FamilyTime Review 2023: Can It Keep Your Kids Safe Online?

FamilyTime offers many useful features to keep your kids safe online and offline. It’s also very user-friendly, so it’s very easy to find your way around it, and it allows up to 15 simultaneous device connections. However, I think there are much better parental controls available on the market in 2023, including Qustodio and Norton Family.

FamilyTime has all the essential parental control features you’d want in a good parental control app, including web and app filtering, daily time limits, location tracking, activity reports, and scheduling.

FamilyTime also offers advanced features, such as:

• YouTube and TikTok Monitoring. See what videos your kids watch on YouTube and TikTok.
• Panic Button. Gives your child the option to send an SOS alert with just a tap.
• Teen Safe Drive. Define speed limits for your teens and alters you when they over-speed.
• TimeBank/FunTime. Lets your kids have the option to transfer minutes from their Daily Time Limit to FunTime.
• Call & SMS tracker. Monitor your child’s call history, contacts, and text messages.
• Browser History/Bookmark Tracker. Logs all sites your kids have visited and how often they go to each site. It also keeps track of every website your kids have bookmarked.
• PickMeUp Alerts. Receive alerts from your kids when it’s time to pick them up.
• FamilyPause. Lock your child’s mobile device from a distance.

However, there are several things I didn’t like about FamilyTime. When I visited its website, I had to constantly close spammy live chat pop-ups, which was really annoying and unnecessary. Its web and app filtering is basic, there’s no daily time limit feature for iOS, and except for YouTube and TikTok, you can’t monitor any other social media app. Plus, I was disappointed that there’s no money-back guarantee and that its free trial only lasts 3 days.

FamilyTime offers 4 different reasonably-priced plans, with the only difference between them being the number of devices. There’s no free plan, and you only get a 3-day money-back guarantee, which is below the industry average of 7-30 days.

FamilyTime Full Review

I tested FamilyTime for several weeks to see how it compares to other top parental control apps, and I can say that it’s a decent app for monitoring your kids’ mobile devices.

What really impressed me are its extra features. FamilyTime has very good Tikton and YouTube monitoring, comes with a feature that notifies you when your children want to be picked up, and even allows you to set speed limits and get alerts when your teen over-speeds.

However, FamilyTime has some disadvantages. There’s no social media tracking other than TikTok and YouTube, its web and app filtering is really basic, and some of the features aren’t available on iOS, like the daily time limit feature. Plus, FamilyTime doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee, and it only allows you to test it for free for 3 days, which I don’t think is enough.

Despite these downsides, FamilyTime is a decent parental control app. It offers advanced features for monitoring your kids’ phones and is easy to use.

FamilyTime Features

FamilyTime has the following industry-standard parental control features:

• Web and app filtering — Allows you to choose which sites and apps your kids can use.
• Location tracking — Lets you see where your kids are and where they’ve been.
• Scheduling — Choose specific times of the day when your child is allowed or isn’t allowed to use their devices.
• Activity reports — Display information about your child’s device usage and online habits.

In addition, it also comes with advanced features such as YouTube and TikTok monitoring, a Panic Button, Call and SMS tracker, and FamilyPause.

Web and App Filtering

FamilyTime’s App Blocker allows you to block any app you want on Android. The app lists every app on your child’s device, and from there, you can block and allow specific apps.

FamilyTime only lets you block certain apps on iOS, which isn’t great. On iOS, you have the option to disable Safari, the camera app, and Siri. For the rest of the apps, you have the option to block them all, which can be convenient if your kid is very young. I also particularly like that it lets you block the iTunes Store and in-app purchases and that there’s an option to stop your kid from installing apps on their device.

When I tried out FamilyTime’s App Blocker, it worked really well. It instantly blocked access to the apps that weren’t preinstalled on my child’s iPhone, as well as every app that I blocked on my Android test device.

FamilyTime has a Content Filters feature on iOS that lets you filter films, TV programs, and apps in general by age rating. There’s also an option to block all explicit content on iTunes and iBooks.

This is a convenient feature, but it’s not the best if you want to apply any filters to web browsing — even if you block everything, your kids will still be able to watch whatever they want on their browser unless you block Safari entirely.

I was happy to see that the Android app lets you filter content by categories (Internet Filters), but it only offers 3 categories to choose from: Pornography, Drugs/Abortion, and Dating/Gambling. For comparison, Qustodio has 25+ predefined website categories. However, I did like that FamilyTime offers a Safe Search option. When you enable it, it automatically filters content that’s flagged inappropriate on Google, Bing, and YouTube.

