How Does Sophos For Mac Compare To Avast

While it's unlikely you'll ever run into malware for the Mac, you may want to consider an antivirus tool anyway—if not to protect yourself, but to protect your Windows-using friends from any malware you may inadvertently send their way. We think that Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac is the best choice, and it's free.

Sophos For Mac
Sophos For Mac Review
How Does Sophos For Mac Compare To Avast Download
Sophos For Mac Free Download
How Does Sophos For Mac Compare To Avast Free

Sophos antivirus free download - Sophos Home, Sophos Home, Avast Free Antivirus, and many more programs.

Update: Our previous recommendation for Mac Antivirus was 'nothing.' We know many of you choose to use nothing, but we also know you don't come to the App Directory to not get any suggestions at all. Besides, malware is starting to become a bit more prevalent on the Mac, and even the safest browsing habits don't protect you completely. So, we now officially recommend Sophos as our Mac antivirus of choice.

Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac

Platform: OS X (10.4+)
Price: Free
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Features

Compact, easy-to-use interface that can be used for custom on-demand scans of files, folders, and drives, or scheduled, periodic full scans of your Mac.
Also scans files on your Mac for known Windows malware, trojans, and viruses, and deletes or quarantines them so you don't risk spreading them to someone else via network share, USB drive, or email.
Deletes or quarantines known threats, gives you the option to quarantine anything suspicious that may be a new threat or dangerous file.
Runs quietly in the background, scanning emails, downloads, and any other files on access, stopping you from opening them before they can do any harm.
Light on system resources while running in the background.
Installs like any other Mac application, and uninstalls just as easily—no complicated packages or components to manage or configure.
Sophos' 'Live Antivirus' feature updates your app the moment new threats are detected or found in the wild. The feature also performs real-time lookups to see if files accessed are in the SophosLabs database, even if they're unfamiliar to the app.
Supports OS X up to 10.8 and back to 10.4, and is completely free for all versions.

Where It Excels

Sophos actually has an excellent breakdown of the history of malware for the Mac going all the way back to 1982. The fact that the article exists should remind Mac users that while they're not the primary target for malware authors, they're by no means invulnerable. The size of the article however should issue some confidence that the risk—while present—is by no means critical.

Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac stands out in a somewhat crowded field of Mac antivirus apps because it doesn't just scan your Mac's files and folders on demand, but it does it quietly in the background without tapping your already precious system resources in the process. The utility also keeps its own constantly-updating database of Windows viruses, trojans, and other threats, so if you inadvertently download a Windows virus or trojan that won't harm you, you don't run the risk of sending it off to someone else by forwarding the message, or you won't infect other computers on your network (or any Windows partitions or virtual machines you run on the same hardware) via shared drives. Sophos is smart enough to tell you 'Hey, this won't hurt you, but we're going to quarantine/delete it so you don't accidentally email this attachment to someone else.' That's a huge benefit—and it keeps you from being that guy no one likes.

Another banner feature Sophos offers that its competition doesn't is its live, real-time access to SophosLabs. 'Live Antivirus,' as it's called in the app, gives you an added layer of protection. The app automatically identifies and quarantines suspicious files, installers, and other packages that may not be well known threats yet, but definitely exhibit behavior suspicious enough that Sophos is looking into them.

Best of all though, in our testing, Sophos was one of the most resource-light antivirus apps on the Mac, which is impressive considering the features it offers.

Where It Falls Short

Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac isn't perfect, however. Even though it's pretty resource light, it wasn't the lightest in our tests. It just hit the sweet spot between resources and features. Also, support for Mountain Lion came a few months after its launch, so Sophos wasn't exactly right there with those people who upgraded on launch day.

Download Avast Free Antivirus 2018 latest version for Windows and Mac OS HERE! Avast Free Antivirus 2018 is a great antivirus software to protect your PC. Avast antivirus for mac install without downloading files.

The Competition

ClamXav 2 uses the open source ClamAV virus scanning engine. It can also detect both WIndows and OS X malware, scan on demand or on a regular schedule, and it's probably a bit more lightweight and easy on system resources than Sophos. It's compatible with OS X 10.5 or higher. The only trouble with ClamXav is that its definitions come a bit more sporadically than we'd like (daily, usually, sometimes, if they feel like it) and while performing scans is easy, tweaking all of the settings and getting the app scanning proactively is a little more effort than I'd like to see. Still, it's an excellent alternative, and one of the first you should check out if Sophos isn't cutting it for you.

Avast! Free Antivirus for Mac is the Mac version of our current favorite for Windows, and for good reason. The researchers at AV Comparitives found that Avast detected 100% of the Mac malware that went through it, an honor that few other utilities won (they didn't test Sophos, unfortunately). It's free, it works, it's lightweight, but the only catch is that it only scans for Mac-specific malware, which won't matter to you if you're in an all-Mac ecosystem, but if you, like most of us, share the world with Windows users, thinking of them doesn't hurt.

Avira is another free utility worth a look. It also picked up 100% of the Mac malware that passed through it with no false positives. Avira's UI and options are perfect for non-technical users, and it offers strong protection against known Mac threats. Again, there's no Windows protection in the app, and both the scheduling and custom scan options are a bit anemic, so power users may want to shy away from it. If you're installing it on your non-technical friend or family-member's Mac however, it's a great option.

