Less tech-savvy users who want a run-and-forget antivirus should consider Sophos.
If you’ve ever wished shopping for antivirus could be simpler, Sophos just might appeal. There are no jargon-packed comparison tables, no pricing schemes so complicated you need Excel to figure them out: the company has one product, one plan, and that’s it. Sophos Home Premium is an unusual Windows and Mac antivirus which focuses on simplicity, yet still manages a decent feature list: real-time and on-demand virus protection, anti-ransomware, anti-phishing, parental control-type content filtering, keylogger protection and more. Sophos Home doesn’t have a mobile app, but users can protect their devices with free Android and iOS versions of Sophos’ Intercept X app, instead. (There was once a Sophos Home Free version, too, but unfortunately, it’s now been dropped. Which makes your choice even easier: it’s Home Premium or nothing at all.) Pricing is simple, too. There’s one plan which covers up to 10 Windows or Mac systems. One year’s coverage costs $60, rising to $100 for two years, or $140 for the full three years. Looks like good value to us: Bitdefender Antivirus Plus costs $80 to cover 10 devices for a year, and Kaspersky Antivirus’ charges $130. If you’re still unsure, there’s a free trial available. Payments can be made via card or PayPal, and if you sign up and regret it, there’s a no-questions-asked 30-day money-back guarantee. Download the Sophos Home Premium trial, hand over your email address and within a couple of minutes it’ll be installed and running a first system scan. This isn’t a speedy process, with the app taking 52 minutes to scan our 50GB of test executables,21:22 on the second run. Most antivirus take 15-30 minutes first time, and by scanning only new and changed files, later runs can be very fast (Bitdefender dropped to under a minute.) We were surprised to find Sophos Home had added around 1.5GB of files to our system (we’re seen far more powerful suites use much less.) Sophos Home also left up to 18 background processes and a handful of drivers running in the background, more than we’ve seen in any recent review. Running top benchmark PCMark Professional before and after installing an antivirus gives us a measure of its performance impact, and Sophos Home Premium sapped our speeds by 5.9%. That’s significantly more heavyweight than most of the competition, who typically show a speed drop of around 1-2%. There’s another potential downside in having so many active processes, in that this could give malware more opportunity to attack and perhaps disable your protection. We test this in several ways – by trying to kill or stop processes, delete key files, pause or remove services, unload filter drivers and more – but Sophos’ tamper protection did its job, blocking everything we tried. Double-click the Sophos Home system tray icon and the program’s very simple interface appears. There’s status information (last update, last scan time), a Scan Computer button, and a handful of other buttons for lesser functions (management, settings and a few other bits and pieces – more on those later). Tap the Scan button and Sophos Home runs a full system scan on your PC. There’s no upfront way to customize the scan, and no quick scan, or removable device scan, or indeed any other scan type. Sophos adds a right-click option to Explorer, which is useful as a way to scan a particular file, folder or drive. Unlike Bitdefender and Kaspersky, though, this doesn’t support simultaneous scans. If it’s busy running a lengthy system scan, and you try a right-click scan from Explorer, you’re warned that ‘a scan is already running, try again later.’ Sophos also adds an icon to your system tray, but it doesn’t do very much. You can left-click it to launch the program, but that’s it; there’s no right-click menu with shortcut options, and the icon doesn’t change to reflect the app state (scanning, virus found, and so on.) This simplicity certainly means that Sophos Home is easy to use, but if you’re looking for any level of power or control over the app, expect to be disappointed. Sophos Home does have some security options and settings, but they’re only available via a web interface. Tap the Settings button, for instance, and a browser tab opens at the Sophos website. Log in and you can then begin configuring the program. If you’re thinking this is a little inconvenient, we agree. But once you’re logged in, it doesn’t take any more time, and it does at least mean the support pages are only a click or two away, if you need them. This kind of central management is also good news if you’re intending to use Sophos’ remote device management features.