Overall, I found FamilyTime’s web and app filters to be OK. I like the app filtering on Android, and I think the content filtering on iOS is interesting, but I’d like to see FamilyTime offer better web filtering overall. App filtering on iOS is also limited as you don’t actually get any web browsing filters. I do like that both its Android and iOS web and app filtering features are very beginner-friendly.

Daily Time Limits (Android Only)

Daily Time Limits allows you to set a time limit for your child’s daily phone usage and make sure that your kid doesn’t spend too much time looking at their screen. My favorite part of this feature that I found convenient is that FamilyTime lets you choose what apps are part of the limit and which ones aren’t, so they can still use their Calculator app or anything else they might need to finish homework.

I was really impressed with its TimeBank feature, which lets your kids save minutes from their Daily Time Limit to enjoy later in FunTime. You can determine when FunTime happens and for how long. Your child can find their daily saved minutes on the FamilyTime Jr. screen.

It’s a solid feature that can teach your child to manage their screen time better, but I’d really like to see FamilyTime add it to iOS, too.

Scheduling

FamilyTime allows you to set screen time limits for bedtime, dinnertime, or homework time. This is helpful if you want to make sure your kids are doing their homework and not browsing social media in bed.

I think it’s great that you’re able to set a start and end time for each, but I was a bit disappointed that you can’t add any other categories to restrict times on iOS. On Android, however, you can add other categories and customize screen time limits.

I also really liked the option to allow certain apps (such as the calculator app when your child does homework) during screen time limits.

Overall, FamilyTime offers a good scheduling feature, but I really hope it adds more categories on iOS in a future update.

Location Tracking & Geo-Fencing

Family Locator shows you where your child is and where they’ve been. The location is usually updated every 5–10 minutes and shows the exact address of your child’s location.

It also shows a location timeline, which is a list of your child’s previous locations. I like it because you can see the exact address and the time stamp, which makes it super easy to establish patterns and notice when your child takes a detour.

FamilyTime also offers a geofencing feature, but it didn’t work on the desktop version. When I downloaded the FamilyTime app, it already had two geofences preconfigured (Home and School). However, I couldn’t set an address for these two geofences or add any new geofence zones. I really like Qustodio’s Family Locator feature for Windows, as it works flawlessly and displays all of the places your child visits.

Luckily, once I tried it on my iPhone and Android phone, it did work. I was able to add new geofences that cover distances between 150m and 1km. I particularly liked that I could receive check-in/checkout alerts when my kid enters and leaves the geofenced area. That being said, Norton Family allows you to cover 2 miles (3,200 meters).

Overall, Family Locator provides a good way to track your children’s locations. Its geofencing feature is decent, but it doesn’t work on desktop.

Activity Reports

FamilyTime’s Reports feature for iOS is very basic — it allows you to see location history (exact addresses), places history (places that you’ve added in the Geofence feature), contacts, and installed apps. I was a bit disappointed that it doesn’t offer a typical activity report like Qustodio and Norton Family do and that it doesn’t show any information about my child’s device usage. Qustodio, for example, allows you to see the total screen time each week, the websites searched, and the YouTube activity on your child’s device.

FamilyTime only shows device usage on Android’s report feature. I could see the total screen time of each week and the total amount of messages received.

Overall, I think FamilyTime could improve its iOS activity reports by adding more in-depth information about my child’s device usage and online activities. Its reports on Android are more comprehensive and include all information that I’d like to see in an activity report.

Panic Button

The Panic Button feature allows your child to send an alert to the parental app in case of emergency. Many parental control apps (like Bark) don’t provide access to an SOS feature, so I’m really happy to see this option.

I like that the alert shows the exact location of your child, which makes it easy to track them down — though, keep in mind that this only works if you’ve enabled location tracking.

The Panic Button is pretty simple to activate — all your child has to do is open the FamilyTime Jr. app and click on the Panic Button. It’s displayed prominently on the app, so they won’t be able to miss it, and they can use it even if they’ve used up all of their screen time.

Keep in mind that the Panic button is not a replacement for emergency services. FamilyTime won’t contact the police, fire department, ambulance, or any other local authorities on your behalf.

Speed Limit (iOS only)

FamilyTime also offers a Speed Limit feature for iOS. This allows you to set a speed limit and receive alerts when your teen is over-speeding.

In my tests, it worked pretty well. It always altered me when I went over the set speed limit while carrying my test device. That said, it would be great if FamilyTime adds this feature to its Android app as well.

While the Speed Limit feature is pretty good, it’s not as good as FamiSafe’s similar feature — it shows your child’s highest speed, average speed, when they speed, the number of hard brakes, and more. Plus, you can get up to 3 weeks worth of reports.

