Sophos Home Premium for Mac Review

Macworld

At a GlanceExpert's Rating

Pros

Good speed and performance, runs well in the background.

Very good price point, the license allowing protection for up to 10 devices.

Caught a respectable amount of test malware and some phishing site activity.

Cons

Allows AdWind and Adobe Flash Player sample malware to be installed, AdWind having to be removed with a separate utility.

Awkward Web-based dashboard interface.

Functions such as quickly scanning an external or network volume feel much harder than they have to be.

Our Verdict
Sophos Home Premium is available for a good price, protects up to 10 devices, and caught a fair amount of test case viral software, but there are too many issues with installation and set up, and certain elements of the program are awkward.

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Sometimes an application doesn’t expand to match its competitors. This is the case with Sophos Home Premium, which we last reviewed in 2021. Since then only nominal changes, outside of supporting the current macOS operating systems, have been made and many of our criticisms made then still apply.

Sophos Home Premium functions as a fairly well-rounded anti-piracy/anti-malware suite, its core modules centering around antivirus protection, web protection, ransomeware protection, and malicious traffic detection. 

The software usually retails for $59.99/£49.95 per year, $99.99/£89.95 for two years, and $139.99/£114.95 for three years, each subscription licensing up to 10 devices. You can currently get 25% off those prices, with the first year starting at $44.99/£37.46.

In the past Sophos offered a free version of its Home product with just the antivirus protection and website protection. In late 2021, the company discontinued that version, leaving Sophos Home Premium as the only option for personal use. You can freely and fully use Home Premium for 30 days via an ad-free trial, the free trial protecting up to three devices. 

Find out how Sophos compares to the Best antivirus software for Mac we have tested.

Sophos Home Premium is easy enough to download and requires macOS 10.12 (Monterey) or later to install and run. Installing the software proved to have its own set of issues and requires an online account to be set up. While the installer program functioned correctly, with the current version installing into the Sophos folder in the Applications folder, it didn’t activate the application in the expected way. Instead, everything was essentially controlled via the Menu Bar icon and a web-based interface. Yes, the program guides you through setting up permissions to install network tools, full disk access, and kernel extensions, but everything is based around the macOS menu bar pull-down menu and a web-based dashboard. 

Once you’ve signed into your Sophos account, it’s easy enough to customize and configure core elements such as actions that occur when malware is found, scan scheduling, and web filtering, and elements such as accessible scan logs, network file scanning, and easy access to creating whitelists and exceptions come in handy. 




Examining a scan log in Sophos Home Premium for Mac.Foundry

Like similar programs, you can choose between quick scans to examine areas of the hard drive that might be infected with questionable software as well as full scans, which can take several hours and cover the full extent of the hard drive. 

While it takes a little nosing around the dashboard, users can configure the Web Filtering options to allow blocking for categories such as general interests, social networking and computing, and adult and potentially inappropriate categories and hone their filters in from there, excluding traffic that might be centered around adult content, gambling, hate, offensive content, violence, weapons, and other categories. The filters work reasonably well and helped block going to sites from some of my Gmail’s spam folder, and it’s easy enough to create a whitelist to provide exceptions for certain websites as needed.

Unfortunately, there’s considerable room for improvement. Although Sophos Home Premium functions well with macOS’s GateKeeper feature and caught and filtered a respectable amount of test malware, it allowed both the AdWind malware and an infected copy of Adobe Flash Player to be installed. While the Adobe Flash Player application later offered an uninstallation option, the AdWind malware had to be removed with another utility, which proved discouraging. 

Other elements of the program felt awkward, and it felt surreal in that while the scan scheduling feature worked well, it only allows you to set schedule times set to every 30 minutes (11:00 AM, 11:30 AM, 12:00 PM, etc). 




The Dashboard’s home screen in Sophos Home Premium for Mac.Foundry

The fact that the application runs entirely from the macOS Menu Bar and a web-based dashboard takes some getting used to, as nothing appears to be running by the Dock, and outside of a small Menu Bar animation, it can be difficult to gauge whether a scan is running unless the Menu Bar item is clicked on and Sophos Home Premium is opened from there. 

Finally, specifying and scanning an external volume such as a thumb drive or network volume feels like a harder process than it should be, with these elements included in the overarching Full Scan option, as opposed to being able to specify what you want to scan and doing this quickly and easily without having to wrestle with a web-based dashboard. 

Should you buy Sophos Home Premium?

Sophos Home Premium is available for a good price to protect up to 10 devices, it caught a fair amount of test case viral software, and yes, it runs well in the background of the macOS operating system, but it feels like the elements that made the software feel awkward when we last looked at it three years ago haven’t been remedied and were barely looked into. 

Granted, there are some powerful customization options to be had within the depths of the Dashboard, but when it comes to ease of use (such as easily scanning an external volume), Sophos Home Premium seems lost in the dark with no hope of finding a flashlight in the near future. The price might be right, but there are other applications that take on these tasks and do them better, and they’re arguably worth looking into once the 30-day trial for this is complete.