F-Secure Safe review: Effective, comprehensive AV at a friendly price

Best Prices Today: F-Secure Safe

With malware and other threats coming from a variety of sources, you need a security product that can protect you no matter where you are and what you’re doing. F-Secure Safe is one program with that goal in mind.

Starting off with basic antivirus protection, the software aims to ward off trojans, ransomware, and spyware. From there, the browsing protection built into the core program and its browser extension steers you away from malicious websites. The banking protection automatically attempts to secure your online banking transactions. And the parental controls try to protect your kids from inappropriate content and help you manage their screen time. Also included in the mix is identity protection, which monitors your email addresses and credit cards for breaches and offers an optional password manager.

Note: This review is part of our best antivirus roundup. Go there for details about competing products and how we tested them.

F-Secure Safe is available for a variety of platforms, including Windows 7 SP1 (support ends in August 2023), Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 11, macOS 10.15 Catalina or later, iOS 14 or later, and Android 8.0 or later.

Like most paid security products, F-Secure Safe charges you an annual subscription rate based on the number of PCs or devices you want to protect—$34.99 for three devices for one year; $44.99 for five devices for one year; $54.99 for seven devices for one year. A convenient 30-day free trial lets you take the full program for a spin; no credit card or payment info required.

F-Secure Safe: Installation

Installation is quick and easy. To download the program, you’re prompted to create an account. You can choose to install the program on your current PC or another device. After installation, your subscription or free trial kicks off, and you’re deposited at the dashboard where you receive confirmation that you’re now protected and are able to view and use the core features.

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F-Secure Safe: Features

The dashboard is well designed, offering you access to the different options by category. Under People & Devices, you can see which people and devices are currently subscribed to F-Secure Safe and add more devices or users to the mix.

Under Viruses & Threats, you can run a manual virus scan. Here, you’re able to choose between a quick scan to check specific Windows system files and a full computer scan to check your entire system. The scan keeps you informed as to whether it finds anything harmful. Afterwards, the protection history for each scan lets you review when it ran, how many files it checked, and whether it uncovered any malware.

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Next, you can temporarily turn off all protection and check for updates. You can also submit a virus sample through the F-Secure website, check your Windows Firewall, and view any quarantined or blocked malware. Plus, the dashboard provides the necessary access to ID protection and monitoring to prevent identity theft. 

The F-Secure Safe settings offer access to a variety of options divided into different categories. Here, you can review and disable the virus protection, antimalware scanning, and web traffic scanning. You can control the manual scan as well as schedule a scan for a particular date, time, and frequency. Further, you’re able to manage the browsing and banking protection features. The Settings screen packs a lot of options into one place, but it’s all well organized and easy to use.

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The dashboard smartly prompts you to add the F-Secure Safe extension to Microsoft Edge as well as Google Chrome and Firefox. The extension enhances the overall browsing protection and tries to defend your online banking transactions from compromise.

F-Secure Safe: Performance

In real-world testing, F-Secure Safe proved itself effective and capable, at least for the most part. With the browsing protection enabled, the software warned me of potentially harmful sites while giving me an option to allow the site and report it as a false positive if I knew it was legitimate.

A manual scan found the three malicious test files on my PC and asked me whether I wanted the software to handle them. However, when I gave the program the OK to proceed, it told me that it was unable to clean two of the files because they were contained in a ZIP archive. On the plus side, trying to manually run the same executable files within the ZIP did prompt F-Secure Safe to catch and quarantine them.

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Downloading the different test files from the EICAR testing site prompted the software to flag them as harmful and automatically quarantine them. An AV-Test review from July/August 2022 gave F-Secure Safe top marks for protection and usability and solid grades for performance. A review from AV Comparatives in 2020 awarded the program high marks for protection but gave it dings for too many false positives.

Adding an old email address to the ID monitoring displayed a report listing past breaches in which my address was exposed. I liked the level of detail in the report as it included the name and date of the breach, my username, my password (if available), the data that was compromised, and recommendations.

The password vault was more difficult and time-consuming to set up compared with most dedicated password managers. But following the setup, the associated browser extension would automatically log me into websites, while the vault was able to flag any weak passwords.

The parental controls were easy to implement. I could send a link to install the software for a child’s account. Setting up the software took me through the screens to select parental rules, so I could opt to limit use to certain days and times and filter specific types of content.

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Should you buy F-Secure Safe?

F-Secure Safe provides solid malware protection and extras like ID protection, password management, and parental controls. For the price, you get a lot of bang for your buck. And despite all the features crammed into one package, the software is relatively easy to use and manage.