YouTube and TikTok Monitoring (Android Only)

FamilyTime allows you to control your children’s access to YouTube and TikTok by banning or restricting app use. In addition, you can see the video history, the channels visited, the comment history, and the amount of time your kids have spent on YouTube and TikTok.

Call and SMS tracker (Android Only)

FamilyTime shows you in-depth information about your child’s calls and texts. Its call tracker displays the call history on your child’s phone, including names, phone numbers, time, and dates, and it even shows you whether there’s an incoming or outgoing call. Unfortunately, unlike Qustodio, it doesn’t allow you to block certain phone numbers.

Its text message tracker gives you access to your child’s SMS messages on their phone. I particularly liked that you can get notified when your child receives or sends messages containing suspicious words. You can define these words in the FamilyTime parental app.

Additional Features

FamilyTime also offers a few other useful features:

• PickMeUp Alerts — This feature allows you to see what apps are installed on the device that’s being monitored.
• Bookmarks (Android Only) — Keep an eye on all the websites your kids bookmark to make sure they are not visiting any inappropriate, unsafe websites.
• Browser History Tracker (Android Only) — Track your kids’ visited websites and how often they’ve visited them.
• FamilyPause — Allows you to lock your child’s mobile device from a distance.

FamilyTime Plans & Pricing

FamilyTime offers 4 plans: MyFamily, MyFamily2, MyFamily3, and MyFamily5. The only difference between these plans is the number of devices you can monitor at the same time (you can choose between 1–5 devices). In addition, I was a bit disappointed that you can only subscribe to one of the plans on a yearly basis — this plan lets you monitor up to 15 devices simultaneously.

I think FamilyTime’s pricing is on the expensive side, and there are other parental control apps that offer a better value. For example, top competitors like Qustodio, Norton Family, and Bark are cheaper and allow you to monitor more devices.

All plans come with a 3-day free trial, but there’s no money-back guarantee, which isn’t great considering most parental control apps come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. On top of that, FamilyTime doesn’t make it easy to cancel your subscription — I couldn’t find anything on its site and knowledge base about it and its live chat reps constantly asked me why I wanted to cancel it, without providing any information I could use to get the process started. Eventually, I found that I needed to send an email to billing@familytime.io to cancel my subscription.

FamilyTime Installation & Setup

FamilyTime’s parent and kid apps work on iOS and Android devices. Its parental app also works on all major web browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

Setting up the FamilyTime parental app takes only about 5 minutes.

If you want to use the desktop version, all you have to do is open a web browser, visit the FamilyTime website, and log in using your credentials (these you receive by email after getting a subscription).

To use the app on Android or iOS, you have to download it from the Google Play store or App Store. Once downloaded, you can simply use your credentials to log in and start using the app.

Setting up FamilyTime on the child’s device took me around 10 minutes. Downloading and installing the app is pretty much the same, and you can use your credentials to log into the app. From there, you’ll have to activate your child’s device for it to be ready to use.

FamilyTime Parental App Installation & Setup

If you want to use the web app, you don’t have to go through any installation or setup process — all you have to do is go to FamilyTime’s website and log into your account with your credentials.

For iOS, download and install the FamilyTime Parental Control app from the App Store. Then, open the app and log in with your credentials. You can now start using the app on your iOS device.

For Android, open the Google Play store and download the FamilyTime Parental Control app. Then, use your login credentials to start using the FamilyTime Parental Control app on your Android device.

FamilyTime Kids App Installation & Setup

To set up FamilyTime on an iOS device, you need to download the FamilyTime Jr. app from the App Store. After downloading, agree to the terms & conditions, and click Next to allow the app access to the data it needs to function.

Log in with your parent account credentials. After that, you can proceed to add child devices and set up their profiles. This includes adding a name, choosing a time zone, and selecting a gender.

Next, you need to install the profile on your child’s device. Click Yes, Let’s Do It! and navigate to Setting>General>Profile to install the familtime.io profile. Once done, go back to the app and tap the All is Done button.

That’s it. The FamilyTime Jr. app is installed on your kids’ device and ready to use.

To start using FamilyTime with an Android device, you have to download the FamilyTime Jr. app via the Google Play Store. When you click the Continue button, you’ll be automatically taken to Settings on your phone. Here, you need to enable the Permit usage access option.

Then, log into the app with your parental account credentials. Once done, you’ll see a menu and an option to create a profile for your child. Here you add their name and age, pick the gender, and add an avatar for your child.

