Our Rating Price when reviewed 50One year, three devices (inc VAT)
Middle-of-the-road protection for a middle-of-the-road price leaves F-Secure stuck in the middle
Pros Minimal impact on day-to-day PC useGood parental control optionsCons Slows app installation significantlyA little lacking in features
F-Secure Safe starts strong, with one of this month’s highest protection rates. It’s a gnat’s hair behind the front runners, with an unrounded score of 99.98%, but that’s good enough for us to put our trust in.
And while its false-positive rate might seem unremarkable, it’s a huge step forward from last year, when F-Secure Safe wrongly flagged up over four times as many innocuous items as any rival suite. It’s still not the best in the business, but we’re very happy about the direction of travel.
F-Secure Safe review: Features
On the features front, Safe is quite modestly equipped. It relies on the Windows firewall, rather than its own, and lacks supplementary tools such as software updaters and performance enhancers.
There’s also no standalone safe browser, but what you get is arguably better: F-Secure detects when you’re accessing a banking site and, rather than bouncing you into a different app, automatically locks down your system, temporarily suspending internet access for extensions and other apps so they can’t spy on your activities. You have to manually end the safe browsing session when you’re done, but it’s probably the most fuss- free approach we’ve seen. It’s just annoying that you can’t add your own sites to the list: it only works with banking services known to F-Secure.
The other major function is parental controls, which enforce time limits and web content filtering for child accounts. The restrictions work on Android phones too, but there’s no clever location-tracking feature, as there is with ESET’s parental controls. You can get Android and iOS devices running the F-Secure client to report back their location, but it involves sending and receiving an SMS.
F-Secure Safe review: Performance
Clearly, there are things to like about F-Secure, but it’s not as nimble as some suites. AV-Comparatives and AV-Test found that Safe substantially hindered app installation, with AV-Test recording a whopping 50% slowdown on a standard PC. AV- Comparatives found it “fast” when running apps for the first time and downloading files from the internet. On the upside, there’s minimal impact on regular app usage and web browsing, so you won’t feel bogged down in day-to-day use.
F-Secure Safe review: Verdict
You can buy a three-device licence from the publisher’s website, but shop around online and you’ll find a boxed five-device edition for just £15. If you’ve a family’s worth of devices to protect, that’s a solid deal, but it’s not the most feature-packed suite.