For more suggestions, make sure to check out AV Comparitives' full 2012 report on Mac antivirus tools—there are more in there we didn't list here.

We're not trying and settle the antivirus-versus-no-antivirus debate; it's been raging for years and isn't going to stop now. For a great and thorough perspective on the issue, check out my old colleague Neil Rubenking's take at PC Mag's SecurityWatch blog, and The Safe Mac's approach to the topic.

Sophos For Mac

Whatever you do though, it's probably not necessary to plop down money for a Mac antivirus suite. The threats don't warrant you dropping money on software to keep you safe, and too many of them do more harm than good (especially the ones looking to get your money). They're just not worth it, especially when there are more effective, robust, free options like the ones above available to you.

Every day, independent test lab AV-TEST.org captures more than 400,000 new malware samples for Windows and 5,000 new samples for Android. For the Mac they identify less than 100 per month. But there is malware out there for the Mac and it does hit users in the real world, if less often and less intensely than on the PC.

Download Avast Free Mac Security 2018 for OS X and protect your Macintosh with the best antivirus & security app. Review, install or uninstall. Download Avast Free Mac Security 2018 for OS X and protect your Macintosh with the best antivirus & security app. Review, install or uninstall. Avast Security is a free antivirus that stops malware & finds Wi-Fi security weaknesses. Free Download! In order to view this page correctly, you must have a JavaScript-enabled browser and have JavaScript turned on. https://tanlilitu.tistory.com/2.

Sophos For Mac Review

The existence of quite a few companies in the business of Mac anti-malware software shows that there's enough demand for it too. Avast security for mac os 10.7.5. That's why AV-TEST just completed a test of 18 products in this space:

How Does Sophos For Mac Compare To Avast Download

avast! Free Antivirus 9.0 (41877)
AVG AntiVirus 14.0 (4715)
Avira Free Antivirus 2.0.5.100
Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac 2.21.4959
Comodo Antivirus 1.1.214829.106
ESET Cyber Security Pro 6.0.9.1
F-Secure Anti-Virus for Mac 1.0.282 (13406)
G Data Antivirus for Mac 2.30.5095
Intego VirusBarrier 10.8.1
Kaspersky Internet Security 14.0.1.46c
McAfee Internet Security 3.1.0.0 (1702)
Microworld eScan for Mac 5.5-8
Norman Antivirus for Mac 3.0.7664
Panda Antivirus 10.7.8 (772)
Sophos Anti-Virus 8.0.23
Symantec Norton Internet Security 5.6 (25)
Trend Micro Titanium 3.0.1251
Webroot SecureAnywhere 8.0.6.105: 181

You can find complete results on their site. Five of the products (avast!, Sophos, AVG, Comodo and Avira) are free. The G Data and Norman products use the Bitdefender engine and the Panda product is based on the Intego product.

AV-TEST used '..the products which are offered at the AV vendor's websites as downloads. The versions available at the Mac App Store might be limited in functionality, as they cannot access all APIs.'

AV-TEST provides test results for malware detection, both on-access and on-demand; false positives; impact on system performance; and ancillary features, specifically anti-spam, anti-phishing, personal firewall, safe browsing, parental control, backup and encryption.

The products from avast!, Bitdefender, G Data, Norman, ESET, Intego, Panda, Microworld, F-Secure, Sophos and Kaspersky detected a very high percentage of the malware on-access. AV-TEST also gives results for on-demand scanning, but their importance pales (in our opinoin) in comparison to those of on-access. Kaspersky detected 95.2% on-access, several others detected 97.6% and 98.8% and four products detected 100% of malware on-access. All of these numbers are excellent, but obviously it doesn't get better than 100%.

Several products, all with well-known brands, had disappointing results. Trend Micro (33.3%), Webroot (22.6%) and McAfee(21.4%) all stand out in a bad way.

None of the products had a single false positive. This may be possible because of the relatively low number of samples.

System performance impact has some interesting results. The test was to copy 7.4GB of files and the reference number (no anti-malware products) was 17.2 seconds. If you leave out the products from Microworld and Trend Micro, the average of the rest is 18.9 seconds and the high is 20.8, both perfectly acceptable. With Microworld eScan installed the operation took 40.4 seconds. With Trend Micro it took 470.3. Clearly something was very wrong with Trend Micro and this specific operation. AV-TEST says that they observed no meaningful performance degradation with any of the products in normal interaction.

Sophos For Mac Free Download

Compared to PC products, the Mac products offer very few additional features. Eight of them add no extra features (as counted by AV-TEST). Only five offer more than one. The only real stand-out is ESET Cyber Security Pro, which offers anti-spam, personal firewall, safe browsing and parental control.

With all that data it's hard to pick a single product out, except to point out that avast! Free Antivirus and Sophos Anti-Virus are the only free products among those with good results both in detection and system performance and that ESET has several additional features missing in the others.

Corrected on September 5: The first version of this story did not mention avast! Free Antivirus as one of the top-performing free products. It was an oversight and we apologize.

How Does Sophos For Mac Compare To Avast Free

This leaves plenty of good products. You may decide that there's no point in using anything other than the free avast! and Sophos products, but for a few bucks you might see something in one of the others that appeals to you. Looks like Mac anti-malware is a buyer's market.

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