Sophos Antivirus Review (2025): Is it the right choice?

Full Review

Sophos Home Premium is a user-friendly antivirus that can protect up to 10 Macs or PCs, plus unlimited mobile devices. Its minimalist design and ease of use make it ideal for non-technical users, while more advanced settings and remote management options cater to tech-savvy individuals. Most features are controlled via an intuitive online dashboard, with a basic desktop app serving as a shortcut to key functions. Overall, its simplicity and flexibility make it a solid choice for both beginners and advanced users.

Anti-malware

Sophos Home Premium offers an easy-to-use malware scanner accessible through both the desktop app and online dashboard, with the option to schedule scans. In testing, it detected 98% of a wide range of malware samples, including spyware, ransomware, viruses, trojans, and rootkits. While it falls slightly behind top competitors like Bitdefender and Norton in detection rate, its performance is still impressive.

Sophos’s real-time protection, powered by AI, blocked 100% of malware samples during testing, including advanced ransomware. However, it lacks features like quick or custom scans offered by other antivirus programs. Despite this, it provides robust protection against malicious USB devices and allows selective scanning of specific files, folders, and drives.

Overall, Sophos delivers excellent malware detection, especially with its strong real-time protection.

Anti-phishing

Sophos’s web protection effectively blocks malicious websites, including phishing pages and malware sites. In testing, it successfully prevented access to every dangerous URL, including those listed on PhishTank. While whitelisting sites is possible, it’s a bit time-consuming compared to competitors that offer a simpler “Proceed anyway” option. However, no false positives were encountered during testing, so most users likely won’t need to whitelist frequently.

Sophos also includes a useful online banking protection feature and a Download Reputation setting, which assigns a trust score to downloads based on community feedback. Unlike many other antivirus solutions, Sophos doesn’t require a separate browser extension for web protection, making setup easier. It’s compatible with popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, though it won’t work with less common browsers.

Overall, Sophos provides strong, hassle-free web protection without the need for additional browser plugins.

Other security features

Sophos Home Premium offers a few notable security features, though it lacks the extensive tools found in more comprehensive antivirus suites like Norton Advanced or Bitdefender Premium.

Remote Management

Sophos’s remote management is easy to use, allowing control of security settings and features on up to 10 devices via the online dashboard. It performed well in testing, enabling remote malware scans and configuration changes on other devices. This feature stands out as one not typically found in many antivirus programs, even from top competitors like Avira.

Parental Controls

The parental controls are basic, offering site blocking by category (e.g., adult content, social networking). While the content filter worked effectively on major browsers like Chrome and Firefox, it’s easy to bypass on less popular browsers like Vivaldi. However, users cannot block specific sites or set time limits, making it more suited for basic supervision of younger children.

Additional Features

Sophos includes webcam protection (Windows only), which alerts users when an app accesses the webcam, though it lacks the depth of protection seen in programs like Kaspersky and Bitdefender, which can block unauthorized access. The keystroke encryption feature, designed to prevent keyloggers from stealing sensitive data, performed very well in tests, protecting login information from malware.

While it lacks advanced extras like a VPN, dark web monitoring, or system optimization tools, Sophos Home Premium provides essential protection with a few useful additions like remote management and anti-keylogger encryption.

If you buy Sophos, consider NordVPN, Surfshark, or Norton VPN to protect your privacy.

Test score comparison

We conduct in-house anti-malware tests and review the results from AV-Test, a German lab renowned for its objective evaluations. Below is the average of the last 10 AV-Test results for Windows. Their scoring criteria are:

• Protection (1-6): Effectiveness in blocking malware.
• Performance (1-6): Impact on system speed.
• Usability (1-6): Frequency of errors like false alarms.

We calculate a final score using this formula:

Final Score = 60% Protection + 20% Performance + 20% Usability.

While these results influence our choice of the best antivirus for Windows 11, other factors like privacy and identity protection also play a key role. For a similar analysis for Android or macOS, visit our other comparisons:

• The best antivirus for Android.
• The best antivirus for Mac.

Note: Brands not listed in the table either do not participate in AV-Test trials or are tested too infrequently, such as Surfshark Antivirus.

Source: AV-Test (Last updated: December 2024).

Price comparison

We’ve compared the prices of the top antivirus products for Windows. To make it a fair comparison, we looked at what it would cost us, to protect a  single Windows PC with the most essential features:

• Anti-malware
• Anti-phishing (web protection)
• Firewall
• Password manager
• Unlimited VPN (no data limit)

A few notes:

• Some brands are missing features, lowering their value for money.
• Prices are second-year prices in the USA, without first-year discounts.
• Prices are rounded up for readability (e.g., $99.99 becomes $100).

Brands have different prices outside the USA. See those on their website.

User reviews

We’ve compared the user reviews of all antivirus brands. We’ve used the scores and review count of TrustPilot, a leading user review platform. 

We consider scores above 4.0 very good. Lower scores indicate that the brand might have a poor product or customer service. McAfee’s scores, for instance, are worrying.

Source: TrustPilot. Last Update: December 2024.