Mobicip Review: Is It One of the Top Parental Controls in 2023?

Mobicip is a great parental control app for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Chromebook that can help you keep your kids safe online and manage their device usage. It’s quick to set up, has a minimalistic interface that makes it easy to use, and provides good customer support.

Mobicip has all of the industry-standard features you’d expect from a premium parental control app, including web and app filtering, time limits, location tracking, scheduling, and activity reports. Its scheduling tool is especially notable as one of the best on the market. It’s also capable of monitoring YouTube activity, as well as your child’s social media accounts, alerting you if your child sends or receives any concerning content.

Compared to Qustodio, our favorite parental control app in 2023, Mobicip lacks the ability to monitor calls and SMS and doesn’t have a panic button. It’s also only able to monitor 3 social media platforms (Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook) compared to Bark‘s 30+. Its activity reports are not as comprehensive and easy-to-read as the summaries of some of our other top parental control apps.

Mobicip offers Lite, Standard, and Premium annual plans, which let you monitor 5, 10, and 20 devices, respectively. It also has a very rudimentary free plan (Basic), but it only gives you access to its web filtering capabilities. Mobicip also lets you try out its Premium features for free for 7 days and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can take it for a test drive and get a refund if you think it doesn’t suit your needs.

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Mobicip Full Review

I’ve done extensive research and testing on Mobicip in the past two weeks, and I was honestly surprised by how good it was. It’s got some clear weaknesses compared to the best parental control apps on the market, but it’s got some unique strengths as well.

Mobicip has all of the essential parental control tools you’ll need to protect your child and monitor their device usage. It also gives you the ability to create different restrictions for different times of the day with its powerful scheduling tool and monitor your children’s activities on major social media platforms.

Mobicip has 3 annual plans, but the Lite and Standard plans only differ by the number of devices they allow you to monitor (5 versus 10). Its Premium plan is what you want if you need the ability to monitor social media accounts and set time limits on app usage.

All of Mobicip’s plans are backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can use the 7-day free trial to test out the Premium features.

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Mobicip Features

Mobicip includes the following essential parental control app features:

• Web and app filtering — Block apps that you don’t want your kids to use and prevent access to websites that may contain inappropriate or harmful content.
• Time limits — Set limits on how much free time your kids get on their devices.
• Location tracking — Find out where your kids are and where they’ve been recently.
• Scheduling — Set different app and website restrictions for different times of the day and different days of the week.
• Activity reports — Provides a quick overview of your child’s device usage including how much time they’ve spent on their device, which websites they’ve visited, what apps they’ve used, and more.

On top of this, Mobicip allows you to monitor your child’s accounts on various social media sites/apps and filter YouTube content.

Scheduling & Screen Time Limits

Mobicip’s scheduling feature is really fantastic. It lets you create an unlimited number of custom app and web filters for specific times in the day and for specific days of the week in 5-minute increments. These override your general content filters and let you restrict some apps or websites — such as gaming sites — or all apps and websites during certain times in the day, like during school hours or when your kids should be sleeping.

Compared to the scheduling features of other top parental control apps, Mobicip gives parents a lot more granular control. Qustodio and Net Nanny’s scheduling features, for example, only give you the option to restrict internet access or disable the entire device. Qustodio also only allows you to apply restrictions in hour-long increments, which can be inconvenient (Net Nanny lets you apply restrictions in 15-minute increments).

Mobicip gives you the ability to limit your child’s screen time. Any time in the day where there’s no set schedule is considered “free time” by the app, and any time spent by your child on their device during these periods of time is subtracted from their Daily Free Time Limit, which you can adjust in 15-minute increments for each day of the week.

Once your child’s Daily Free Time Limit is used up, they won’t be able to use their device (except for making emergency calls). I like that Mobicip notifies your child when their Daily Free Time Limit is about to be used up, and that it allows them to request grace time from you directly through the app, which will send you a notification and allow you to approve or reject their request.

Finally, Mobicip includes a handy feature called Vacation Mode, which overrides your usual schedule. This lets you set more lenient app and web filters or more generous Daily Free Time Limits for family vacations or summer break, for example, and will apply until a preset end date or you choose to turn it off manually.

Overall, I’m very happy with Mobicip’s scheduling and screen time limits features — It’s one of the best I’ve seen out of all the parental control apps I’ve tested.

