The Best Parental Control Apps of 2024

Your child lives and breathes YouTube. They’re connected 24/7 to their friends across platforms as diverse as reddit, Discord, FaceBook and Instagram. They’re streaming anime and Swedish death metal from Spotify playlists at 3 a.m. on a school night while chatting to extremists on the dark web.

Does that sound familiar? I’ll bet that at least parts of it do to most parents – if not in reality, then at least in your head.

The truth is that internet access is becoming more and more essential to functioning as a human being in the third decade of the 21st century. It’s essential as an adult, and to a child or teen who needs to conduct a social life as well as research and hand in homework online – it is (from their point of view) a matter of life and death.

The internet is not a safe place. There are virtual muggers out there, waiting for an opportunity to commit electronic violence on your nearest and dearest, and there are unsavory characters lurking in the digital shadows to radicalize, to groom and to do stuff you don’t even want to think about.

There’s a fine line between encouraging your child to experiment, learning about the world in which they will be living for the next three score years, and giving them the freedom to wander into a dangerous situation.

As a parent, it’s always good to have an overview of what your child is up to without prying too closely into the fine details.

You set rules In the real world, and you may let them go off to the local park or woods with their friends, but they need to be home before dark, and must under no circumstances go near the abandoned quarry where the coyotes spend their time sunning themselves on the hot rocks.

It’s common sense, and it’s (relatively) easy to set real world rules of behavior and check whether they’re being obeyed.

In the digital world, it’s different. What you need is parental control software that will show you, at a glance, what your child has been up to online and set hard limits to their freedoms.

Here’s how:

Tell Your Child What You’re Doing

Would you behave differently if you knew that there was someone watching your every move 24 hours per day, could rewind time to look for patterns, and potentially punish you for rule infractions? I know that I would. I wouldn’t cross the street without being on my best behavior.

I’d also resent it – even if I knew that the monitoring was for my own safety and security.

But I’d resent it even more if I found out some time later that I was being spied on.

When deploying parental control software, it’s important that your child knows what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Yes, there’s likely to be some kickback, but it will be nothing compared to if they discover your monitoring at a later date.

Plus, if they know you’re watching online, and they know the limits, their behavior is less likely to be risky in the first place.

With the most important part out of the way, I’ll move onto the most basic options.

The Built-in Basics

There are two main operating systems on desktop computers – Windows and macOS. The chances are good that all of the laptops and desktops in your house are already running one of these, and in recent versions, turning on and using parental controls is a breeze.

I’ll also cover iOS and Android devices, and what built-in options are available for those platforms.

Windows 7 and Up

To set up parental controls in Windows 7 and up, go to your Settings from the Start menu and type in “Family Options.”

This will take you to a screen in Windows Security. Click “View family settings.”

This will bring up a browser window, where you’ll have to sign in to your Microsoft account. This prevents nosy teens from trying to change the settings that you set up.

Through the home page, you can access pages that will let you control screen time and what content your child is allowed to access.

Screen Time

When you go to this page on the Microsoft website, you’ll see how to set up screen time limits for your child.

You’ll have to create a group for your family, labeling who’s who by their email address. Then, you can choose a member of the household and set different limits on their usage.

Just go to the Screen Time tab and select their hours. You’ll have to change the time limit from “Max scheduled” to a certain length of time.

Additional Controls

When you first create a family group on microsoft.com, you will be asked to set up the ways in which Microsoft will monitor your child on your behalf, what they need your permission for, and what they can do on their own.

By default, they will require your permission to spend money in the Microsoft app store (does anyone actually use the Microsoft app store?), and “Content restrictions” will be set to “On” – meaning that inappropriate websites and apps are blocked. Also on is “Activity reporting” – which will create reports of your offspring’s every online move.

There are additional options to restrict screen time as I have shown above, and “Find Your Child,” which will allow you to “Make sure your child is safe by tracking their location,” so their offline moves are covered too.

To alter any of these settings, click on “Manage Settings,” which will return you to the “Your Family” screen. Each of the people using your machine (including you) need to register email addresses with Microsoft for parental controls to work. For the purposes of this article, I created some disposable addresses with temp-mail.org.

