Bark Review: Pros & Cons, Features, Ratings, Pricing and more

The best parental control apps, like Bark, are becoming increasingly popular as the web gets increasingly dangerous for young people – and with features like screen time management, website and app blocking and location tracking available, it’s no wonder.

Bark was founded by Brian Bason, the current CEO, in 2015. It’s grown to become one of the biggest names in the parental control space, with 7.5 million children covered by its services – and, admirably, it’s detected millions of potential self-harm and bullying situations alongside loads of other threats.

Should you consider Bark for your parental control needs, though, or should you look elsewhere? Let’s find out.

Plans and pricing

Bark’s core service, its monitoring app, is available with two different plans. The more affordable plan, Bark Jr, costs $5 per month or $49 per year and allows parents to control screen time, filter websites and apps and monitor for appropriate content. It also offers location tracking and check-in features.

The more expensive plan, Bark Premium, costs $14 per month or $99 for a year and adds social media, email, and YouTube monitoring on phones, tablets, and computers. That pricier product also includes advice and tips from child psychologists and web search monitoring.

Bear in mind that right now the app only works in the US, Guam, South Africa and Australia. Bark’s size and popularity mean that the company has branched out beyond the app, too.

The Bark Phone integrates many of the app’s features into a kid-friendly smartphone with automatic monitoring capabilities. The Starter Plan costs $29 per month and doesn’t allow apps, social media or browsing, so it’s ideal for younger children. The Advanced Plan costs $39 per month and adds those features – with parental controls – for older children.

The Bark Watch monitors texts, tracks locations, manages contacts, and includes an emergency SOS button. It costs $15 per month and includes a Bark Premium subscription.

Finally, there’s Bark Home, which is a small device that connects to your home internet to monitor screen time, content and apps for every device in your home. It costs $6 per month.

Features

We’re here to discuss the Bark app, though, and there’s no denying that there’s plenty to talk about.

Firstly, it’s essential to note that, like many parental control tools, Bark can monitor various services and apps on both Android and iOS devices. While there are still differences between the features available on both platforms, Bark is still better than the likes of Boomerang when it comes to iOS functionality.

On Android, Bark currently monitors 30 different apps. The list includes big social media names, like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X and TikTok, alongside messaging services like WhatsApp, Kik, Slack and Discord. It covers cloud storage services like OneDrive and Google Drive, apps like ChatGPT, Spotify and Steam, and gaming platforms like Roblox.

Beyond that, Bark on Android monitors Google Chrome, Firefox, and the device's default browsers, email clients including Outlook, Gmail, AOL, Comcast, and iCloud, and the device’s texts, photos, and videos.

On iOS, add Yahoo Mail to the list. On Apple’s platform, Bark only includes complete monitoring for 16 apps, and that list does not include TikTok, Snapchat, Skype or Discord. That said, Bark can still monitor some social media apps like WhatsApp, X, and Reddit on iOS.

When a potential event is detected, the parent gets a real-time alert to intervene, and different alerting methods are available, including texts, emails, or push notifications.

Bark also offers comprehensive features to limit children’s online time, including blocking websites and controlling screen time with a range of granular options. Bark allows you to set up your child’s schedule throughout the week, choosing from options like School, Free Time, and Bedtime.

For instance, you can block games and social media apps from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. while still allowing your child to access educational apps. You can also set time limits for specific apps with Bark (however, this is a Bark Phone-exclusive feature and is not available in the app).

A particularly handy feature is the ability to pause internet access on your child’s device with the click of a button. This automatically cuts off access to apps that require an internet connection to work (provided they do not find an alternative, such as public Wi-Fi). As with any other parental control application, you can also block certain websites or apps that you deem inappropriate for your child.

What we liked about Bark is that it includes predefined content categories such as gaming, sexual content, social media, and streaming services. You can simply toggle a button to block all websites within a category instead of blocking each website manually.

You can also require safe search on browsers such as Google and Bing while blocking all other search engines that do not support the feature. It's worth noting that a complete website history is not available. Bark will only update you if it’s flagged for your chosen topics.

But, with Bark, that’s the idea. It’s not a keylogger or a tracker, and relies on a certain level of trust between parent and child – so you get alerting and reporting, but not a complete picture.