Next, you’ll be asked to activate the device admin app. Tap Activate this device admin app to go to the device’s settings, and once there, enable Use service.

That’s it. Now you can monitor your child’s Android device.

FamilyTime Ease of Use

FamilyTime’s applications are incredibly user-friendly. They have an intuitive interface where all features are conveniently accessible through a single menu. Installing the mobile apps on your child’s device is also a straightforward process.

Mobile & Tablets

FamilyTime provides user-friendly iOS and Android applications. They’re easy to navigate and all features work really well.

However, I was a bit disappointed that the iOS parental app is missing some features compared to the Android app. You can’t track or block calls and text messages on iOS and you don’t get access to Internet Schedule, Daily Limit by App Usage, and App Usage Reports — check out our top iOS parental control apps here. That said, the Android app lacks the Speed Limit feature, and I’d like to see FamilyTime add it there, too.

Overall, FamilyTime’s Android and iOS apps are good. They’re intuitive and come with many useful features, but I don’t like that the iOS app is missing several advanced features.

Web App

FamilyTime’s web app is beginner-friendly. You can quickly access all main features directly from the dashboard — the option to view each child’s device is on the left, alongside the notifications page, and the Family Locator feature.

However, I was a bit annoyed with the large discount banners that are all over its dashboard. I found this to be rather distracting.

Unlike Qustodio, there’s no auto-logout feature. If you happen to leave your computer unsecured while the FamilyTime app is running, there’s a possibility that your children could uninstall the app from their phones. This can be done with a simple click on the web app’s dashboard.

Overall, FamilyTime’s web app is easy to navigate and beginner-friendly, but the discount banners on its dashboard are a bit annoying.

Customer Support

FamilyTime’s customer support is okay. I was happy to see that it offers email and live chat and that they have a very good response time — I was always connected to a live chat rep in seconds, while email reps took only a couple of hours to respond. That said, their responses weren’t always useful. When I asked a live chat agent if there was a money-back guarantee, he told me there isn’t one for customers that use the discount code. However, later I found out that FamilyTime doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee at all. In comparison, I was very impressed with FamiSafe’s live chat and email support, as both platforms were responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful.

It does come with a support center that offers helpful information. The support center is divided into 4 sections: Getting Started, Features, Troubleshooting, and Announcements, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. I also like FamilyTime’s FAQs as they offer comprehensive explanations of every feature FamilyTime offers and I found the installation guides and accompanying screenshots for different devices to be user-friendly and easy to follow.

Overall, I’d say that FamilyTime customer support is decent. While it does offer useful installation guides and detailed FAQs, the responses from the live chat agents aren’t always useful.

Is FamilyTime a Good Choice for Keeping Your Kids Safe Online?

Yes, FamilyTime comes with many features that allow you to keep your kids safe online. It offers web and app filtering, a location tracker, scheduling, a panic button, and even a speed limit feature that sends notifications if your teen is over-speeding.

It’s also very beginner-friendly. Its apps are very easy to navigate, and all features come with helpful explanations.

However, FamilyTime has some limitations. There’s no social media tracking other than on TikTok and YouTube, its web and app filtering is really basic, and the iOS app lacks several important features such as daily time limits. In addition, there’s no money-back guarantee.

Overall, FamilyTime is a good parental control app. It offers several pricing packages, and it comes with a 3-day free trial for all purchases.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does FamilyTime offer a free version?

No, there is no free version of FamilyTime available. That said, FamilyTime does offer a 3-day free trial, which allows you to test the service on both Android and iOS devices. If you need more time, you’ll have to get a subscription.

There are some decent free parental control apps out there, but most of them are limited — they lack key features and only allow you to monitor 1 device. That’s why I strongly recommend purchasing an affordable premium parental control app like Qustodio, which costs just $54.95 / year.

Will the FamilyTime app icon be visible on my child’s device?

Yes, there will be a FamilyTime Jr. app icon on your child’s device. FamilyTime is not a spying app, but a parental control app, so your child knows that their device is being monitored. In addition, the FamilyTime Jr. app comes with several important features for your child, such as a Panic Button and a PickMeUp feature.

Is FamilyTime legal?

The app itself is legal, but using the app may be subject to certain restrictions depending on your location. I recommend reviewing and complying with the local laws and regulations. In most countries, using the app is legal when monitoring underage children.

Does FamilyTime provide web and app filters or screen time controls?

Yes, FamilyTime allows you to set web and app filters and control screen time. You can even schedule your child’s screen time for the whole week. For example, I set a screen time limit every weekday between 5–6 p.m. for dinner.