Select a family member and click on “more options” to open a drop menu.

“Content Filters” is the second item on the list, and selecting it will bring up controls for which websites your child is and isn’t allowed to visit.

“Filter inappropriate websites and searches” is pre-selected and, as the name suggests,  will restrict websites and searches based on what Microsoft thinks is appropriate for a child to view.

Below that, there is a toggle for “Only use allowed websites” – this is whitelisting. If you don’t add a certain website, your child cannot visit it. Use this if you want to keep your child on a very short leash.

If there are some websites you definitely do not want your child to visit, you can add them to the block list.

All pretty straightforward

macOS Catalina & Big Sur

You’ll be relieved to hear that with Apple’s macOS, parental control software is administered on the computer itself, so there’s no need to log into an online service – sharing your and your child’s browsing habits with a third-party company.

It’s worth noting that both you and your child will need to have an Apple ID linked to your accounts on the Mac in order to use Family Sharing and allow you to set parental controls.

Apple’s approach to parental controls changed in 2019. While there used to be a centralized “Parental Control” button in the user management settings area, this has now been taken away, replaced with a “Screen Time” feature. (Don’t ask me why because I don’t know.)

To access the macOS Screen Time parental control functions on Catalina and above, open up system preferences by clicking the gear icon on the right hand side of the dock.

You can also open System Preferences by clicking on the Apple icon in the upper left-hand corner of the Mac Desktop, then clicking on “System Preferences…” in the drop-down menu that appears.

The app you want is called “Screen Time” and is situated centrally in the Settings window.

Using Screen Time, you can track and control your offsprings’ app usage.

This includes the ability to see how many notifications they receive from each app and see how often they pick up their Apple devices.

You can also schedule downtime away from the screen, set daily time limits on app usage, apply limits to communication with outside parties, specify which apps can be used, which websites can be visited, and how a child communicates with other players in games.

Screen Time: App Usage

App Usage allows you to view information about which apps that a child account is using.

You can customize the chart to display usage statistics for a specific time period, app, app category, website or device. Apps that have met the time limit show a Limit icon next to them.

Screen Time: Notifications

Notifications allows you to view charts that show how many times your child has received notifications.

You can customize the chart to display the number of notifications received for a specific time period, app, website or device.

Screen Time: Pickups

In the “Pickups” section, you can view how many times your child’s device was awakened and the first app that your child used when it was awakened.

You can customize the chart to display the number of pickups for a specific time period, app, website or device.

Screen Time: Downtime

The Downtime portion of Screen Time allows you to schedule time away from the screen.

You can set the same downtime schedule for every day, or set a different schedule for each specific day of the week.

Screen Time: App Limits

In App Limits, you can set limits on the amount of time your child spends in apps and on websites.

Limits can be set for specific apps, app categories and websites. A message will warn the user 5 minutes before the time limit expires. Once the time limit is reached, the app icon will be dimmed and a message will be displayed if the app is opened.

Screen Time: Communication

In the Communication section, you can manage contacts and set up restrictions about who can be communicated with during screen time and during downtime.

Screen Time: Always Allowed

Here, you can specify which apps your child can use anytime, even during downtime. This can be handy for apps that may need to be used in case of an emergency.

Screen Time: Content & Privacy

Content & Privacy allows you to set up restrictions on content, purchases, apps and downloads. You can also choose privacy settings.

iOS 14 & iPadOS 14

Apple’s iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 mobile operating systems also include the Screen Time parental control software. This keeps both yours and your childrens’ browsing habits safe from third-party apps and companies.

To simplify things, from now on I’ll use “iOS” to refer to both iOS and iPadOS. This information applies to both platforms.

You and your child will both need to have an Apple ID linked to your accounts on the iPhone and/or iPad to use Family Sharing and allow you to set parental controls.

To access the iOS Screen Time parental control functions on your iPhone or iPad, tap the “Settings” icon. (It looks like a gear, and is usually located on your Home screen. However, you may have moved it into a folder, as seen below.) Then, tap the “Screen Time” menu option in the “Settings” menu.

