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What Is the Best Parental Control App in 2025?
With the stress of juggling household, career, and family obligations, many parents are turning to parental control apps to help keep their kids safe online and limit screen time.
A 2025 Pew Research study found that 42% of American parents feel they could be doing a better job of managing their kids’ screen time.
Aura and Bark are two of the most popular options for child online safety — but they take uniquely different approaches to helping parents stay informed and have control of their children’s online time. It’s important to understand these differences before choosing which one is right for your family.
Aura vs. Bark: What Parents Need To Know
Choosing a digital safety provider for your family can be overwhelming — especially once you start wading through long feature lists, conflicting reviews, and technical jargon. Parents just want to keep their kids safe, but this can mean many different things in 2025.
Both Aura and Bark cover the absolute essentials: blocking age-inappropriate content, monitoring online interactions for cyberbullying and potential predators, and setting time limits for apps and devices.
The main differences between Aura and Bark are:
- Aura takes a holistic approach to full-family online safety. Aura combines proactive child safety and parental control features with its suite of award-winning family online safety tools to protect your whole family from a wide array of online threats — including online predators, scammers, hackers, identity thieves, and more.
- Bark focuses mainly on monitoring your child’s behavior and messaging. Bark’s priority is reacting to threats by surveilling and blocking your child’s online activities. The company also offers a range of physical products for kids — preloaded with tools, including Bark Phone, Bark Watch, and Bark Home.
When choosing between the two services, you need to ask yourself what’s more important to you: monitoring your child’s conversations or creating a safe online experience for your entire family?
Here’s how some of the key features offered by Aura and Bark compare for families:
The bottom line: While Bark focuses entirely on parental controls, Aura's family plans provide more comprehensive digital security features as well as parental controls for your entire family — at a similar or lower monthly cost.
Remember that no parental control software can fully replace an open and honest relationship with your child about the risks of online content and threats. Talk to your kids regularly about online safety.
Aura Overview: Features, Pros & Cons, and Pricing
Founded in 2014, Aura is an all-in-one family safety solution that protects adults, kids, and elderly family members from online risks.
Aura gives parents control over the specific apps, websites, and games that their kids can access on their mobile devices, how long (and when) they can be online, and warns if they’re being targeted by cyberbullies and online predators when playing many popular online PC games.
However, unlike Bark and other apps that only focus on parental controls, Aura combines these features with child and adult identity theft protection, credit monitoring, digital security features that protect against hacking, online scams, and viruses, as well as 24/7 U.S.-based support.
In 2025, Aura launched its unique child online wellbeing features that use AI to alert parents to worrying changes in their child’s online activities and provide science-backed recommendations and tips.
Rather than “spying” on your child’s messages, Aura uses semantic analysis to warn you if your children’s messages are becoming negative or dangerous — such as when they’re engaging with high-risk AI chatbots.
The bottom line: Rather than only being reactive and alerting you to issues, Aura’s goal is to protect your entire family from the numerous online threats that are constantly evolving.
How much does Aura cost?
Aura offers two plan options for families: the all-in-one family protection plan that covers up to five adults and unlimited children and includes identity theft and credit protection, or the more affordable Kids plan that provides parental controls and online security tools on a per-child basis.
Here are Aura’s plans and pricing as of November 2025:
- Kids Plan (parental controls and online safety): $8.33/month using this special discount link.
- Family Plan (full protection for five adults and unlimited children): $20/month using the discount link listed below.
Is Aura better than Bark?
Bark is one of the best parental control apps for monitoring SMS text messages, social media content, and app usage. But Aura takes a more proactive approach to family online safety — providing all-in-one protection against online threats, and tracking behavioral changes that can be early warning signs of risks to your child’s wellbeing and safety.
With Aura’s family plans, you can protect children and parents even if they reside in different households, such as kids away at college or grandparents who don’t live with you.
Plus, if the worst should happen, you’ll have access to 24/7 customer support and up to $5 million in identity theft insurance.
If you’re a parent, you should choose Aura if:
- You want award-winning parental controls, including easy-to-use content filtering, screen time management, control of internet access, and browsing history tracking.
- You’re worried about modern threats, like online scams, dangerous AI chatbots, child identity theft, hackers, and phishing emails, calls, and texts.
- You have other family members to protect, such as multiple children, a spouse, grandparents, or other elderly family members.
