Here’s the Deal

avast! vs F-Secure

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When comparing avast! vs F-Secure, the Slant community recommends avast! for most people. In the question“What is the best antivirus software for the Mac OS?” avast! is ranked 4th while F-Secure is ranked 7th.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What is the best antivirus software for the Mac OS?

Pros

Pro
Decent anti-virus protection

Pro
Good malware detection

Full scan seems very thorough compared to other antivirus/malware software.

Pro
Intuitive UI

All the tools are accessible within the one app versus some of the competitors where they have separate apps for each tool.

Pro
A trial version is available

30 day from date of first installation / launch of f-secure.

Ad
Cons

Con
Tries too hard to sell you the paid version

Con
Too noisy

Avast! has sounds turned on by default. It also has a lot of blinky features of questionable use.

Con
Makes your system slower than usual

Even though scans are not being run in background, it will slow your system.

Con
Opt-out installation of Google Chrome

These advertising tactics are simply unacceptable.

Con
Selling potentially identifying user data

Con
Detection rate isn't too solid

Avast! is not the sort of antivirus product to give you peace of mind. In practice, it does miss some malware every now and then. You'll need backup virus protection, which raises the question why you should get Avast in the first place.

Con
Expires after a year leaving computer exposed to new viruses

Expires and stops updating after a year after which the user's computer may become infected by new viruses not covered by existing patterns.

Con
May interfere with hyper-V

Since avast has its own virtualization engine, it will cause issues with hyper-V.

Con
Unable to detect some adware such as FADE adware

Con
Blocks or causes issues on apps or games

Con
"Smart Screen" feature

When running an unknown application, avast will run it wrapped in a sandbox environment first for scanning, then kill the process and re-run it again. A lot of applications do not like this.

Con
Can't quarantine malware

For real-time or manual scanning, if F-Secure finds something, it will move suspicious files to the trash, not ideal.

Con
Firewall gives false sense of security

The firewall f-secure includes only has two options, allow all and block all. Non tech savvy people may think they are protected more than they really are because the word "Firewall" is somewhere in the software dialogue.