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Web Filtering

With Mobicip’s web filtering, you can easily manage the websites your child can access online by setting permissions for websites of 15+ predefined content categories including Alcohol and Addiction, Games, Mature and Adult, Shopping, Social, and more.

I would like to see the list of content categories expanded though to give parents more control. For comparison, Qustodio has 25+ predefined categories, and Norton Family has 45+. Some of Mobicip’s content categories also lack clarity. For example, I’m not entirely sure what the Utilities category is or how the YouTube category differs from just putting YouTube on the website blacklist (or blocking the YouTube app on mobile devices).

Mobicip uses advanced AI and machine learning to scan web pages in real time, taking into account both the content and context. This allows Mobicip’s filters to keep up with the new content that’s constantly being put up on the web.

Mobicip’s web filtering worked really well during my testing, blocking all of the web pages in restricted categories that I tried to access on my child’s device. It worked on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, and even while browsing in private (incognito). No web filter is perfect though, so I like that when your child attempts to visit a blocked website, Mobicip allows them to request access from you directly within the app. If you approve of their request, the website will then be automatically added to a whitelist, so it’ll always be accessible to them in the future.

Besides content categories, Mobicip also lets you filter web content by adding specific sites to a blacklist or whitelist. There’s even a unique “Whitelist only mode” that you can enable to only allow access to the websites you specify. This can be a good option for parents with very young children, whose internet usage you may want to restrict to a few specific websites as you ease their entry into the online world.

Mobicip lets you create your own custom filters by specifying keywords. How this feature works isn’t explained at all in the app, but what it does is block any web pages where the words or phrases you specify appear. At first glance, this seems pretty useful, but it’s really easy to accidentally block a lot of innocuous websites if you aren’t careful when setting your keywords. In this regard, I prefer Net Nanny, which has a similar feature, but offers the ability to simply alert you when your child accesses content containing the keywords. Net Nanny has the ability to automatically mask profanity on web pages as well, which is super neat.

One last feature that Mobicip includes in its website filtering tab is the ability to disable parental controls on specific networks. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what this feature is for. The in-app explanation is terse, stating that you can “Disable Mobicip on your child’s protected school network.” But it’s unclear why you would want to do that — especially when Mobicip has such a great scheduling feature that lets you create custom app and web restrictions specifically for school hours. To get it to work, you also need to know the target network’s IP address or (IP address range), which can be a bit of a hurdle.

Overall, Mobicip’s web filtering features are pretty good. The core elements of it are very solid and comparable to the best parental control apps on the market, but I’d like to see better explanations for some of its features.

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App Filtering & App Supervision

Mobicip lets you limit what apps your child is able to access on their device. One way you can do this is to restrict apps by category — Mobicip offers 3 predefined categories for you to choose from: Social Media, Entertainment, and Games. This is a convenient feature that’s missing on most other parental control apps. It lets you quickly target some of the most commonly blocked apps just by flipping a switch rather than needing to find and block each one individually (and risk missing some in the process).

I tested the feature’s reliability by attempting to run half a dozen game apps on my child’s device, from the popular to the obscure, and Mobicip was able to identify and block every one. It’s a little unfortunate that the categories are so indiscriminate though — puzzle, word, and other potentially educational games will also be blocked if you choose to restrict Games. Another minor gripe I have with the categories is that it’s not made clear what kinds of apps fall under the Entertainment category.

Note that all apps rated 17+ on their respective app store are blocked by default (and there’s no way to turn this off).

If you want finer control over which apps are restricted, you can search for specific apps directly on your device’s app store and add them to a block list. This is a fairly unique feature among parental control apps. Most, like Qustodio, Net Nanny, and Norton Family, can only detect the apps after they’ve been installed on your child’s device. However, Mobicip gives parents no easy way of seeing which apps your child actually has on their phone, which seems to me like a pretty big oversight. You could try to block apps as they show up in the activities log of your parental app dashboard, but that’s a rather clunky workaround.

Finally, Mobicip lets you set limits on the length of time your child can spend on certain apps every day. You can adjust the time limit in 15-minute increments, and you can apply these limits on up to 3 predefined categories (Social Media, Entertainment, and Games — but the Games category is unavailable on iOS devices). Unlike Qustodio, however, you can’t set time limits on individual apps, so Mobicip trades a lot of granularity for convenience.

