Sophos antivirus review

Want to protect without the bloat? Sophos Home Premium is not only inexpensive but it does the basics quite well. An offshoot of the company’s excellent business-based Intercept X software, it’s very streamlined with only one security suite available. It may not have every option – like a password manager, VPN and file shredder – but Sophos Home Premium does a reasonable job of keeping a system clear of dangerous malware, hackers and identity thieves.

With one of fastest malware scanners on the planet, Home Premium extracts a lot of a system’s precious resources although the program leads the malware world with an excellent remote management package that others should be jealous of. Not only can t monitor the status of any connected and protected computer but can scan them at will. The program is awkwardly divided between local and online activities, leading to more than a little confusion though. 

All told, Sophos Home Premium is a value king that will likely appeal to those who don’t want to pay for confusing bells and whistles, making it essential protection on the cheap. Our Sophos Home Premium review will help you decide if this is the best antivirus software for protecting your devices. 

Sophos Home Premium review: Costs and what’s covered

Protection from Sophos starts with the free Scan & Clean app. It is basic but promises to catch malware that others, like Microsoft’s Windows Defender, miss. Unlike others though, it works with Windows 7, 10 and 11 systems; there’s no Mac version of Scan & Clean, though. 

Sophos’s Home Premium product is a refreshing change from competitors that offer half a dozen or more slightly different products. The Sophos scanning engine uses up-to-date machine learning techniques to find and eradicate infections before others notice them. There’s protection against ransomware and the program can defend a webcam but not a microphone from snooping. It lags behind others without a hardened browser to protect online shopping, though.  

Sophos has a one-month trial of the Home Premium package, but it’s limited to protecting three systems. The paid version is aimed squarely at families with a 10-system license for $60 a year – about the cost of a single ESET Smart Security Premium license; there are two- and three-year packages that cost $100 and $140. If you shop around, you can often find Home Premium at a 25% discount. 

Since we last looked at Home Premium, Sophos dropped compatibility with Windows versions 7 and 8.1, although the aforementioned Scan & Clean still works with older computers. Home Premium can protect 64-bit Windows 10 and 11 systems as well as macOS versions 11-13. The company’s Antivirus for Linux and Unix program has been phased out but replaced by a more powerful program that can thwart kernel exploits, data destruction and cryptominers 

For phones and tablets. Home Premium includes the free version of Sophos’s Intercept X for mobile apps with technical support; there are versions for Android (version 7 or newer) and for iOS (iOS 14 or newer). Like the others, the iOS app can’t scan for malware though.

Finally, to use its online dashboard for monitoring and scanning systems, you’ll need to use a compatible browser. These include Apple’s Safari, Google Chrome or a Chromium offshoot, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox. The company offers lots of free tools.

Sophos Home Premium review: Antivirus protection

The main idea behind Sophos Home Premium is to deliver enterprise-grade cybersecurity to home users without the complexity of competitors’ offerings. Based on the company’s commercial-grade Intercept X scanner, Home Premium’s defenses revolve around continuously looking for early signs of an attack. 

Since the company uploads new and unique threats from your computer to the company’s Security Lab for dissection and a fix, every system is part of a wide net that acts like an early-warning system. Unlike Bitdefender, ESET, Kaspersky and Norton though, there’s no way to opt out of this data collection. It is the price you need to pay for Sophos’ protection. 

The result of this intelligence network is that several times a day, Sophos updates the malware-signature databases for its three million users. This makes Sophos Home Premium one of the smaller security software providers against the likes of Norton, Bitdefender and McAfee but one that has proved to provide nimble responses in the face of new threats.

Sophos Home Premium does the expected with defenses against boot-sector malware, fileless exploits and attacks on a PC’s UEFI start-up firmware. The defenses go a step or two further by preventing attacks on the Windows Encrypting File System (EFS) and thwarting PowerShell and side-loading exploits. It’s the rare antivirus software that goes to special lengths to lock down its own code and those of other high-privilege applications that might be a tempting target for hackers.

