Sophos Home for Mac deals

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.

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 Antivirus

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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Today's best Sophos Home for Mac deals

While it's unlikely you'll ever run into malware for the Mac, you may want to consider an antivirus tool anyway—if not to protect yourself, but to protect your Windows-using friends from any malware you may inadvertently send their way. We think that Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac is the best choice, and it's free.

Update: Our previous recommendation for Mac Antivirus was 'nothing.' We know many of you choose to use nothing, but we also know you don't come to the App Directory to not get any suggestions at all. Besides, malware is starting to become a bit more prevalent on the Mac, and even the safest browsing habits don't protect you completely. So, we now officially recommend Sophos as our Mac antivirus of choice.

Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac

Platform: OS X (10.4+)
Price: Free
Download Page

Features

Compact, easy-to-use interface that can be used for custom on-demand scans of files, folders, and drives, or scheduled, periodic full scans of your Mac.
Also scans files on your Mac for known Windows malware, trojans, and viruses, and deletes or quarantines them so you don't risk spreading them to someone else via network share, USB drive, or email.
Deletes or quarantines known threats, gives you the option to quarantine anything suspicious that may be a new threat or dangerous file.
Runs quietly in the background, scanning emails, downloads, and any other files on access, stopping you from opening them before they can do any harm.
Light on system resources while running in the background.
Installs like any other Mac application, and uninstalls just as easily—no complicated packages or components to manage or configure.
Sophos' 'Live Antivirus' feature updates your app the moment new threats are detected or found in the wild. The feature also performs real-time lookups to see if files accessed are in the SophosLabs database, even if they're unfamiliar to the app.
Supports OS X up to 10.8 and back to 10.4, and is completely free for all versions.

Where It Excels

Sophos actually has an excellent breakdown of the history of malware for the Mac going all the way back to 1982. The fact that the article exists should remind Mac users that while they're not the primary target for malware authors, they're by no means invulnerable. The size of the article however should issue some confidence that the risk—while present—is by no means critical.

Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac stands out in a somewhat crowded field of Mac antivirus apps because it doesn't just scan your Mac's files and folders on demand, but it does it quietly in the background without tapping your already precious system resources in the process. The utility also keeps its own constantly-updating database of Windows viruses, trojans, and other threats, so if you inadvertently download a Windows virus or trojan that won't harm you, you don't run the risk of sending it off to someone else by forwarding the message, or you won't infect other computers on your network (or any Windows partitions or virtual machines you run on the same hardware) via shared drives. Sophos is smart enough to tell you 'Hey, this won't hurt you, but we're going to quarantine/delete it so you don't accidentally email this attachment to someone else.' That's a huge benefit—and it keeps you from being that guy no one likes.

Another banner feature Sophos offers that its competition doesn't is its live, real-time access to SophosLabs. 'Live Antivirus,' as it's called in the app, gives you an added layer of protection. The app automatically identifies and quarantines suspicious files, installers, and other packages that may not be well known threats yet, but definitely exhibit behavior suspicious enough that Sophos is looking into them.

Best of all though, in our testing, Sophos was one of the most resource-light antivirus apps on the Mac, which is impressive considering the features it offers.

Where It Falls Short

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. Also, support for Mountain Lion came a few months after its launch, so Sophos wasn't exactly right there with those people who upgraded on launch day.

The Competition

ClamXav 2 uses the open source ClamAV virus scanning engine. It can also detect both WIndows and OS X malware, scan on demand or on a regular schedule, and it's probably a bit more lightweight and easy on system resources than Sophos. It's compatible with OS X 10.5 or higher. The only trouble with ClamXav is that its definitions come a bit more sporadically than we'd like (daily, usually, sometimes, if they feel like it) and while performing scans is easy, tweaking all of the settings and getting the app scanning proactively is a little more effort than I'd like to see. Still, it's an excellent alternative, and one of the first you should check out if Sophos isn't cutting it for you.

Avast! Free Antivirus for Mac is the Mac version of our current favorite for Windows, and for good reason. The researchers at AV Comparitives found that Avast detected 100% of the Mac malware that went through it, an honor that few other utilities won (they didn't test Sophos, unfortunately). It's free, it works, it's lightweight, but the only catch is that it only scans for Mac-specific malware, which won't matter to you if you're in an all-Mac ecosystem, but if you, like most of us, share the world with Windows users, thinking of them doesn't hurt.

Avira is another free utility worth a look. It also picked up 100% of the Mac malware that passed through it with no false positives. Avira's UI and options are perfect for non-technical users, and it offers strong protection against known Mac threats. Again, there's no Windows protection in the app, and both the scheduling and custom scan options are a bit anemic, so power users may want to shy away from it. If you're installing it on your non-technical friend or family-member's Mac however, it's a great option.

For more suggestions, make sure to check out AV Comparitives' full 2012 report on Mac antivirus tools—there are more in there we didn't list here.

Sophos

We're not trying and settle the antivirus-versus-no-antivirus debate; it's been raging for years and isn't going to stop now. For a great and thorough perspective on the issue, check out my old colleague Neil Rubenking's take at PC Mag's SecurityWatch blog, and The Safe Mac's approach to the topic.

Sophos Antivirus For Mac Vs Avast Antivirus

Whatever you do though, it's probably not necessary to plop down money for a Mac antivirus suite. The threats don't warrant you dropping money on software to keep you safe, and too many of them do more harm than good (especially the ones looking to get your money). They're just not worth it, especially when there are more effective, robust, free options like the ones above available to you.