- You want an all-in-one intelligent digital security solution that eases your mind about your entire family's online activities.
Ultimately, the choice comes down to whom you need to protect and how you approach online family safety. If you have other family members to take care of and want access to the most advanced online threat protection, try Aura free for 14 days.
Bark Overview: Features, Pros & Cons, and Pricing
Bark has been a leader in dedicated parental controls and child online monitoring for over a decade. Founded by former Twitter (now X) employee Brian Bason, Bark takes a more focused approach to parental controls — ignoring other online threats and concentrating its features on child monitoring, screen time limits, and location tracking.
While Bark offers an app that works on iOS and Android, a big part of its appeal for some parents are the dedicated devices that come pre-loaded with Bark’s parental controls. This allows the company to have more strict control over how your children use their devices. This includes:
- Bark Phone: A dedicated Android phone (built by Samsung) with built-in parental controls that can’t be deleted by kids.
- Bark Watch: A smartwatch with monitoring features and control over whom your child can message.
- Bark Home: A device that connects to your home wi-fi router and extends parental controls and screen time limits to other connected devices, such as your TV and gaming consoles.
However, Bark’s main selling point for many parents is its content monitoring features. Depending on the device you use, Bark can monitor your child’s texts, photos, emails, and social media messages with alerts about dangerous, sexual, or violent content.
The bottom line: Bark does a great job of tracking your child’s interactions through email, message, and social media monitoring. However, you may hit limitations depending on the device you have for your child, or be forced to pay a high monthly fee for one of Bark’s dedicated devices.
How much does Bark cost?
Bark offers a wide array of plan and device options for families — from a small home connected device to dedicated phones with parental controls, talk, text, and data.
Here are Bark’s plans and pricing as of November 2025:
- Bark Premium (Apple iPhone and Android devices): $14/month or $99/year
- Bark Jr (limited parental controls): $5/month or $49/year
- Bark Phone: $10/month for 24 months (for the device), plus $29 – $79/month for your phone’s plan
- Bark Watch: $22/month ($7/month for 24 months for the device, plus $15/month for service)
- Bark Home: $6/month, $49/year, or a one-time payment of $79
Who should choose Bark?
While Bark doesn't offer Aura's robust digital security tools, it is a great app to help keep tabs on what your children are doing online.
Choose Bark if:
- Your main concern is monitoring your child’s texts, emails, and social media apps. Bark has an expanding list of messaging and social media apps that it monitors.
- You want a dedicated phone or watch for your kids. The Bark Phone and Watch come with built-in parental controls and content monitoring.
- You want to track your child’s location. Bark is equipped with a real-time map, location alerts, and check-in features to ease parents’ worries about their children’s movements.
- You only want web filtering. If you need an entry-level option to block apps and websites, Bark Jr is a user-friendly way to get started. You can also set up the Bark extension on Google Chromebooks to monitor search results (although recent reviews have been overly negative).
💡 Related: Canopy or Bark? Which One Is Right For Your Family? →
Is Bark worth it?
While it excels in messaging and social media monitoring, Bark may not be worth it for families seeking the most robust online safety for their kids.
At a minimum, it’s important to consider the drawbacks of only focusing on monitoring your child’s messages.
By the time your children are sending or receiving concerning messages, they may already be in danger. With Aura’s sentiment analysis and online behavior trend insights, parents can get early warnings if their children are engaging in dangerous online activities.
Additionally, parents should consider these Bark shortcomings:
- Apple devices (iPhone and iPad) are only monitored when your child is on your home Wi-Fi network. Bark can only “scan” iOS devices for dangerous messages, photos, and emails when your child’s device is connected to your home Wi-Fi network, potentially allowing them to bypass the app’s monitoring features.
- Limited protection against hacking and scams. Bark doesn’t include an antivirus, password manager, or Safe Browsing tools. Without these protections, your kids remain vulnerable to online threats.
- Doesn’t protect the rest of your family. Without award-winning identity theft protection and three-credit bureau monitoring, Bark lacks the functionality to safeguard your family’s most sensitive data.
- More expensive than other services. Considering that it’s essentially a social media monitoring app with parental controls, Bark is not the cheapest option — especially if you opt for the Bark Phone for your teen with data needs.
Aura vs. Bark: How Do They Compare in Terms of Features?
