MMGuardian Review 2023: Will It Keep Your Kids Safe?

MMGuardian is a good parental control app that can monitor Android and iOS devices and keep your child safe both online and offline. It’s easy to set up, intuitive to use, and gives you an incredible amount of control compared to many other parental control apps. You can try MMGuardian for free using its 14-day free trial.

MMGuardian comes with all the industry-standard parental control features you’d expect from a parental control app in 2023, including web and app filtering, scheduling, time limits, location tracking, and activity reports. Additionally, it is capable of monitoring calls and SMS messages, as well as many major social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger.

There are some areas where MMGuardian is notably lacking, however. To list a few: It doesn’t have a geofencing feature (Norton’s is especially good), it’s unable to monitor YouTube activity (like Qustodio can), and it can’t set daily device usage limits (like most of our top parental control apps).

MMGuardian is also a little pricey, especially considering it only allows you to monitor 1-5 devices depending on whether you choose its Single Child Device plan or its Family plan. MMGuardian’s plans aren’t backed by a money-back guarantee either, but its 14-day free trial should help you get a sense of whether or not it’s the right parental control app for you.

MMGuardian Full Review

While MMGuardian isn’t my absolute favorite app for monitoring Android or iOS devices, it has some unique strengths, such as the incredible amount of control it provides with its web and app filters, which can make it quite appealing to certain parents.

MMGuardian includes all the features essential for a good parental control app. On top of that, it offers the ability to monitor calls and read and monitor your child’s SMS and social media messages.

While MMGuardian is slightly expensive, it’s still a great value for parents who want an easy-to-use app with its specific set of capabilities. To see if MMGuardian will be a good fit for you and your family, you can use its 14-day free trial. No credit card information is required to activate the free trial, so it’s totally risk-free.

MMGuardian Features

MMGuardian includes the following essential parental control app features:

• Web and app filtering — Choose which apps your kids can use and when and which websites your kids will be able to access.
• Time limits — You can specify how much time you kids can spend on certain apps each day. Note that unlike most parental control apps, MMGuardian can’t set time limits on how long your child is able to use their device each day.
• Location tracking — Find out where your kids are at any time and track where they’ve been. MMGuardian doesn’t have geofencing.
• Scheduling — Decide when your kids’ devices are usable and when they’re locked.
• Activity reports — Summarizes your child’s recent device usage including metrics on the messages they’ve sent and received, the apps they’ve used, the calls they’ve made and received, the websites they’ve visited, and more.

MMGuardian also includes other useful features like the ability to monitor your child’s calls, SMS messages, and social media activity.

App Supervision

MMGuardian allows you to choose which apps your child can use on their Android or iOS device and for how long. All apps installed on your child’s device are displayed in a list in the App Control tab, and you can block any one with just a tap of a button. I really like how MMGuardian notifies you whenever a new app is installed and includes a setting to automatically block newly installed apps, so you can review new apps before you give your child access to them. This will help prevent any inappropriate apps from making it past your filters.

I really like that MMGuardian allows you to create your own app groups and set time limits and usage restrictions on the apps within it. You can, for example, put a bunch of game apps into a group labeled “Entertainment” and limit your child’s combined usage time for those apps to a certain number of minutes each day (adjustable in 15-minute increments) — you can even have different rules for weekdays and weekends. This feature also allows you to dictate periods in the day in which the apps within a group will be blocked (eg. Apps in the “Entertainment” group during school hours).

I do wish that MMGuardian would notify your child when they’re about to hit the time limit on their usage of an app or an app group, and that the screen that pops up when your child tries to use a blocked app was a little more informative — If the app is being blocked because a child has run out of time to spend on apps in a particular category, it should say so!

Overall, MMGuardian’s app supervision feature is excellent. It worked flawlessly during my tests, detecting and blocking every app I tried it with. Its app groups also provide parents with more advanced functionality than is available on most top parental control apps. For example, Qustodio only lets you set time limits on apps individually, Norton Family doesn’t let you set time limits on apps at all, and Net Nanny doesn’t give you the ability to restrict particular apps during specific times in the day.

Web Filtering

MMGuardian lets you filter out inappropriate web content with a ton of granularity. You can manually select categories of content you want to be filtered out — with over 140 categories to choose from — or you can use the predefined filters provided, which are based on age range. I like how each category includes a little explanation for the kinds of content that are included in it as well. MMGuardian’s web filtering only works on the Google Chrome browser, so make sure you block other browsers like Edge, Firefox, Brave, etc., so your child can’t get around your restrictions that way. The web filters do work in incognito mode.