As seen in the right-hand screenshot above, you’ll see the Screen Time report screen, which displays how the device is being used, which websites you’ve visited, apps that have been opened and more.

By scrolling down the Screen Time report screen, you can view the settings you can manage with Screen Time.

Screen Time: Downtime

In the Downtime section, you can schedule downtime and choose which phone calls and apps can be accessed during downtime.

Users get a reminder five minutes before it starts, and if you enable the ability to ask for more time, child users can tap “One More Minute” a single time, or tap “Ask For More Time” to send a request to the parent account for approval.

Screen Time: App Limits

In App Limits, you can set daily limits for app categories and also enable or disable the restriction for individual apps in each category.

This allows you to restrict the usage of entertainment, social networking and gaming apps during schoolwork time, which is especially handy for the home schoolers among us. App Limits reset each night at midnight.

Screen Time: Communication Limits

Communication Limits offers the ability to control who your child can communicate with during the day and during downtime.

The limits apply to the Phone, FaceTime, Messages and iCloud Contact apps. If the child has an Apple Watch paired through Family Setup, you can also decide and manage which contacts are available on the Apple Watch. Communication to emergency numbers is always allowed. iCloud contacts must be enabled to use this feature.

Screen Time: Always Allowed

You may want to access certain apps, even during Downtime or if an All Apps & Categories app limit is set. The Phone, Messages, FaceTime and Maps apps are always allowed by default. However, they can be removed here in Always Allowed.

Screen Time: Content & Privacy Restrictions

In the Content & Privacy Restrictions section, you can block inappropriate content, purchases and downloads, and set your privacy settings.

Android

Considering that Google is one of the largest and wealthiest companies in the world, with an almost complete overview of everything you see and do online and in the real world, it comes as a bit of a surprise that its parental controls are such a colossal mess.

There is no one-stop-shop for family groups, and the Google Play store is shockingly unhelpful to anxious parents wanting to keep inappropriate content from the eyes of their offspring and ward off the internet bogeyman.

This is not helpful, Google!

Rather than attempt to guide you through Google’s broken, largely useless system, it’s probably best if I just advise you not to attempt to use it at all.

The Case for Paid Parental Controls

Yes, you want to see what your child sees and does online. It’s a balancing act between trust and safety, between protective parenting and intrusive surveillance, and you’re going to have to be extremely careful when dealing with teenagers. It’s natural for adolescents to have secrets, and you should accept that there are some areas you should not pry into at all.

With that out of the way, paid parental controls have a legitimate use in that they save you from needing to set up controls and restrictions on every browser on every device your child has access to.

There’s usually a centralized dashboard from which you can monitor, set restrictions and limit access. It’s a pain if you do it device by device, and the controls available in Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android do not allow for the kind of granularity you need.

And while it is possible to set up your own complete and free monitoring solution (more on this later on), it can get a little technical.

Features to Look for

Before you subscribe to a new parental control service, it’s important to know what you actually want to achieve with it. Some offerings are far more capable than others, and may be more expensive as a result.

There’s no point in paying for functionality you’re never going to use, or in buying a subscription to a service which doesn’t do what you need it to.

Here’s what you might need:

Monitor and Control Browsing Habits

For the majority of parents, this will be the biggest item on the list: Finding out whether your child is accessing websites they’re not supposed to and blocking them.

From the apps dashboard, you should be able to see both individual websites and categories of websites your child visited and be able to block them in an eyeblink.

Set Screen Time Easily

Making sure your child isn’t up to no good when they’re supposed to be asleep or doing homework is extremely valuable.

The granularity of screen time depends on the software you decide to use, with some solutions allowing you to block specific websites at specific times and others offering little more than an on / off switch.

App Blocking

The Google Play store is a treasure trove of wonder and delight for kids – but not all apps are suitable for everyone. You can block them if your parental control allows it.

Location Tracking

Both Apple and Google have a “share my location” feature, which allows users to share their location with chosen users.

