Every kind of parental control software, and who it suits
Short answer
There are five broad categories: the controls already built into Android and iOS, monitoring apps that alert you to concerning messages, filtering and time-limit apps, phones sold pre-restricted, and launchers that replace the home screen on a phone you already own. They solve different problems rather than competing directly. Start with the built-in controls, which are free on both platforms, and only pay for something once you can name what they are failing to do.
Most parents reach this decision through a brand name. Someone at the school gate mentioned Bark, or a search put Qustodio at the top of the page, and the research starts from there.
The brands are mostly not competing with each other. They are answers to four or five different questions, and it is much easier to choose once you know which question you are actually asking. So here is the whole landscape, including the parts we are not in and the parts that cost nothing.
The controls already on the phone
Both platforms ship parental controls at no extra cost, and plenty of families never turn them on.
Google Family Link covers Android and Chromebooks: daily screen limits, per-app limits, approval before an app installs, SafeSearch, location on a map, and a remote lock. Google states it is built for children under 13, or the applicable age in your country, and that children over that age can manage their own account.
Apple’s Screen Time is built into iPhone, iPad and Mac. Apple’s own support documentation lists purchase and download approval, hiding built-in apps, content ratings for music and video, web filtering with an approved-sites mode, restrictions on Game Center messaging, and locked privacy settings.
Neither one reaches across ecosystems, which is the practical catch. If the household runs an Android phone, an iPad and a school Chromebook, no single built-in tool covers all three.
For a lot of families with children under about eleven, the built-in controls are genuinely enough. They are worth exhausting before you pay for anything.
Monitoring apps
Bark is the best known. These tools watch what moves through the phone — messages, social accounts, email — and alert a parent when something matches a concern, rather than handing over a full transcript. That restraint is a deliberate design decision and the main thing that separates monitoring from surveillance.
The category suits older children who are already on social platforms, where the risk is contact you cannot preview and content you would never think to block. It is a poor fit for a seven-year-old with a tablet, who has nothing to monitor yet.
Filters and time-limit apps
Qustodio, Canopy and Aura sit here, along with a long tail of smaller apps. The feature set is the classic one: blocked categories, schedules, per-app limits, usually location. Qustodio runs a free tier alongside its paid plans.
The reason to pay for one of these is usually coverage rather than capability. They work across mixed-device households where Family Link and Screen Time each only see half the picture.
Phones sold already restricted
Gabb, Pinwheel and Troomi sell hardware with the restrictions built in. There is no app store to police because there is no app store. Gabb lists a device at $169.99 on its plans page, with a monthly service plan on top; the others follow the same shape of buy the phone, then pay monthly.
This is the strongest option for a genuine first phone, and the most expensive one, because you are buying a device the family did not previously need. It also has a shelf life. The restrictions that make it right at nine are the restrictions a thirteen-year-old will campaign against, and the usual exit is another phone purchase.
Launchers
A launcher replaces the home screen on a phone the family already owns. The child sees a controlled set of apps; the device underneath stays an ordinary phone, so the same hardware can relax as the child gets older without anybody buying anything.
Suvi is in this category, so treat what we say about it accordingly. We built it because the second-device cost and the upgrade cliff both seemed avoidable. If Family Link already covers your household, though, use Family Link — it is free, it is good, and we would rather you spent the money on something else.
What none of these categories do
Every option above operates on the device. None of them are present in the conversation where a child decides whether to reply to a stranger, and the serious harms of the last few years have run through direct messages rather than through the web pages a filter can see. We wrote about that gap separately in what parental controls actually block.
Pew Research Center surveyed 3,054 parents of children aged 12 and under in May 2025 and found that 42% say they could be doing better at managing their child’s screen time. No product in this list moves that number on its own.
Picking one without over-buying
A reasonable order of operations:
- Turn on what you already have, and give it a month. Most families discover the built-in controls do more than they expected.
- Name the gap before you pay. “It does not cover the iPad” and “I cannot see who is messaging her” lead to completely different products.
- Match the tool to the age. Monitoring an eight-year-old produces nothing; a locked-down handset for a fifteen-year-old produces a workaround.
- Check the price yourself. Everything in this category reprices constantly, and comparison articles — this one included — go stale. The vendor’s own page is the only number worth trusting.
If you finish this and conclude the free tools are fine, that is a real answer, and it is the right one more often than the market would suggest.