F-Secure Safe
Distraction-free protection that does the job, but F-Secure Safe doesn’t stand out from the crowd
PRICE (5 devices) First year, £50 (£60 inc VAT), renewal £67 (£80 inc VAT) from f-secure.com
F-Secure Safe is an unobtrusive, no-frills security suite with a small range of features. Its pared-down interface feels almost empty compared to some of the other services, but that’s mostly because it doesn’t try to fill space with random system optimisation tools or services better provided by a specialist.
As well as a couple of different scanning options, its modules provide integrated protection against known malicious websites, a secure banking tool and reputation tools for in-browser search (available via extensions for Firefox, Edge and Chrome).
DeepGuard is a cloud-based reputation system that only allows the installation of apps that it knows to be safe. Impressively, this didn’t throw up any false positive identifications of legitimate software in recent tests. A gaming mode prevents interruptions and suspends system-intensive scanning tasks when you’re in the middle of playing something.
Parental controls are included, and they’re effective and easy to activate. Features include time limits and web filtering, but not per-app restrictions.
A more comprehensive version, F-Secure Total, also includes a password manager and the company’s surprisingly capable Freedome VPN, which is developed in-house. This costs around £20 more per year.
F-Secure’s main benefit is that it doesn’t bother you or really need any interaction at all. This is the same ethos we see from Microsoft Defender, and it’s a good one – many end users don’t want to make hands-on decisions about system security.
F-Secure combines its in-house malware detection with the Avira engine, although tests show that F-Secure’s weighting and handling of threats differs from Avira’s. It’s tricky to say how effective it is, as the only recent test data comes from AV-Test: here, it missed some malware in an October 2022 test, but still scored a respectable 99.2% for protection. This is comparable to long-term historical data from AV Comparatives, while 2021 data from SE Labs shows F-Secure detecting 98% of malware with no false positives. AV-Test also found that it slowed down file copies more than many rivals.
F-Secure Safe isn’t as expensive as some but its performance and features don’t provide a compelling reason to use it instead of Defender, or most other free and paid-for alternatives.