If your child is sharing with you, you’ll be able to pop open the relevant Maps app and see their real-world location at any time of day or night. But this allows them the freedom to turn it off.

If you choose parental control software with smartphone location tracking, they won’t have the choice.

Nice to Have

In addition to the core features you’ll be using to check on your kid’s well-being, parental control software should be a painless experience. Here are a few more things you should be considering.

Does It Have a Well-Designed Dashboard?

Like the dashboard in your car, the dashboard of your parental control software should tell you everything important you need to know in a single glance.

The information it gives should be easy to understand and easy to use, with a display that shows how much time your child is spending online, where they’re going and what they’re looking at.

Clear, visually distinctive colors are good, and if you can configure the dashboard to show the information and controls you’re most interested in, all the better.

Notifications on the Go Through Companion Apps

If your child is hanging out on r/teenagers at three in the morning, there’s a good chance you won’t know anything about it until you next check the dashboard of your parental control software. That’s probably days too late, as your child will have missed out on valuable sleeping time.

If your parental control software is able to send a notification through to your phone, you can instantly rectify the problem at the source.

Another handy feature to look for in companion apps is “request access.” This means that if your child has a legitimate interest in a blocked website, they can request access and a notification will be sent through to your phone where you can decide whether to make an exception or not.

Flexible Pricing

Every family is different. You may have one child or you may have twenty. You want to keep them all safe, and it makes sense that you should be able to choose the best plan along with the best price for your needs.

A Solid Support Team

Software can be difficult to set up, and there’s a good chance that your kids have grown up with the internet and may be competent in finding out ways to subvert or evade your parental control software entirely.

In these cases, it’s good to have knowledgeable staff on standby who can help you through everything you need to know to monitor and control your kids’ online behavior.

And by reporting problems with the software or its administration, you’ll be doing the company a favor by showing them which areas of the documentation or the user interface need to be made easier to use.

What Other Parental Control App Guides Won’t Tell You

This is the most important section of the article, and the next paragraph is probably the most important paragraph – so pay attention, or prepare to be disappointed.

Parental control apps will not work as you expect them to all of the time. I guarantee this, and I will explain why.

Software and websites do not like their users to be tracked beyond the level that is acceptable for advertising purposes. They take measures to prevent this from happening. As far as browsers and sites are concerned, any entity attempting to intercept or monitor traffic is a potential enemy.

They’re right, of course. Sites and services have an obligation to keep their users’ details and data private, and much of the technology used in some parental control apps is very similar to that used by criminals.

Almost all traffic on the internet in 2021 is encrypted. After making contact with a Domain Name Server to resolve the address of a domain, nothing can be seen by outside attackers – not even the full address of a website page the user is visiting. Anything after the slash (/) is hidden from prying eyes. Your Internet Service Provider can’t see it. No one can.

Some parental control apps work by forcing your child’s device to use the app company’s DNS and logging all of your child’s DNS requests – blocking requests to domains it deems inappropriate or that you have banned.

So far, so good. That much is pretty simple.

Parental control apps – particularly ones which give you the most fine-grained detail – need to resort to exploits and hacks to gain control over your child’s device and gather the kind of details you want to see.

If the control app tells you that your child has visited https://disney.com/movies/marvel rather than just https://disney.com, the app has undermined standard internet security features to do so.

It would take a mind-boggling amount of computing power to break the encryption used on website connections. So they resort to other tactics, which, in any other context, we would call malware – giving it an extraordinary degree of control over your child’s machine, and possibly, your entire home network.

Browser developers, app developers, web developers and OS developers are constantly on the lookout for malware, and they issue patches against it. Even hardware manufacturers will issue occasional updates if vulnerabilities are found in their systems.

Malware (and parental control app) developers are constantly discovering new vulnerabilities. It’s kind of like a race.

So what works one week may not work the next, and what you, as a user of parental control software, view as a desirable feature, is seen as a bug and a vulnerability by literally everyone else.

Occasionally, taking over certain functions of a phone or computer will require parental app software developers to deploy hacks in a particularly clumsy manner. Preventing the app from being uninstalled, for instance, usually requires locking down the device’s entire settings menu. The same is usually required to prevent your child from turning off location tracking.