In some ways, it’s difficult to compare Aura and Bark directly, as they take such different approaches to online family safety. However, there are some critical areas where it’s important to know the differences between each service:
Content monitoring and alerts
It’s impossible to deny that Bark offers more robust message and content monitoring tools across its own and other supported devices. This includes email, photo, and (most) social media monitoring.
However, while Aura’s parental controls don’t currently provide specific message monitoring across all apps, they do include deeper analysis and alerts into changes regarding how your children use their devices, when they use them, and what they’re saying to people and tools like AI chatbots.
There are also several serious limitations to Bark’s ability to monitor content, especially on iPhones.
Bark can only scan your child’s device when it’s connected to your home Wi-Fi network.
Here’s the simplest way to think about it:
- Bark monitors more content, but only sends reactive alerts. You’ll get alerted to potentially dangerous messages, photos, and emails across most apps (depending on the device you use).
- Aura tracks larger behavior trends to send early warning alerts. Aura creates a baseline of each child’s online behavior and then uses sentiment analysis to alert parents of changes to how their kids interact online, what they’re saying, and when they’re using their devices. Aura’s Safe Gaming tools can also warn you of voice and text messages from cyberbullies and online predators across 200 of the most popular PC games.
💡 Pro tip: Aura monitors your child’s interactions with high-risk AI chatbots. Get warnings if your children are using AI chatbots and whether they’re engaging in dangerous conversations.
Screen time limits and scheduling
Both Bark and Aura do a great job of allowing parents to set and control screen time limits, create custom schedules around school hours, bedtime, and family time, and pause the internet when kids need a break.
Some Bark reviews have called out how the company allows for more customizable screen time schedules, whereas Aura uses a single Focus Time setting to limit device usage at certain times of the day.
Website and app blocking
Many parents of young children are especially concerned about blocking access to inappropriate or explicit content and controlling what apps their children can download to their devices.
Both Bark and Aura include strong content filters and website and app blocking features to keep your kids safe.
Location tracking
If you’re worried about tracking your child’s location, Bark offers real-time maps with geo-fencing to alert you if your child has arrived or left specific locations (such as school or a friend’s house). Aura doesn’t currently include any location tracking features.
Digital security and online safety
Bark doesn’t include any cybersecurity or device protection features, leaving your children potentially vulnerable to viruses, hacking, identity theft, and online scammers.
Aura, on the other hand, is an industry leader in online safety. Family plans include powerful digital security features for unlimited devices, including:
- Antivirus software to protect you and your family against viruses, malware, ransomware, and more.
- Virtual private network (VPN) to hide your browsing data from hackers and other prying eyes.
- Safe Browsing tools to warn of dangerous websites and potential phishing links.
- Password manager to securely store and protect your credentials and warn if they’ve been leaked in a data breach.
- Sensitive data removal to help remove your personal information from Google search results as well as over 140 data broker sites.
- AI-powered spam call and text protection to block spam and scam callers and warn you of dangerous links in text messages.
Family identity theft protection
Approximately one in 50 kids has their identity stolen, costing American families over $1 billion annually.
While Bark offers no protection against online identity theft or fraud, Aura is the #1-rated family identity theft protection service by reviewers at CNET, Forbes, Security.org, NerdWallet and others.
Aura tracks your family’s most sensitive personal information across the Dark Web, data breaches, public records and more. You’ll get near real-time alerts if your data is discovered anywhere it shouldn’t be.
Aura also provides three-bureau credit monitoring — with the industry’s fastest fraud alerts3 — for all adults on a family plan. Aura can also monitor your child’s Social Security number (SSN) and help you freeze your child’s credit file with all three major bureaus to prevent scammers from taking out loans or opening accounts in your child’s name.
If the worst should happen, Aura provides 24/7 U.S.-based support with access to a team of Expert Fraud Remediation specialists who hold Certified Identity Protection Advisor (CIPA)® certifications. Your family is also covered by up to $5 million in identity theft insurance for lost and stolen funds and relevant expense reimbursement.
Aura Provides Full-Family Protection Against Online Threats
Parents have more options than ever when it comes to parental controls — from Bark and similar services, such as Qustodio and Norton Family, to Apple Screen Time and Google Family Link.
But what sets Aura apart is its focus on full-family online protection, proactive alerts about changes to your child’s online behavior, and powerful digital security. Aura knows that keeping your kids safe online goes far beyond just spying on their messages and waiting for them to do something risky.