A similar approach is deployed for Bark’s location tracking. You get alerts when your children are at specific locations, rather than 24/7 tracking. If they drive, you get a summary of their travel and top speed.

You can also choose to lock your child's phone while they are driving to help them stay focused on the road. Parents can also request in-app check-ins to confirm that their child has reached a destination safely.

Unlike Net Nanny, Bark allows you to drop pins on a map and set a radius of up to 200 meters (0.12 miles) to create a predefined geographical boundary. Every time your child enters or leaves this boundary, you’ll receive an instant alert. However, the radius is a bit too small. Competitors like Norton Family allow you to set a two-mile radius, which is a much more practical approach to geofencing.

Despite offering such a wide range of parental control and monitoring features, Bark stays true to its philosophy of being non-intrusive. This is why you cannot read your child’s conversations in real time. Instead, Bark notifies you only when its algorithms detect a potential issue.

Bark can detect instances of anxiety, bullying, depression, drug- or alcohol-related conversations, hate speech, profanity, sexual content, violence, and weapon-related conversations.

Another handy feature is that Bark alerts you if your child attempts to create an alternative account to circumvent its monitoring. This helps prevent them from creating secret accounts to hide their online activity.

Bark’s machine learning is great at catching the latest trends and slang words, and it can spot if your child is using VPNs. To play into the trust involved here, children can uninstall Bark – albeit with a warning. If they try to install risky apps, parents will get a warning and parents can block, but that’s not automatic.

Interface and in-use

Setting up Bark is straightforward and takes around 10 minutes per device to connect your child’s phone with your own. Simply follow the setup checklist presented when you first log in.

One thing we liked about Bark is its "alerts, not logs" philosophy. Since Bark uses AI to filter your child’s activity, parents are not bombarded with endless notifications and are alerted only when there is a genuine concern.

Each alert is detailed, providing information about the platform where the incident occurred, the time it was detected, and even suggestions on what your next steps could be. Parents can review each alert and take the appropriate action, either dismissing it as a false positive or escalating it for further review.

Bark’s apps and desktop interfaces are excellent: clear, straightforward, and attractive. A dashboard provides a summary of the rules you’ve set for your children and their activity over the last seven days, and parents get a weekly report via email too.

Support

Bark offers email and live chat support, online guides and forums, and an AI assistant can provide easy access to articles and triage basic issues.

On the Bark website you’ll find how-to videos that explain the app’s key features, and plenty of support articles.

There isn’t any phone support, though, which may be a dealbreaker for parents who want quick responses while talking to a real person.

The competition

Bark faces plenty of competition as one of the larger names in the sector. Qustodio is one of the other big names, and it suffers from some of the same issues: it’s far more powerful on Android than on iOS, for starters.

One of Qustodio’s biggest advantages is its pricing, which is much more affordable than Bark’s. The basic Qustodio plan is priced at around $5/month, the same as Bark Jr., but it also includes the ability to pause internet access. Qustodio’s complete plan costs around $9.16/month, roughly $5 less than Bark, while offering similar features alongside AI-powered search and messaging alerts.

Elsewhere, Google Family Link is free, even if it’s a bit more basic than Bark, and Mobicip is a good alternative if you want real-time activity monitoring and location tracking.

Mobicip is also more affordable than Bark, with plans starting at just $2.99/month and supporting up to five devices. Even on this budget plan, you get similar features such as screen time limits, schedule management, activity reports, and app blocking.

Bark: Final verdict

Bark has adopted a modern approach to parental controls, promising to remain non-intrusive. This philosophy is clearly reflected in its feature set, which gives children a greater degree of freedom and privacy. Parents cannot read their children’s text messages directly. Instead, they are notified only when something suspicious or inappropriate is flagged by Bark’s algorithms.

In addition to the essentials, such as website blocking, app blocking, and location tracking, Bark offers several additional utilities that add value to its parental control suite. You can receive alerts whenever your child attempts to create a second account to circumvent Bark’s controls. Additionally, Bark offers pre-built content categories, allowing a single toggle to block all websites within a selected category, saving you a lot of manual setup time.

That said, Bark is a bit on the expensive side, costing around $14/month for its full feature set. If you’re looking for cheaper alternatives, apps like Qustodio, Mobicip, and Norton Family are all worthy options.

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