This can be extremely inconvenient for you and your child if they want to do something as innocuous as changing their ringtone or wallpaper. Often the camera is locked, and other functionality fails to…well, function.

You also need to bear in mind that although the software is allowed on App stores, it isn’t exactly encouraged. Vulnerabilities that allow parental control software to work on one version of Android, for instance, may be patched by the time the next major release rolls out.

I have spent several days painstakingly sorting through the most popular parental control software out there. I’ve been reading reviews, and I’ve been figuring out the mechanism by which the software does what it does.

I have come to the conclusion that your experience will vary wildly based on exactly what hardware and software your child is using, how quickly the company is able to keep up with new developments and software updates, whether or not you’re vigilant in applying security updates, and possibly even the phase of the moon.

The Best Parental Control Software of 2021

Having said the above, some parental control software seems to work better than others.

These are my recommendations – try them out for a month and see if they’re suitable for your use case. In my opinion, it is better to employ these on a month-by-month basis rather than buying a 12-month subscription up front.

Yes, it is potentially more expensive, but if or when something breaks, you can easily try another option.

As you trawl through user reviews on app stores, you will see large numbers of negative reviews for ALL of these recommendations. I advise you to look for reviews from users who have setups similar to your own, and if there are reported bugs or glitches (there will be), make a calm assessment of how much these will matter to you and your child.

Net Nanny

Best for Basics and Reliability

Net Nanny was one of the original parental internet filters – and some readers may have grown up with it themselves.

Net Nanny has kept up to date with filtering on desktop computers and has successfully expanded into the mobile space, supporting most of the common devices, including Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.

As you would expect from such a veteran, Net Nanny’s blocklists for inappropriate content are exceptionally thorough, and it also monitors and filters your child’s activities in realtime.

Controls are easy to use, and setting up screen time schedules is simple across all registered devices. This means you’ll be able to sleep well knowing that your child isn’t up all night playing Fortnite with their buds.

Net Nanny is not able to monitor the content of individual social media apps, text messages or chats, but you can use Net Nanny to prevent those apps from being installed in the first place.

Through its web-based interface, you can log in to your Net Nanny account from any device and see what your child has been up to – giving you peace of mind.

Net Nanny can be used to track your child’s physical location on its web interface, block profanity on websites, and force your child to use “safe search.”

Net Nanny’s lack of advanced features such as in-app chat monitoring means that it is less likely to break when the individual apps on your child’s device are updated, but if you want the most fine-grained control, this probably isn’t for you.

Price-wise, Net Nanny offers plans which vary based on the size of your family. The basic offering covers one desktop PC, while the most expansive (and expensive) option will protect your children on up to 20 devices. All of its plans are above-average cost, but there are frequent sales on subscriptions.

Qustodio

Best All-Arounder

I had to think long and hard about putting Qustodio on this list, as the overwhelming majority of user reviews are negative – complaining of inappropriate blocking, system restrictions on devices and failure to function in its entirety.

Nonetheless, Qustodio is updated regularly, so most things should work most of the time, and its basic functions should work all of the time.

Qustodio is super easy to set up, and its feature list is breathtaking, including an array of filters to choose from depending on what it is that you don’t want your child to see online.

Headline features in addition to the basics include family tracking – meaning that you will be able to find your child wherever they are in the world; monitoring for YouTube (only available on Android, Windows and Mac devices); and a full 30-day breakdown of your child’s online activity delivered via email on a daily or weekly basis.

My favourite Qustodio feature is the Panic button (Android only), which your child can press to send you location-based alerts in case of emergency.

Subscription prices are below average.

mSpy

Best for Watching Without Interfering

mSpy is for parents who want to know what their child is up to, both online and in the real world, but don’t want to stop them from doing it.

As its name suggests, mSpy watches, but doesn’t interfere. More a hiding in the shadows kind of spy than a James Bond. You won’t find any filters or blocklists here.

But what mSpy does, it does exceptionally well, and no aspect of your child’s online or offline life can be concealed.

