Back in the early days of personal computers, you could install a security suite on the lone family computer in the den and be done.
In the modern world, you have a houseful of devices that all need protection, whether they're running Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS.
F-Secure Safe supports all four platforms, but it offers fewer protective features than the best competing products.
In previous years, the F-Secure product line included a standalone antivirus, an entry-level suite called F-Secure Internet Security, and the cross-platform suite F-Secure Safe, reviewed here.
F-Secure has dropped the entry-level suite for new installations, though existing users can keep it.
Dropping it makes sense, given that its pricing was the same as the more powerful F-Secure Safe.
This product's pricing starts at $69.99 per year for three licenses.
However, for a cross-platform suite, a five-device subscription matches the needs of many users.
At $89.99 for five licenses, F-Secure Safe is on par with the entry-level suites from Kaspersky and ESET, and cheaper than the top-tier suites from those vendors, which cost $99.99.
That same $99.99 gets you 10 licenses for Bitdefender Total Security, while F-Secure costs $129.99 at the 10-license level.
And of course, your $159.99 per year subscription to McAfee Total Protection gets you unlimited cross-platform licenses.
If you're devoted to F-Secure's products, you may want to consider F-Secure Total.
This bundle includes the F-Secure Safe suite reviewed here, as well as F-Secure Identity Protection (which is a password manager at heart) and F-Secure's Freedome VPN.
Depending on your needs, F-Secure Total may be a better deal than F-Secure Safe, despite prices running from $89.99 per year for three licenses to $299.99 for 25.
The thing is, F-Secure Identity Protection alone starts at $45.90 per year, and Freedome ranges from $34.99 to $69.99 per year.
My F-Secure
On Windows, F-Secure Safe looks a lot like the company's basic antivirus.
Its minimalist main window boasts plenty of white space.
When all is well, it reports "Your computer is protected" and displays a green icon.
If something's wrong, it describes the problem and switches to a red icon.
You click the big blue button to launch a scan or click a link to open the settings page.
A simple menu at left lets you choose Antivirus, Family Rules, Tools, or My F-Secure.
The color scheme is a bit bolder than in previous years.
For example, the top banner changes from pale turquoise to a bold navy blue.
Clicking My F-Secure opens the online My F-Secure console.
Once you log in with your account credentials, you can quickly see how many days remain on your subscription and how many unused device licenses you have.
You can also tweak your account configuration and manage your billing and renewal settings.
Most importantly, the console is where you go to manage your devices.
The attractive display shows your account with its associated devices, as well as any children's accounts and devices.
You can easily release the license for any device you no longer use, making it available to apply on another device.
A Settings button suggests the possibility of remotely modifying the settings, but all it does is rename the device.
What you can do remotely is configure the Family Rules parental control system for devices assigned to children.
It's a little confusing, as it looks like you're just setting the rules for the selected device, but your changes apply to all the child's devices.
You can also invoke the Finder feature to locate any mobile device, your own or your child's.
I'll discuss these features in detail below.
Shared Antivirus Features
The core features of this suite are precisely the same as what you get with F-Secure Anti-Virus, with one enhancement.
The big difference is that the suite integrates with popular browsers to help fend off malicious and fraudulent websites.
Please refer to my review of the standalone antivirus for full details on shared features.
I'll summarize here.
All four of the independent antivirus testing labs we follow include F-Secure in their reports.
Its test scores are all good, but not tip-top.
We use an algorithm to map all the different-style scores onto a 10-point scale and come up with an aggregate lab score.
F-Secure's score of 9.1 points matches Windows Defender, also tested by all four labs.
Among products appearing in results from all the labs, the best aggregate score goes to Kaspersky Security Cloud, with a perfect 10 points.
Avast and ESET are very close, at 9.9 points.
In our own hands-on malware protection test, F-Secure detected 91% of the samples and earned 9.0 of 10 possible points.
That's a decent score, but others have done better against this same set of samples.
