The 5 Best Parental Control Apps for 2023 You Need To Have

Want to know what are the 5 best parental control apps for 2023? These are the tested and approved parental control apps you need to know about.

Keeping children safe online means recognizing that they spend far too much time on their devices and not enough time socializing in person, getting physical activity outdoors, and doing creative pursuits. Studies have shown for a while now that limiting screen time for children is necessary for their healthy development.

To help families, we have put together the 5 best parental control apps for 2023. You are going to learn about all of the features these apps offer parents. After reading about these apps, you will be able to decide which one of these is best for you and your family.

This post is all about the 5 best parental control apps for 2023 that you need to have.

Best Parental Control Apps:

1. Our Pact

This parental control and family locator app is top notch. Chris and I have used Our Pact for years while raising our son. [We have no financial ties to Our Pact, and we do not receive any money from them for this review.] We have used this app for many years and came to rely on it because it helped keep our son safe while he used apps, texting with friends, and on the internet.

The view tool lets parents see screen shots of what their kids are watching on their devices.

Other key features are category warnings that include sexual content, profanity, violence and more. Parents can create custom categories of warning on any content you don’t want your child watching. You can block specific apps that are viewed as too intrusive. It allows parents to restrict social and gaming apps to certain times of day. And you can remove inappropriate apps and prevent them from being re-downloaded. Finally, the locator function lets you know where your child is at any given time, so you can check in with them.

Works Great For Older Children

When our son was young and through his teenage years, I would set the app which prevented him access to any apps during school hours. And we limited the time he could use his apps after school. On weekends, we set a different schedule when he wasn’t in the classroom. When the scheduled time to use his apps would expire, he used to jokingly complain that his apps would “disappear” from his phone. So we knew the app worked great!

Another great feature that we loved about the app is that it lets you block texting, which I believe is crucial to keeping your child safe. Older kids are on group texts with different friend groups. This has to be limited and controlled by you. We would shut our son’s texts off at a certain time of day. So, if someone in a group text, for example, would send a late-night unwanted text, our son never saw it. Also equally as critical, do not let your teens have their devices in their bedroom at night. Have them put away in a community space, or with you, to avoid problems.

Using this app, we restricted our son’s access to internet search engines. If he wanted to say check Major League Baseball scores, we would allow him to use a specific app – that we approved — for a limited time during the day, instead of giving him access to search websites for sports scores. By the way, we used Our Pact until our son turned 18 which was several months after he graduated high school.

Our Pact starts at $6.99 a month. We used to pay $5.99 monthly. I remember thinking each month that is a bargain for the protection and peace of mind it gives. This is the most expensive app on our list. But we think the value is there and worth the price.

2. Net Nanny

Some reviewers say this parental control app is top of the market. Others reviewers on sites like Amazon and in tech trade publications give it a more mixed rating.

Here’s what we found. Net Nanny has web and app filtering which allows you to choose which website and apps your youngster has access to. It limits screen time by allowing you to set how much time your kids can use their devices daily, and scheduling allows you to set daily device usage schedules.

Restricts Screen Time

Their activity usage reports allow you to see what your child has been doing online including search history and app use and screen time. It also comes with YouTube monitoring where you can see what your child has searched for on YouTube and their watch history.

While it can block any app on Android, it is limited to blocking about 120 apps on iOS devices.

What we really like is that you can lock the settings menu which keeps your children from trying to disable the app. And it can’t be uninstalled by your child as it requires your account password to delete the app. So never share your password with your savvy youngster.

Net Nanny does not allow users to set time limits for certain apps, and it can’t block as many apps on iOS devices than other competing products.

Their plans start at $39.99 annually for one device and they go up from there. Pricing may change so check out Net Nanny for yourself.

3. Kaspersky Safe Kids

This parental control app gives you full range protection. GPS tracking allows you to know where your child is at all times. You can hide inappropriate content with web filtering and a safe search feature. You can block specific apps and sites from being opened. And screen time management allows you to decide how much time your child can use their device.

Unlike some competitors, Kaspersky Safe Kids allows you to set daily time limits for certain apps with an app use control. Device scheduling lets you determine how much time each day your child should spend on their device. And the child limit bar allows your child to view and track rules which may help educate them on developing positive online habits.

Kaspersky Safe Kids app starts at $20.99 annually for one user account. Prices go up for five or more devices.

4. Google Family Link

We wanted to include a free option as well and Google Family Link fits the bill. To access this app, log into your Gmail account. Your child will need a Gmail account in order for you to set up supervision for them. Family link lets you set the rules for your child’s account. You can restrict content, approve or block apps for downloading and purchases and limit screen time.

To start, you create a “family group” with up to five other members plus yourself. As the “family manager” you direct the parental controls for supervised accounts. Then you choose what is shared across Google.

You can manage the apps your children use on their devices. You can determine the account of daily screen time, set gameplay limits and manage privacy settings so your kids will play safer online.

5. Norton Family

Norton Family parental control app lets you view and manage apps your children use, set rules that block online content you don’t want them to see, and allows you to review the videos your child watches on YouTube.

It also lets you lock unsuitable websites, view a map of where your child’s device was located for a period of 30 days, and allows you to set a schedule for device use. You can lock a device, which blocks all content, when they need to take a break.

Also, another selling point is that parents can create a list of approved, educational websites that can be accessed during the day if your child is doing remote learning. They can create a block list for sites their kid spends time on that could be a distraction during the day.

Norton Family also offers monthly and weekly reports of what your child is doing online. Norton Family is currently $49.99 a year making it one of the most inexpensive parental control apps out there.

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