Compared to other top parental control apps like Qustodio, Net Nanny, and Norton Family, MMGuardian gives you a crazy amount of control. However, I do wonder if some of the categories are strictly necessary or if they’re just irrelevant bloat that makes the list harder to look and scroll through. MMGuardian’s list, for example, includes categories like Vehicles, Vacation, Travel, and Weather, which are probably fairly safe topics for even the strictest parents out there. That said, MMGuardian also includes really useful categories not found in other parental control apps such as “School cheats,” which filters out websites that offer essay writing services and the like.

In addition to filtering websites using broad categories, you can also create blacklists and whitelists for websites that should always be blocked or always be allowed (this supersedes the category filters).

I hate how MMGuardian’s web filters just close your window without warning and kick you back to your home screen when it blocks a website. This can lead to very confused and frustrated kids and cause them to think that their phone is broken or infected by some kind of virus. Most other parental control apps will at least redirect your kids to a page telling them the content they were trying to access is blocked. Norton Family will even tell them the restricted category the website falls under. Both Net Nanny and Norton Family also allow the kids to request access to a blocked website directly within the app if they think the filters made a mistake (no filter is perfect, after all).

Overall, MMGuardian’s web filter is incredibly powerful, but the number of categories could probably be trimmed down to a more manageable number without sacrificing much utility, and the way it blocks content is very annoying.

Call, Text & Social Media Monitoring

MMGuardian allows you to monitor your child’s calls, text messages, and social media. In your Phone Usage tab, you’ll be able to see who your child has called (or received calls from), when, and for how long. You can also see who they’ve messaged or received messages from on SMS or any of the following apps and read the contents of those conversations.

For both calls and SMS, MMGuardian gives you the ability to create blacklists and whitelists, allowing you to shut down communication to and from dangerous or toxic individuals. It includes a whitelist-only mode as well (only allows specific contacts to call or message your child), which parents with younger children may find convenient.

Finally, MMGuardian protects your children by scanning sent and received messages on SMS and a wide range of apps for anything that falls under one of these content categories: Suicide, Pregnancy, Violence, Bullying, Drugs, Sex, Love, Profanity, Depression, and Predator. If it finds any matches, you’ll be alerted immediately. You can also turn off detection for any or all of the content categories.

MMGuardian’s Text Monitor feature lets you create custom words or phrases that will trigger an alert, which is handy if the content categories provided don’t meet all of your needs.

Overall, MMGuardian’s call, text, and social media monitoring features are very good. Most parental control apps can’t show you the exact content of your child’s conversations on SMS or social media. Qustodio only lets you read SMS messages, and Bark won’t show you the exact content of your child’s conversations unless it detects concerning or inappropriate content that may require your intervention.

Scheduling & Time Limits

MMGuardian’s Time Limits feature allows you to schedule times in the day (in 1-minute increments) and days in the week when your child’s device will be locked. Your child will still be able to send a text to or call admin phones using the Contact Admin button on the lock screen, but they won’t be able to do anything else. Compared to Qustodio and Net Nanny’s scheduling features, MMGuardian gives you a lot more control — Qustodio only lets you restrict times in hour-long chunks, and Net Nanny still falls short at allowing you to restrict times in 15-minute increments. Kaspersky Safe Kids is one of the few top parental control apps that will give you as much flexibility.

While you can apply different app filtering rules to different times of the day using the App Control feature, MMGuardian’s scheduling feature lacks the ability to apply different web filtering rules to different times of the day like Norton Family and Bark can. That said, Norton Family’s school time feature is unable to detect or block apps, and Bark’s screen time management feature only allows you to edit three different rulesets (Bedtime, School time, and Free time), whereas MMGuardian has no limit on the amount of rulesets you can have.

What disappoints me though is that MMGuardian doesn’t allow you to set a limit on how much time your child can spend on their device daily, as you can with most top parental control apps. Its ability to set time limits on specific apps or groups of apps covers this function to some extent, but it’s not quite as comprehensive.

Overall, MMGuardian’s scheduling feature is comparable to that of other top parental control apps, but I wish it would let you apply different web filtering rules to different times in the day and set daily time limits on device usage.

Location Tracking

MMGuardian’s location tracking feature can accurately locate your child’s device and track their location history. I really like how there’s a button that you can press to manually and instantly update the tracker. You can also set it up so that MMGuardian sends you an alert and updates you on your child’s location every 5, 10, 15, 30, 60, or 120 minutes, and decide which times in the day and which days of the week you want these updates. One of the only other top parental control apps that offers similar functionality is Norton Family.

One big downside of MMGuardian though is that it doesn’t include a geofencing feature. Geofences alert you when your child enters or exits a predefined area, such as your home, their school, or a friend’s house, and is an essential safety feature that is available on almost all top parental control apps.

Overall, I like MMGuardian’s location tracking, but it just doesn’t stand up to its competition without a geofencing feature. If you’re looking for a parental control app with great location tracking, I suggest checking out Norton Family instead. It has almost all of the same features plus geofencing and offers a less invasive form of location tracking where your children can use the kids app to perform a check in (which shares their location with you by email).