Avast and Norton 360 Deluxe weighed in at 9.5 points, McAfee beat that with 9.6, Sophos, managed 9.7, and G Data took 9.8 points.
The big winner was Webroot, with a perfect 10 points.
F-Secure's standalone antivirus does not include the browser protection component found in this suite, which is a shame.
However, it does have an advanced network protection feature that successfully blocked access to a few malware-hosting sites in testing.
F-Secure Anti-Virus eliminated most of the malicious payloads at download, for a total score of 88% in our malicious URL blocking Test.
To the protection available at the antivirus level, the suite adds a browser extension that proved quite effective.
Be warned, though, that this extension only supports Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Internet Explorer (plus Safari on the Mac).
If you use Brave, Opera, or another browser, it won't help.
In almost every case, it diverted the browser to a page stating that F-Secure advises you not to surf to the harmful page.
It called a couple pages merely suspicious rather than harmful, but we counted those as correct detections.
Finally, in a handful of cases the page loaded but F-Secure’s regular real-time protection wiped out the download.
With 99% detection, F-Secure is in the winners’ circle.
Bitdefender, G Data, K7, and Sophos Home Free also came in with 99%, while McAfee and Vipre earned a perfect 100%.
F-Secure's real-time protection wiped out all our ransomware samples, as these are known quantities.
But the real ransomware threat comes from zero-day attacks.
If brand-new ransomware gets past your antivirus, it doesn't matter if an update wipes out the malware the next day, because the damage is already done.
To simulate zero-day attacks, we turned off the regular real-time protection, leaving only the DeepGuard behavioral and ransomware-specific components active.
Our ransomware samples are mostly the common file-encrypting type, though the collection does include one whole-disk encryptor and one screen locker.
DeepGuard detected and quarantined all but two of the samples after launch.
One escaped detection because it didn’t do anything—there was no behavior to block.
However, the other was a hard miss.
It encrypted files in the Documents folder and elsewhere and changed the desktop to a ransom note.
Remember, though, that for this test we turned off regular antivirus protection.
With all F-Secure components enabled, the ransomware didn't have a chance.
Phishing Protection—From Rags to Riches
The same browsing protection that did so well against malware-hosting URLs also aims to steer users away from fraudulent websites, phishing sites that try to steal their login credentials.
Phishing is platform-agnostic.
You can fall for a phishing trap on any platform, from a PC to a gaming console to an internet-aware bidet.
Smart netizens can learn to recognize frauds, but it’s nice to have some help from your security suite.
To prepare for this test, we scrape hundreds of reported phishing URLs from sites that track such things.
We aim to include some URLs that haven't yet been analyzed and blacklisted.
We use a hand-coded program to launch each URL in turn and record that the antivirus caught it, the antivirus missed it, or it wasn't a phishing site after all.
We run this test on four systems simultaneously.
The product under test protects one, of course.
The remaining three rely on the protection built into Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.
Almost half of the current products outperformed all three browsers.
About another quarter beat at least one of the browsers.
When last tested, F-Secure fell into that dismal group of products beaten soundly by all three browsers.
It lagged their average detection rate by 11%.
Fortunately, that fiasco is in the past.
This time around, F-Secure achieved a perfect 100% detection score.
It shares top honors with McAfee, while Bitdefender and Norton come close with 99%.
See How We Test Security Software
Banking Protection
While online security is always important, it's especially urgent during sensitive online activity such as banking.
Quite a few suites offer extra protection to keep spyware from snooping on sensitive online transactions.
For example, Bitdefender includes Safepay in all products, starting with the antivirus.
At the suite level, Kaspersky offers Safe Money, which specifically isolates the protected browser from other processes.
You get Bank Mode in Avast's product line, starting with the free antivirus.
Bank Mode in Avast Premium Security and Safepay in Bitdefender both open a separate desktop for secure browsing.