Overall, Mobicip is very good at blocking apps and is one of the few parental control apps capable of blocking apps preemptively (Google Family Link is a good free alternative). There’s a bit of clunkiness to its app blocking features though (such as its inability to list which apps are installed on your child’s device), and I’d like it more if I could set time limits on specific apps rather than by category.

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Location Tracking

Mobicip’s location tracking feature is very good. It was able to accurately detect where my monitored device was and show me the location directly on Google Maps. It also tracks where the device has been through its location history function, which stores up to 30 days worth of location data.

Mobicip has a geofencing feature as well, which will alert you when your child enters or exits areas that you define on the map. The zones can cover up to 0.62 miles (1,000 meters). This puts it above top parental control apps like Qustodio, whose zones can only cover up to 0.12 miles (200 meters), Net Nanny, which only lets you set specific addresses, and Bark, which doesn’t have a geofencing feature at all.

However, the distance that Mobicip’s geofenced zones can cover isn’t as big as Norton Family (2 miles or 3,200 meters). Norton Family also has some great extra features that Mobicip lacks, such as the ability to notify you where your kids are at scheduled times in the day, and the option to allow your children to share their location with you instead of using real-time tracking (in case you don’t want to be too invasive).

Overall, Mobicip’s Locator feature compares favorably to most other parental control apps, but falls short of Norton Family, which has my favorite location supervision features out of all parental control apps.

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Social Media Monitoring

Besides blocking and limiting the usage of social media apps, Mobicip also gives parents the ability to monitor their children’s social media accounts. This works for Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, but Snapchat monitoring doesn’t work on iOS devices.

The in-app explanation is non-existent, but what this feature does is scan your child’s social media texts and images for inappropriate or concerning content relating to bullying, sex, violence, drugs, and self-harm or suicide. If it finds something, you’ll be alerted immediately and sent a snippet of the offending content, so you can evaluate whether intervention is necessary.

Mobicip’s social media monitoring feature is very useful, but it doesn’t stack up to the content monitoring capabilities of Bark. For starters, Mobicip is only able to monitor 3 social media platforms compared to Bark’s 30+ social media platforms and apps (including ones popular with kids today like Discord and Tiktok). Bark is also capable of detecting a lot more categories of problematic content or unhealthy behavior including things like anxiety and body Image/eating related issues. And it allows you to fine tune how sensitive you want the algorithm to be for each of the 15+ categories it monitors.

Overall, there are a lot more comprehensive and versatile options for social media monitoring than Mobicip. If this is what you’re looking for, I strongly recommend checking out Bark instead.

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Activity Reports

Mobicip’s Dashboard tab provides parents with a summary of their children’s recent activities. You can see how much time they’ve spent on their device broken down by category, see which apps they’ve used, what they’ve searched, which websites they’ve visited, and what YouTube videos they’ve watched. This is also where you’ll receive alerts when your child enters or exits a geofenced area.

I find Mobicip’s activity reports quite mediocre both in the amount of information provided and in its presentation. For example, I would very much like to be able to see my child’s screen time usage broken down by individual apps rather than by broad categories like Social Media and Games (Qustodio, Norton Family, and Kaspersky Safe Kids can do this).

Mobicip activity reports are a huge pain to browse through. All activities and alerts are all crammed into a narrow little box, so you have to scroll a ton to see everything. The inclusion of extraneous functions like the “Block App” button in the activity timeline also clutters up the report and makes it harder to process everything at a glance.

Finally, the app gives you no indication of what some of its entries actually mean. For example, I was confused by the “Maths club” entry in the activity report until I realized that the icon was supposed to indicate location and guessed that it was a geofencing alert. But even then I couldn’t be sure if it meant my child had entered the geofenced zone or exited it.

Overall, I think Mobicip’s activity reports don’t provide enough information and could do with a lot of usability improvements.

