10-second breakdown:
Offering best in class virus and malware protection, F-Secure is a great choice if sheer protection is what you’re looking for rather than lots of frills. While there aren’t a ton of extras, what they offer is done well.
The good:
Some top-of-the-line malware scanning. In order to provide users with the highest protection possible against those pesky malware programs, F-Secure has two different scanners to maximize detection.
The interface is one of the best around with a simple-to-use and intuitive dashboard as well as looking snazzy. Beginners and the not-so-tech-savvy will appreciate just how easy it is to find your way around.
Antivirus and malware scans are fast, so you can get back to using your device quickly. Just because they’re fast doesn’t mean that they might miss something. F-Secure’s are very thorough, providing you top-notch protection.
The bad:
There are no anti-phishing capabilities, which is odd for a modern antivirus product.
Limited parental controls. If you’re worried about what your children are looking at, another software will better fit your needs.
How it works:
Security programs are all over the place with what features they include or leave out. Many cram spam filtering, advanced firewalls and more into their programs even if those don’t necessarily help with antivirus protection.
F-Secure went down the opposite road, rather than cram their package with features galore they focused on what matters the most – keeping you virus and malware free. Their focus paid off, year over year they rank towards the front of the security software pack in antivirus detection and removal.
Many of the top antivirus suites offer a behavior-based malware detector. If you don’t know what a program is, but it’s acting suspicious and trying to hijack your router, your antivirus will step in and quarantine the program. In theory, this is awesome and will protect you from malware that hasn’t been identified yet. In practice though not everyone that acts shady has bad intentions.
False positives plague behavior detectors but F-Secure stands far in front of everyone else. Their ‘DeepGuard’ might kick in to take a peak at the program you’re installing, but has a nearly perfect rate of allowing legitimate programs to install.
F-Secure also offers a specific online banking protection feature. Online banking sites are often targeted by hackers, after all if they can get your credentials then they can steal all of your money. F-Secure’s feature shuts down all additional connections while you have an online banking site open, thus stopping any malware from transmitting data. You can see it in action for yourself if you attempt to open another web browser, it won’t connect to the internet. As long as you don’t multi-task with your online banking open you shouldn’t notice any difference.
The program also doesn’t hog many of your system resources. While some of the competitors require a beefier or newer computer to get any work done while the antivirus is scanning, you won’t notice while F-Secure makes its rounds. It also has a very minimal impact on how fast your computer starts up. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need protection at all but the second best option is to not even know it’s there. Even better, the scans usually run much faster than the competition, it’ll be over before you even knew it started.
Although F-Secure cut much of the bloated extra features they still have a few up their sleeve. In addition to the normal antivirus you can download ‘Booster,’ it’s a Windows PC tuneup tool that helps to speed up your system. It cleans up your system looking for unnecessary installation files left behind and useless Registry entries. Those features are handy but you may only need to run them once or twice a year. Much more useful on a day to day basis are the ability to secretly delete your recycle bin and tweak your power-saving settings if you’re on a laptop.
One thing to note, since F-Secure is focused purely on protecting you from viruses online, it has no additional firewall and the parental controls are paltry. Where other suites let you check in on your family’s searches or block specific sites, F-Secure only allows you to block entire categories of sites, like ‘dating’ or ‘adult.’
F-Secure’s website is a little complex, they bombard you with a ton of different options that sound remarkably similar. There are two of relevance for our antivirus purposes, both of which have a no credit-card 30-day trial. Don’t like the service? No problem, uninstall the program and go about your business.
The first one is F-Secure’s ‘Internet Security.’ This is a very barebones package for just one Windows PC, it’ll set you back $49.99 for one computer for a year license. It includes everything we mentioned above, and they do offer discounts for multiple computers or multiple years if you pay upfront.
What if you have a Mac or a smartphone? The second option worth looking at is F-Secure’s ‘Safe’ package. It includes everything Internet Security provides but adds in protection for smartphones, tablets and Macs. It starts at $69.99 for three devices on a one year plan and similar to the other packages F-Secure offers discounts for multiple years or more users. They also add in the feature to track any lost smartphones or tablets through their GPS. Plus you can lock down your Android to make sure anyone who finds it won’t get any personal data.
Although it doesn’t offer as many extra features as anyone else on the list, F-Secure niched down and chose to focus purely on protection. This paid dividends, as their protection is among the highest in the industry. If you have elderly or young loved ones who don’t care about features, they just need a virus free computer, F-Secure is a great choice.
For complete rankings of all antivirus software, go here.
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