All incoming and outgoing calls are logged, together with timestamps, duration, and caller information. The same is true for SMS messages, even if they’ve been deleted.

Messaging and social apps are taken care of, and you can even view all media that is stored on the device, whether it has been generated by your child, downloaded, sent or received.

If you’re mostly concerned about the web, you’ll be relieved to hear that the device’s entire web browser history and activities are available to you with timestamps and bookmarks.

It should go without saying that mSpy gives details of your child’s real-world activity. You can easily check their current location on the map, the routes they have taken and visited places.

mSpy is designed to be installed on mobile Android and iOS devices rather than desktop operating systems. If it is being installed on an iOS device for which you have the iCloud credentials, you don’t need physical access to the device unless two factor authentication is enabled. Neat.

Best of all, mSpy suggests you use its phone compatibility checker to ensure that the software can actually be installed and run on your child’s device without encountering too many problems.

mSpy is by far the most expensive option here, with a one-month subscription costing in the region of $50. Discounts are often available.

Bark.us

Best Social Media Monitoring

Bark.us is unique on this list as it allows you to monitor and control an unlimited number of devices for a flat monthly fee.

It also has the widest scope – monitoring the content of a huge number of apps, including text messages, YouTube, email and the full range of social media.

Screen time monitors, blacklists and filters are included, and the software can also alert you if your child is searching for certain terms online such as bullying, drug use or suicidal thoughts.

In addition to parents, Bark.us also sells its services to Internet Service Providers, schools and private “security companies.”

Subscription prices for Bark.us are below average, and the company also offers “Bark Junior,” which offers reduced functionality for a much lower price.

The “Roll-Your-Own” Method

The core function of parental control software is to monitor the addresses visited by machines on a network and allow you to block access as appropriate. A nice extra is to be able to restrict access to sites based on scheduling.

If you have any slight technical skills, there is an option that allows you to create your own home-network-based parental control software.

Introducing Pi-hole

Pi-hole is free and open source software dedicated to network-wide ad blocking, but can easily be repurposed as parental control software.

How It Works

Any requests for web resources are first sent from your computer to a Domain Name Service, which returns the IP address at which that resource can be found.

Pi-hole acts as a DNS on your network, and when it’s running, will check the domain name against a list of known advertisers. If the name matches, Pi-hole returns an IP address of 0.0.0.0 – which is… nowhere. The request does not go through, and the ad isn’t served.

Pi-hole also keeps a log of which domains are requested, which computer on your network requested them, and allows you to block the domains either for an individual machine or the entire network with the click of a button.

With me so far? Good.

Pi-hole doesn’t just block ads. It will block whatever you tell it to, based on domain name.

Here is a link to a selection of blacklists – including one which contains 3,128,816 adult sites. Other lists are available for everything from astronomy to webmail.

Simply point your Pi-hole at the appropriate blocklist through its handy web interface and everything on it will be blocked.

It is also possible to set up time-based restrictions for various devices on your network.

This is not a Pi-hole function – rather a useful but slightly hacky extra. There is more about that here. Yes, you can shut off the entire internet at 6 p.m. on a schedule, although it does require a little more than surface knowledge.

If you’re really confident, you can set up your own OpenVPN server, so that all of your child’s mobile data is routed through the Pi-hole too.

Installation

Pi-hole was designed to run on Linux, although it will work on Windows using Docker. I’m not going to walk you through it as there are plenty of guides out there – and on Linux, it is literally a one line install.

As Pi-hole is running as the DNS for your home network, the machine on which it is installed needs to be on 24/7.  Because of this, I recommend spending $5 on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It can easily run the software and the power draw is negligible. It’s also a one-off $5 hardware cost as opposed to a subscription.

If you can follow a set of instructions, and your needs are basic, you should probably give Pi-hole a go.

What Else You Should Know

What parental control software you should use will depend largely on your own needs. There’s a solution out there for everybody – regardless of your family size and how much you want to know about your children’s activity.

No one solution will be perfect for everybody, and you should try out various solutions before committing a large sum of money for a year-long commitment.