Recently Sophos added a few extra defenses, such as HTTPS scanning in Windows. On the other hand, the keyboard encryption that could have thwarted a keylogger stealing log-in info has been retired.

The good news is that Home Premium runs in the background and requires little or no user intervention. While many features can be turned on or off, there’s no single place to adjust the overall security level and the program doesn’t have an interruption-reducing gaming mode, although Sophos does an excellent job of pointing out ways to reduce interactions that might slow down the action.

Sophos Home Premium review: Antivirus performance

Sophos Home Premium hasn’t recently been evaluated by third-party malware testing labs we use to see how effective it is at catching and killing viruses, old and new. On the other hand, the company’s business-oriented Intercept X Advanced, which uses the same underlying technology, scanning engine and database of rogue code, is evaluated by both AV-Test and AV Comparatives. 

Based on the June 2023 results from AV-Test, Intercept X Advanced scored a perfect 100% for both widespread and prevalent malware as well as zero-day attacks. This is a big step up for the scanning technology from recent evaluations where the software missed some of the newest threats, potentially causing a problem. 

Happily, it had no false positives in either evaluation, making it a clean sweep. This puts Home Premium/Intercept X’s performance equivalent to the best in the business. By contrast, Bitdefender had five false positives and McAfee and one on the same tests.

On the other hand, AV Comparatives reported that the software was only 98% successful at protecting against the latest dangers in that June 2023 testing. This test routine is slightly different from the May 2023 consumer-oriented testing that the organization performed but the trends are similar. Intercept X Advanced allowed 10 potentially dangerous items through and had five false alarms. 

By contrast, Kaspersky and Bitdefender on slightly different consumer-based testing in the May 2023 survey had perfect scores with no misidentifications of safe software as dangerous. Bitdefender, however, had two false alarms. The low point of this testing was McAfee, which may have aced the identification portion but had 39 false positives along the way, making its results unreliable, at best.

The company no longer participates in testing by SE Labs.

Sophos: Security and privacy

Most antivirus products use their own browser extensions to block known malicious websites, but Sophos Home Premium integrated its online hit list into the core antivirus software. This allows it to work with any browser, not just a select few.

Unfortunately, the Sophos Firewall Home Edition is not integrated into the installation process. It’s a separate download and installation took a few minutes but was worth it to control Internet traffic and filter web content. It integrates with Home Premium’s malware scanning to catch viruses before they enter a computer. 

Home Premium’s parental controls are a little skimpy compared to its competitors but include web filtering based on more than two-dozen categories of inappropriate content. It lacks the ability to schedule online access or base the filtering on the age of the user.

Whether you use Sophos’s free or paid security software, the company includes one of the best online-management interfaces in the business. It can add protection to new systems and allows remote configuration with the ability to remotely scan another protected system. Just open the Sophos Home online portal, pick the computer you want to scan and click on Clean. If the receiving system isn’t online, the software will perform the task when the computer reconnects.

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Sophos’s online account lets you use two-factor authentication (2FA), an extra level of account security that should be on every security suite today. Unfortunately, it does without a hardened browser for secure online banking and shopping.

Sophos's online account lets you use two-factor authentication (2FA), an extra level of account security that is still rare among antivirus programs. This option requires that you enter a time-limited code you receive on your phone or email when logging in from a new computer.

The program’s CryptoGuard ransomware defenses work to spot an encrypting ransomware attack in its early stages and stop it before major damage is done.  Should some files get surreptitiously encrypted, the program can roll-back files to their pre-attack state; this feature requires 3GB of available hard drive space.

For pesky infections, Sophos engineers have integrated Hitman Pro defenses into Home Premium. The code performs deep scans and can wipe clean malware that other antivirus products miss, including spyware, rootkits and Trojans. It’s also available as a standalone app.

Sophos Home Premium review: Performance and system impact

Sophos Home Premium uses the same scanning technology as the company’s industrial-grade business program, Intercept X. Paying customers get scanning that relies almost exclusively on cloud computing in the Windows version. There’s a vocabulary snag because Sophos refers to this scan of all files and folders as a quick or fast scan. Others use this term for scans that look at particularly vulnerable areas of the computer. Happily, it can be started locally or through the online portal and is among the fastest around. It can eat up a lot of system resources though.