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Additional Features

Mobicip also comes with the following additional features:

• Uninstall protection — On Android and iOS devices, you can set it up so that your child can’t uninstall Mobicip without your Mobicip account credentials. On Mac or Windows computers though, you’ll have to ensure that your child doesn’t have access to an admin account.
• YouTube filters — Mobicip claims that it filters YouTube videos on a “video-by-video basis” on Android and iOS devices, but what this means is unclear. There’s also a baffling lack of configurations or really any sort of indication that the feature exists at all in the control panel. You can’t turn it on or off or have any input on what counts as “inappropriate video content.” So far as I could tell, it does little more than what YouTube’s built-in “Restricted Mode” already does.

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Mobicip Plans & Pricing

Mobicip has 3 separate annual plans. The Lite ($2.99 / month) and Standard ($4.99 / month) plans have all the basic functionality, including the app and website blocker, the ability to set schedules and daily screen time limits, and the family locator. They’re identical except for the fact that the Lite plan only allows you to monitor up to 5 devices whereas the Standard plan allows you to monitor up to 10.

If you want access to features like social media monitoring and the ability to set time limits on app categories, you’ll have to upgrade to the Premium plan ($7.99 / month). Additionally, the Premium plan lets you monitor up to 20 devices and includes “Parenting Expert Advice,” though it’s unclear to me what that means or why I would want it. Mobicip does have an “Expert Advice” blog accessible from its website, but it appears to be freely available to everyone.

Mobicip has a free Basic plan, which you’re automatically downgraded to once your 7-day free trial expires, but the only features available on Basic are its website filters and a rudimentary version of its activity reports, and it can only manage 1 device. If you’re looking for a great free plan, I strongly recommend checking out one of our top free parental control apps instead.

Overall, Mobicip is a little expensive in my opinion. Its Premium plan is similarly priced to Qustodio’s Premium plan (our top parental control app in 2023) but doesn’t provide nearly as much polish or value. If there’s a specific feature that attracts you to Mobicip, however, you can always try out its Premium features risk-free with its 7-day free trial (credit card details required) and 30-day money-back guarantee.

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Mobicip Installation & Setup

Setting up Mobicip’s kids apps is very easy. It only took me about 5 minutes total, and I experienced no issues throughout the setup process. Mobicip has very comprehensive and easy-to-follow guides in both written and video format to ensure that even non-tech-savvy parents are able to use its products.

But honestly, Mobicip makes its installation so simple that you shouldn’t even need a guide. On Windows devices, for instance, all you have to do is to download the app off of Mobicip’s website, click install, agree to the data disclosure agreement, create a Mobicip child user, and select the Windows user account you wish to link to that user. That’s it.

The installation wizard basically holds your hand through the whole setup process and will even warn you about programs (such as antiviruses on Windows devices and Google Family Link on Android devices) that might conflict with Mobicip’s monitoring capabilities, which I thought was a nice touch. Sharing monitoring responsibilities with your partner is super easy as well and can be done directly from your control panel.

Overall, I very much appreciate how easy it is to set up Mobicip on a device.

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Mobicip Ease of Use

Mobicip’s web app for parents is generally intuitive to use. Even parents new to parental control apps should be able to quickly grasp all of its functions and navigate the interface without issues. Adding new devices to monitor and setting restrictions on your children’s devices is also very simple.

However, Mobicip’s minimalistic interface has its downsides. For example, its Social Media Monitor and Keywords and Phrases features have incomplete or non-existent in-app explanations, which forced me to look up how they work on Mobicip’s website.

I found Mobicip’s graphical indicator for whether an app or website is blocked or unblocked rather unintuitive as well (Mobicip must have thought so too, since they included a legend on relevant pages). The grayed out graphic just doesn’t automatically translate to “blocked” in my head, so it always takes me an extra second to process what I’m seeing. I think a red and green color coding and/or a blocked/unblocked text directly on the toggle would make things much clearer.

As noted previously, Mobicip’s Activity Reports could also use some improvements. As of now, it doesn’t provide as much information as I would like, nor is it presented in an easily readable format.

Overall, Mobicip’s dashboard is clean and well-designed, but I’d like to see some better labeling and in-app explanations.

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Mobicip Customer Support

Mobicip has decent customer support. Its website provides in-depth guides and explanations (with plenty of pictures and videos for the more visually inclined) for frequently asked questions, including how to set up Mobicip on all compatible devices and operating systems and how to make full use of its various features.

