Sophos Antivirus for Mac Home Edition Review

[Jill Scharr]

Sophos Antivirus for Mac is an easy-to-use and free program whose strong protection and built-in scans make it our top choice.

Sophos Antivirus for Mac Home Edition Review : Read more

 

[Seta Soso]

All these features and protection offered count for little when Sophos locks up my Finder everytime I browse folders on my Macbook Pro 15" Retina running OS X Mavericks (10.9.5). The fix? I uninstalled Sophos and everything was back to working fine.

 

[ruftytufty]

One expects a full scan to have some performance impact - but one doesn't normally need to run a full scan very often. I think a more useful performance test would be how much does the always-on scanning (of downloaded files, URL's, copies), etc. affect performance. That's going to affect one's day-to-day experience of performance effects much more.

 

[Justin Keller]

I'm a little surprised to see some of the other scanners rate more highly... Avira has known issues with cause Macs to take forever to shut down, or even to hang while shutting down. Avast installs adware, blocks some websites from loading (the browser will say that it can't connect to the server), and has massive issues with replacing certificates for secure sites.

I have absolutely no relationship at all with any company that produces an antivirus scanner. But I have tried both of these products, and when I began having problems I went to sites such as Apple's discussion groups and to The Safe Mac. This is known stuff.

 

[StephenStrum]

Here's the problem as I see it. I agree with Justin's comments that you never know if there exists a CONFLICT OF INTERESTS in what one person or site advises versus another. I am a physician and uninvolved with any software company. That is the truth, but is this enough for readers to believe in what I have to say. Second, many comments by users and in different websites becomes outdated. In fact, searching Google for me is impaired dramatically but not seeing on the search findings the most recent date per that site. So, I went to TheSafeMac.com and their review of anti-virus apps is 2 years old. That's outdated in my opinion. I have used a number of apps that muck up my computer's operation i.e. slow down, or even freeze operations. Some colleagues have had major problems with Sophos.
The bottom line is where can we find those ethical persons that provide reports that are up-to-date, accurate, and not corrupted by conflicts of interest? Basically, it's the same issue: Caveat emptor or Buyer beware!

 

[Captain Yesterday]

I was very satisfied with Sophos from 2011 until August 2016 when the last version supporting OS X 10.7 and earlier (9.4.2) stopped adding new virus definitions (after having been reduced to limited support in November 2014 and zero support in November 2015). The couple of problems ever I saw were always introduced in one update and quickly fixed in the next. For a free product, I found their support forum excllent. However, I only used its On-Access Scanning, Manual Scanning, and Manual Updating functions. I disabled its Live Protection, Web Protection, and Automatic Updating functions because I use other measures (ipfw/WaterRoof, Little Snitch, MVPS hosts, NoScript for Firefox, webmail exclusively) and because managing network and CPU resources significantly increases reliability and performance for me.

Based on "Best Antivirus Software and Apps 2016" I decided to try switching to Avast. So far it seems a perfectly serviceable replacement, though with fewer of the user interface features I use, I'd rather Sophos had kept supporting my system. I'll elaborate under the Avast review.