Gone are those days when we used to live in countries separated by borders. Today in 2021, we live in a big virtual world named world wide web without any border or boundaries. It enables us to do amazing things and allows us to connect with people living on the opposite side of the globe. However, like everything else in life, it comes with its own set of cons. And among those cons, probably the most crucial is child safety. Unlike us who grew up in the eighties or nineties, today’s children have access to computers in home and school, and most have their smartphones too. They use the internet for their school projects, to connect and chat with their friends, and play games online. While all of these things are relatively harmless, the internet exposes them to the dark side of the virtual world.
While the internet is an essential commodity today even for children, you can’t afford to allow them to access inappropriate content. Here come the parental control apps, by which you can control and monitor your kid’s online activity while you’re not around with them physically. By these tools, you can control which sites they are allowed to visit and which they are not. You can place a limit of how much time they can spend online maximum, and you can monitor every online activity and every chat typed by them as well. In this roundup, we will tell you about three best parental control software and their features in details, so stay tuned.
3 Best Parental Control Apps
NEXSPY
NEXSPY is the next generation parental control app which you can install in any Android, iPhone, and iPad (this app is not for pc or mac, for that, please check our other recommendations) and monitors every activity being done in these devices, literally in real time.
It serves as a digital assistant for parents to monitor text messages, current GPS location, calls, emails, social media platforms, like WeChat, WhatsApp, Viber, Instagram, Tinder, and much more.
NEXSPY has a lot of advantages for modern parents. It helps them to keep tabs on their kid’s smartphone activities without fear of being caught. Besides, parents will always be able to know what their kid is up to online and raise a red flag if danger occurs.
NEXSPY collects the target device data and sends it to the control panel. A parental account will be created after the purchase, which can be easily accessible from any browser at any time, so parents can always know what their kid is doing online.
The app is easy and straightforward to use, and it provides with three subscription plans so you may choose the one which meets your needs the most. You will be able to save the most if you subscribe to their yearly plan.
Qustodio
This is our second recommendation in our quest for the best parental control app. Unlike the NEXSPY, you can use this software to monitor internet activity on a pc or mac, and smartphones as well.
Feature-wise, this app is quite similar to most other parental control apps; however, it has some unique advantages over others.
First of all, as mentioned already, this software is compatible to basically every device we use to access the internet, such as pc, mac, Android, IOS, and even Kindle. So, you won’t have to worry about installing different tools for different devices; this one is enough to take care of all.
Secondly, this app is not only a “spy” tool to monitor the activities, but it has control features as well. You can decide what app should your kids use and what not, how much time they can access the internet and precisely what time of the day they are allowed to be online and when not.
You can block them from using specific sites, or you can prevent access to every other site except what you allow explicitly. As we already said, this is not a classic spy app. It cannot read emails your kids send or receive or cannot record the keystrokes. If you want those more intrusive features, this app may not be suitable for you.
However, with all the needed functions, a parental control app should feature and its multidevice application, this app is recommended by several experts as one of the best parental control software.
Net Nanny
Let’s talk about the Net Nanny now – its features, what it has to offer, how much it costs, and how it works. We used Net Nanny a little bit and played around with it. It has parts of controls which let you set up time management, and a filter to block pornography and other kinds of content which are not suitable for your children.
It can send you alerts and report if something inappropriate has been visited or if they’ve spent too much time. If they run out of time no matter where they are, you can manage and limit their access in the device remotely. Also, you can set user profiles, so it works for more than one kid, and all of them will have different profiles with different limits and controls.
Net Nanny has an excellent filter that scans the page and looks for inappropriate content, and it works pretty darn well. One of the things we loved most about Net Nanny is they have great resources on their website and blog. You will find a lot of good research and infographics there for you to understand the software and how it works precisely.
The software has a feature like time management, which is a pretty good set up. You can set and schedule it, and it works automatically without any user intervention. The software is pretty easy to control; the flexibility and options it offers are simply unmatched.
It offers three subscription options, and we recommend the family protection pass package where only $89.99 per year would be enough to protect up to 20 devices at the same time.
Conclusion
All the three apps can put you in control of what your kids do online without much hassle so that you can have some peace of mind when you’re busy in your work, and you can’t be around.
You can’t go wrong with any of them; however, each has some unique advantages than the others. If you want more intrusive monitoring, and you don’t mind paying a monthly subscription fee for just a single device what others charge yearly for multiple devices, you can go with NEXSPY. Because out of three apps, NEXSPY only let you read all the emails and chats your kid’s exchange with every keystroke recorded. Or if you want an all-around performer with advanced monitoring and control, you can subscribe to Qustodio. And if you have several kids of different ages and you need customized control profile for each of them, Net Nanny is the cheapest and best parental control app which allows you to monitor up to 20 devices for a single subscription license.