To gauge system load, we used our custom benchmark test, which measures how long the system takes to match 20,000 names and addresses in an Excel spreadsheet. Our Lenovo ThinkPad T470 test machine had a 2.5GHz Core i5-7200U processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of solid-state storage with 50.7GB of files.

Prior to getting started with Sophos Home Premium, the test system registered a 9.8 second score on our name-matching benchmark. This was in line with the others and rose to 10.2 seconds after the program was installed but before any scanning took place. That 4% loss of performance potential is good and on a par with ESET’s results but behind the 2% lag experienced by Trend Micro and Bitdefender. 

While scanning, though, the program’s benchmark score dropped by 39% to 13.6 seconds, showing a moderate to heavy drag on system operations. The first full scan took all of 7 minutes and 16 seconds with the internet online, making it among the fastest around. Unfortunately, the program doesn’t report how many files it examined. This scan time dropped to as low as 5:11 on the third pass when it learned what to keep an eye on and what to ignore. 

It lacks what we would call a traditional quick scan option to examine the areas of greatest concern from a security perspective.

Sophos Home Premium review: Interface

Sophos Home Premium’s look and feel has gone through some subtle changes, mostly for the better of late. It’s still built around a home screen that displays a green checkmark to show that everything is safe and secure. It has a handy direct link to the online Dashboard but the local app can’t run full screen, although the online components do.

The main Status page provides access to everything the program offers. This includes reassurance that all the defenses are in place and a scan can be started at any time.

Home Premium’s interface is a hybrid between local and online operations with an emphasis on the latter. Scans can be started locally or through the online portal but while the local interface has an integrated progress indicator, the task tray has a numeric indicator for online scans. Just about everything is done online except for the Help section, although many of its aspects are done in the cloud. Everything from protecting a new device to the actual Help Center are all online, while Troubleshooting, which can exclude certain apps, is a local activity. 

The Sophos icon in the Windows Tasktray shows when the last malware-definitions update took place and the progress of a current scan. Other antivirus brands let their Taskbar icons do lots of tasks, such as starting a scan, pausing the firewall or blocking all network traffic.

Sophos Home Premium now relies on the company’s Intercept X mobile apps. The Android version can scan for malware, block dangerous websites and prevent man-in-the-middle Wi-Fi attacks. Due to restrictions that Apple places on the platform, the iOS version for iPhones can’t scan for malware, however. 

Sophos Home Premium review: Installation and support

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Getting Home Premium loaded onto my system was easy but took 14 minutes to protect it. It started with me downloading the 3.6MB Trial installer from the company’s website. 

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After I clicked on “Let’s Start,” I agreed to the program’s terms and conditions and installed the full program. I needed to create a new account with Sophos and verify my email address.  

At this point, I needed to pay and the installation was complete, ready to scan for malware.

Forget about 24/7 support help. Sophos technicians are ready to assist from

8 a.m. to 8 p.m. (Eastern time) on weekdays. The 24/7 chatbot available provided generally useful answers to basic questions. On the other hand, if you have an attack on a Saturday evening, be ready to wait until Monday morning to talk to somebody. There’s also a chat window and email support. The Sophos site has extensive software updates, videos and self-help items. 

Sophos Home Premium review: Verdict

Lean and mean, Sophos Home Premium is among the least expensive of the major security suites, but it lacks many of the mainstays we now take for granted in a security suite. These no-shows range from a password manager to VPN access to file encryption. Its malware protection is good with one of the fastest virus scanners on the planet, although it extracts too much of a system’s resources and might slow things down. 

At $60 to protect 10 systems, Sophos Home Premium is a bargain. If you want more bells, whistles and features, look to the top suites from Bitdefender, Kaspersky and Norton. But Sophos Home Premium does the trick with basic, simple and inexpensive protection.