If its Knowledge Base is unable to answer your questions, you can also submit a ticket or schedule a call with Mobicip’s customer support. I received a response to my question within 24 hours of submitting my ticket, and I found the customer support representative friendly and helpful.

I would have preferred some sort of live chat function, which parental control apps like Norton Family and FamiSafe offer, in order to get immediate assistance — plus, who really wants to make a phone call if they don’t have to? But Mobicip is far from unique in lacking a live chat function.

Overall, Mobicip’s customer support is able to swiftly resolve any issues that may arise, whether that’s through its excellent database of articles and guides or through its responsive ticketing or call scheduling system. And while I do wish it had a live chat function, most parental control apps don’t have one either.

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Is Mobicip Hold One of The Top Parental Control Apps of 2023?

Mobicip is a really good parental control app — I especially like its powerful scheduling capabilities. It has all of the industry-standard features that you’d want in a parental control app including web and app filtering, time limits, location tracking, and activity reports. It also has extra features like the ability to monitor YouTube usage and major social media platforms.

However, there are some areas where Mobicip is lacking. Its social media monitoring only works for Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook (compare this to Bark, which can monitor 30+ social media platforms). It’s unable to set time limits on individual apps (like Qustodio can). And it has a host of other minor issues that add up and detract from its overall user-friendliness (such as difficult to read Activity Reports).

Overall, I think Mobicip is a little pricey, but it’s still one of the best parental control apps in 2023. If you’re unsure whether it’d be good for you and your family, you could always test it out by taking advantage of its 7-day free trial of its Premium features as well as its 30-day money-back guarantee.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is Mobicip safe?

Yes, Mobicip is safe to use and has tons of features like web filtering and social media monitoring to protect your kids online. Its privacy policy also states that all of the data it acquires is carefully safeguarded through industry-standard security features including encryption, firewalls, and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and that no personally identifiable data is sold to third parties without the user’s consent.

Can my child bypass Mobicip?

No, Mobicip comes with uninstall protection, so if it was set up correctly, your child won’t be able to bypass or uninstall it from their device(s). To do so, ensure that your child’s account on the device is a normal user account and that they don’t have administrator access. Mobicip is also capable of filtering and monitoring activities on any browser in incognito/private mode.

Does Mobicip allow me to see all of my child’s social media activity?

No, Mobicip only works for Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook accounts (Snapchat monitoring doesn’t work on iOS devices). It also doesn’t record all of your child’s activities. You’ll only be able to see messages and images that contain concerning behavior or content in one of the following categories: Bullying, Sexual, Violence, Drugs, and Self harm/Suicide.

If you’re interested in a parental control app with more comprehensive social media monitoring capabilities, check out Bark. Not only can it monitor over 30 social media platforms including TikTok, Skype, Discord, and more, but it also checks for 15+ categories of concerning behavior or content, and can even monitor email and text messages.

Will my child know that I’m monitoring their social media accounts?

Yes, Mobicip requires that you have your child’s login credentials to set up its social media monitoring feature.

Bark, another parental control app that can monitor social media accounts, also encourages you to be open with your child about your use of a parental control app and about digital safety.

If for whatever reason you wish to monitor your child’s social media without them knowing, consider mSpy instead. While it’s not as good of a parental control app, it has powerful surveillance features and is designed to work stealthily.

What devices does Mobicip work on?

Mobicip has kids apps for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Chromebook devices.

Parents can access their dashboard from any device through a web browser from which they can change the settings and restrictions on any of the devices being monitored by Mobicip.

Does Mobicip allow me to monitor calls and SMS?

No. However, you can block messaging apps using Mobicip’s app filtering function, and you get reports if concerning behavior or content shows up on one of your child’s monitored social media accounts.

If call and SMS monitoring is important to you, I highly recommend checking out Qustodio instead. It’s my favorite parental control app in 2023, and it allows parents to read all of their child’s text messages and create blacklists and whitelists to block incoming or outgoing calls and messages.

Does Mobicip have a free plan?

Yes. Once your 7-day free trial of Mobicip’s Premium features expires, you’ll be automatically downgraded to the Basic version. The Basic plan only gives you access to Mobicip’s web filtering function.

If you’re looking for a good free parental control app, I recommend Qustodio. Its free plan gives you access to plenty of its features including screen time monitoring, daily time limits, restricted time periods, and web filtering.