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.

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