Most antivirus suites charge $100 for 10 devices for a year as the introductory offer. First-time users pay a little less at $42, $80, or $113.40 for one-, two-, and three-year subscriptions respectively. Believe it or not those are the non-introductory prices. Sophos Home Premium costs $60 for a one-year subscription covering 10 devices, $120 for two years, and $162 for three. Perhaps budget PCs will see more of an impact, but nothing to worry about. Overall, there shouldn’t be much of a dip in performance with Sophos. If we had to guess, that’s because Sophos was actively scanning each file during the operation. Without Sophos Home installed, the unzip time of a moderately sized archive was about one minute and 17 seconds, with Sophos installed the time jumped to over two minutes. The only other noticeable difference we saw was in the unzip test. Our large file transfer test was only about 30 seconds slower with Sophos running, which isn’t terrible. That dropped to 1,610 with Sophos running after its initial scan.

The PC Mark 10 Extended test was 1,645 without PC Mark installed. That puts it on par with Avast, AVG, Eset, F-Secure, and Windows Defender while Comodo, Kasperky, Symantec, and Trend Micro all scored higher.įor our in-house performance tests, Sophos Home did moderately well. Sophos scored a 98, meaning it missed two threats. SE Labs also has something called a protection score, which is a count of how many times a security suite protected its host system. Kaspersky, Symantec, and Trend Micro all scored higher. SE Labs’ scores tend to be lower than the other testing houses, so to put that 95 percent in perspective, Sophos Home tied with AVG, and was in the same tier as Avast, AVG, Eset, and Windows Defender. In its Q4 2019 report, SE Labs gave Sophos Home Premium a AAA rating with a 95 percent protection rate. Of the testing houses we track, only SE Labs has tested Sophos Home recently. Performance IDGĪn active scan on the desktop with Sophos Home Premium. “Managing app access, however, is something we constantly monitor and potentially will roll out in the future based on customer demand,” a Sophos representative said. MacOS has Screen Time, for example, and Microsoft Family offers similar parental controls. The reason being that modern operating systems have similar features already built in.

We asked Sophos about this and the company said it doesn’t have plans to expand parental controls outside of web filtering. Other tools, however, such as limiting or tracking screen time, or managing access to certain apps aren’t available. It’s easy enough to block sexually explicit sites using the web filtering options. Sophos Home is also lacking any kind of serious parental controls. That may be intentional to avoid having too much personal file system information contained on Sophos’ end. It’s possible to scan specific folders locally by choosing Scan with Sophos Home from the right-click context menu but there are no remote options. It would be nice to see a wider variety of scans that are typical for home antivirus suites such as full system scans, quick scans, custom scans, and so on. That makes a lot of sense, and when a scan is ongoing hovering over the Sophos icon in the system tray or taskbar will show it.

We asked Sophos why it didn’t display anything during a remote scan, and the company said it didn’t want to disturb people in the middle of their workflow with a sudden window pop-up. It all occurs in the background, with the activity history in the cloud indicating if anything happened.Ĭontrast that to clicking the scan on the desktop, which actively shows a scan is happening. Whenever a scan is initiated remotely, the desktop app doesn’t indicate that anything’s happening. Sophos Home Premium’s configuration options include scan scheduling. Overall, it’s a good set of features that are easy to understand and navigate. The latter removes malware, adware, browser cookies, and other unwanted items and their remnants. In addition to tweaking the Sophos Home configuration there are also buttons towards the top of the dashboard for adding new devices, or launching the clean feature.

Sophos home premium free features