Kaspersky's Safe Money isolates the browser process from other products, flagging the secure browser with a green border.
All three kick in automatically on detecting a financial site.
Banking protection in F-Secure also activates automatically for financial sites, but it operates a bit differently.
When you connect to a financial site, it blocks all other connections and displays a banner stating that banking protection is active.
Buttons let you shrink the banner down to a green checkmark, or you can end the protection session.
In testing, it clearly worked.
The banner appeared when I opened a bank site, as it should.
And when I attempted to connect elsewhere with a different browser, I got an explanatory page advising me to finish my banking first.
I did find, though, that protection against connecting elsewhere did not affect other instances of the same browser.
Banking protection does what it promises, but we're not sure it's as completely protective as some of the competition.
It seems possible to that, for example, a data stealer could capture your private data and wait to phone home with it until banking protection ended.
The other products mentioned isolate the entire browser process rather than simply preventing other connections.
Negligible Performance Impact
The days of bloated security dinosaurs sucking up system resources are long over.
Most modern products range from almost no performance impact to not very much.
But I still find it worthwhile to run some simple performance impact tests.
To measure boot time, we use a script that launches at startup and waits for 10 seconds in a row with less than 5% CPU usage.
At that point, we deem that the computer is ready to use.
Subtracting the start time of the boot process (obtained by querying Windows) yields the boot time.
We average multiple runs with no suite, and multiple runs after installing the suite.
With F-Secure installed, the boot process finished in less time than without no suite.
A few other products have exhibited this behavior, which we record as a zero, for no slowdown.
Most people let PCs go to sleep when not in use, rebooting only when they must, so an increase in boot time doesn't necessarily mean much.
Slowing down day-to-day file manipulation activities could be more of a drag.
To test that, we repeatedly run a script that moves and copies files of many different types and sizes between drives.
That script averaged just 2% longer with F-Secure installed, certainly nothing you’d notice.
A script that zips and unzips the same set of files over and over ran just 1% longer under F-Secure.
Averaging F-Secure's scores we get an overall performance hit of 1% putting it among the least impactful suites.
Even so, several competitors managed no measurable impact at all, among them ESET Internet Security, K7, and Webroot.
Better Parental Control
One big difference between this suite and the dear departed F-Secure Internet Security is that the latter provide a totally local parental control system.
If you simply jumped in and configured it to block unwanted sites and put limits on screen time, you'll find that you applied those restrictions to your own Windows account.
To configure it for another account, you had first log in to that account.
If you had given Administrator privileges to an older child, there was nothing to stop the child from terminating this simple, local-only parental control.
With F-Secure Safe, you handle configuration online, in the My F-Secure console.
Settings apply to all devices associated with the same child profile.
Note that to initially configure parental control for a child's Windows or Mac user account, you still must log into that account.
Awkward! But the remote configuration system does mean that the child can't simply turn off parental control.
The content filter offers to block 15 categories, color-coded red for dangerous, yellow for iffy, and blue for innocuous.
That last color code includes Social Networks, Anonymizers, and Unknown.
Anonymizers are sites that can evade parental control and monitoring, among other things, so be sure to block that category.
The power of content filtering varies by platform.
On Windows, F-Secure blocks inappropriate sites regardless of the browser used.
Installed on macOS, it filters Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, period.
On mobile devices, it only manages browsing that uses F-Secure's proprietary browser.
It does filter secure HTTPS sites, so your kid can't evade filtering by using an off-brand browser.
Parents can limit device or internet time in ways that vary by platform.
You can limit all activity on an Android device except for calling and texting.
On an iOS device, limits only apply to surfing with the built-in browser.
For Macs and Windows boxes, parents put limits on all use of the device; there's no option to just limit online time.
Time limits work two ways.
Parents can set an overall daily cap, up to eight hours, separately for weekdays and weekends.
Parents can also define bedtimes for weekdays and weekends.
Bedtime is a single span during which access is banned, not the full grid found in...