Activity Reports

MMGuardian’s Phone Usage tab allows you to view the activity reports for specific dates. It displays the following metrics:

The Phone Usage tab’s main screen isn’t too useful, but tapping on any of the metric display boxes will take you to a separate page that’s a lot clearer and has a lot more depth. Diving deeper into web activities, for example, will present you with a much more readable listing of all of the websites your child has visited. You’ll also be provided a beautifully color-coded graph on which you can see exactly when in the day they visited each website.

However, the Alert History tab provides a lot of useful information. It allows you to see when your child tries to visit a blocked website or use a blocked app, when their device is turned on or off, when a concerning topic is detected in their conversations, and more. You can turn any of these alerts on or off in the Alert Settings tab, to make MMGuardian work exactly the way you want it to.

The biggest downside of MMGuardian’s activity summaries is that there’s no way to see your child’s activities summarized weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly as you can on Qustodio. I wouldn’t necessarily check on my child’s activities every single day, so it’d be useful if I could get a broader summary of their activities.

Overall, I like MMGuardian’s activity reports. It gives you accurate and in-depth information in a very clean and clear way, but its inability to provide long term stats can be a bit limiting.

Additional Features

MMGuardian also comes with the following additional features:

• Uninstall protection — Prevents your child from removing MMGuardian from their device without your admin password.
• Lock Unlock — You can lock a device manually “for the rest of the day” or for a specified amount of time (adjustable in 5-minute increments). Alternatively, you can unlock a device manually for the same duration, overriding any schedules you may have set using the Time Limits feature.
• Find Phone Siren — You can play an alarm from your child’s phone which makes a sound even if their phone is on mute. The alarm lasts for 15 seconds.

MMGuardian Plans & Pricing

MMGuardian’s pricing structure is a little complicated. In short, it’s divided into Single Child Device plans, which cover only 1 device, and Family Plans, which cover 5 devices. And each type of plan offers subscriptions for different lengths of time. Note that you can only get 5-year licenses for Android phones and that the Android Tablet plans are cheaper than the plans for Android phones and iPhones/iPads (this is because they lack many important features).

In terms of features, MMGuardian doesn’t have basic or premium versions like some other parental control apps. You get access to all of its features regardless of the plan you purchase. There are, however, differences between the features available on Android phones, Android tablets, and iOS devices, as seen in the table below.

Overall, MMGuardian’s plans are a bit pricey, especially for iOS devices, which lack many crucial features compared to Android phones but are priced the same. For comparison, Qustodio, our favorite parental control app in 2023 only costs $54.95 / year and monitors 5 or unlimited devices, and Norton Family can monitor an unlimited number of devices for just $49.99 / year and comes with a ton of extra value if you get it as part of a bundle like Norton 360 Deluxe or Norton 360 Advanced. While MMGuardian has a 14-day free trial, it doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee either.

MMGuardian Installation & Setup

MMGuardian has parent and kids’ apps for Android and iOS devices (including tablets and iPads). Both apps are simple to set up — the in-app installation instructions guide you through the entire process. The kids’ app requires you to give MMGuardian a bunch of permissions for all of its functions to work though, so it might take slightly longer to do. Regardless, it took me less than 10 minutes to get MMGuardian up and running on my Android phones.

MMGuardian Parental Apps (Installation & Setup)

Getting the parental app working couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do is to go to your device’s app store and download the MMGuardian Parental Control app. After that, confirm that the phone you’re using is the parent’s phone, accept the terms of service and privacy policy, and log into your MMGuardian account (if you don’t have one, the app will take you through the process of account creation).

MMGuardian Kids Apps (Installation & Setup)

The first time you log into your MMGuardian parent app, you’ll be asked to add your child’s device. This can be done by sending your child’s phone a link to the correct app or by finding and installing the app on your child’s phone yourself.

Once you’ve installed the kids’ app, open it up, and you’ll have to create an admin account. Next, you’ll be asked to grant MMGuardian a series of permissions that are required for all of its features to work properly and to make a series of configuration changes on your phone for the same reason. Don’t worry, the app makes the whole process very straightforward by taking you directly to the settings that you need to change with a single tap.

And that’s it — you can now keep tabs on this device using the parental app!

MMGuardian Ease of Use

MMGuardian’s parent app for both Android and iOS devices are very intuitive to use. Even first time parental control app users should have no problem navigating it. Everything is clearly labeled and short explanations are included where necessary. I also like how it has a “Send” button, which instantly applies any changes you’ve made in the parental control app to your child’s device.

I wish MMGuardian had a web app, however, like Qustodio, Net Nanny, and Norton Family, as it’s not always convenient for me to pull out my phone.

