Bare concrete floors always seem to keep a haze of dust of them. I hear a finish allows them to be cleaned and dust free.

If you are only concerned about the here and now, you can put down a finish.

HOWEVER

If you can maybe kinda sorta in the future see yourself putting anything other than carpet or floating floor down there (ie tile) - DON'T!!

We would LOVE to tile our basement floor... but to do so will be expensive and messy because the people who sold us the place 'did us a favor' and painted the floor. Now if we want to go with tile we have to strip or sand the paint off and THEN we can tile. Not something I'm excited about doing.

Our builder put a sealer on our concrete floor. Fast forward 12 yrs--we wanted to tile sections of the floor while finishing the basement.

The tile layers put an adhesive over the concrete that would allow their tile glue to adhere. Unfortunately, the adhesive they used was flammable and caused a fire.

Just a cautionary tale in case anyone thinks of trying to do such a thing.

Sealer or paint, will make it difficult to tile your basement floor in the future.

We tiled over our painted basement floor and there was no problem at all. We used a concrete paint and etched the concrete before painting. We hired out for the tiling but when we moved 7 yrs later there still was no problem with the floor even in our laundry room where I over flowed the laundry tubs more then once.

Maybe it has something to do with the type of paint originally used?