I use McAfee EPO at work, after switching away from Sophos, and have no complaints. I use Windows Defender only at home.
I don’t know about the home versions, but McAfee comes with Adaptive Threat Protection. In essence it looks at the behaviour of applications, and is not signature based. If you have heard of Cylance, it does a similar job.
For example, if you were running Word, and the active scan checks it out as it launches, and finds nothing, other AV might consider this job done. ATP continues to monitor it. If Word suddenly started making lots of registry write calls, or trying to modify system files in any way, the ATP will block those actions.
Sophos has its InterceptX product, that is supposed to do a similar job, but we never used it so can’t compare the two.