MMGuardian has a kids app that you have to install on your child’s device for everything to work properly, but it’s pretty thin on features. All your child can do on it is contact you (by call or text) to request that you unlock their device in case of an emergency. In comparison, Qustodio‘s kids app gives your child feedback on how much of their daily time limit they’ve spent (and on which apps), how much daily screen time they have remaining, gives them a heads up about upcoming times when device usage is restricted, and finally gives them access to a panic button, which will immediately send an alert to trusted contacts via a text message or email and shares their device’s location.

Overall, MMGuardian’s parent apps are great, but I wish it had a web app, and its child app is very lackluster.

MMGuardian Customer Support

MMGuardian’s customer support isn’t the strongest. Its library of support articles is pretty sparse and none of the articles include any pictures or videos for more auditorily or visually inclined users. MMGuardian does have good installation videos for both Android and iOS devices at least, but I’m unsure why the iOS installation videos aren’t linked to from the FAQ page as the Android installation video is. Instead you have to find it on an entirely separate page.

MMGuardian also doesn’t offer 24/7 live chat support like Norton Family or FamiSafe do, which means there’s no way to get immediate assistance if you encounter a problem. That said, very few parental control apps have live chat support, and MMGuardian is fairly quick to respond to messages sent via email. I received an answer to my question within 24 hours.

Overall, I found MMGuardian’s customer support to be functional but unimpressive.

Is MMGuardian a Good Parental Control App for Keeping Your Kids Safe In 2023?

MMGuardian is a great parental control app. In addition to industry-standard parental control features, it has several extras like call and SMS monitoring and social media monitoring. It also gives you a lot of more granular control than most other parental control apps. Last but not least, it’s super easy to set up and has a very beginner-friendly interface.

However, MMGuardian has some flaws. For example, it’s unable to set daily time limits (only app usage limits), it can’t monitor YouTube activity, and it doesn’t have a geofencing feature. Compared to Bark, one of the best parental control apps for monitoring social media, it also covers a lot fewer platforms (Bark can monitor 30+ social media platforms while MMGuardian only covers 5+).

Overall though, MMGuardian is certainly a parental control app you shouldn’t dismiss out of hand. It has incredible web filtering capabilities, which allows you to choose from over 140 content categories, a great app grouping function, and a powerful scheduling feature. MMGuardian doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee, but it has a 14-day-free trial that you can use to try out all of its features.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is MMGuardian Safe?

Yes, MMGuardian has a lot of great features to help keep your child safe both online and offline. These include powerful web filters (with 140+ categories to choose from), the ability to read your child’s SMS and social media messages, and a great location tracker.

MMGuardian’s privacy policy also states that your information is never sold, rented, or otherwise provided to third parties for marketing purposes without your permission. The only time when your personal information may be shared with a third party is when MMGuardian is required to do so by law enforcement agencies. Finally, all information in MMGuardian’s possession is secured using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption), which renders your data unreadable by anyone but them.

Can my child uninstall MMGuardian?

No, MMGuardian has a built-in uninstall protection which will prevent this from happening. It’s also turned on by default, so as long as you don’t change that setting, your child won’t be able to uninstall MMGuardian without first acquiring your admin password.

Can MMGuardian see incognito mode?

Yes. MMGuardian is able to monitor the Chrome browser in incognito mode.

Can MMGuardian see WhatsApp messages?

Yes. MMGuardian allows you to read your child’s SMS and social media messages on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook messenger. MMGuardian will also scan conversations from a number of social media apps including Snapchat, Discord, TikTok, and more, for concerning content that falls under categories such as: Suicide, Pregnancy, Violence, Bullying, Drugs, etc.

If you need to monitor more social media platforms, Bark is a great alternative. It can monitor 30+ social media platforms compared to MMGuardian’s 5+. However, unlike MMGuardian, Bark only allows you to read your child’s messages when they contain concerning or inappropriate content that may require your intervention.

Can MMGuardian see emails?

No, but very few parental control apps can, and MMGuardian does allow you to monitor your child’s SMS and social media messages on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook messenger. Consider checking out mSpy if you want this feature.

Can MMGuardian monitor YouTube activities?

No. MMGuardian can limit the amount of time your child spends on YouTube or block the YouTube app entirely, but it’s unable to track which YouTube videos your child has watched or to filter YouTube content.

Qustodio is our favorite parental control app in 2023 and includes a dedicated YouTube monitoring feature, which lets you see your kids YouTube searches and also what videos they watch. Qustodio also lets you enforce YouTube’s Restricted Mode, which can help filter out potentially inappropriate content that you don’t want your child viewing.

Can MMGuardian record phone calls?

No, very few parental control apps offer this feature, but MMGuardian does allow you to monitor your child’s SMS and social media messages on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook messenger.

Does MMGuardian see deleted messages?

Yes. MMGuardian stores your child’s messages as soon as it’s sent or received on your child’s device, so even if your child deletes the message from their phone, MMGuardian will still have a record of it.