Qustodio Review: Is Its Premium Features Worth the Price?

Feature variety is among Qustodio’s biggest strengths. The app has many tools to help you manage and monitor your kids’ activity. Whether setting screen time limits, restricting certain apps, or monitoring your kids’ location, Qustodio has every important parental control tool you’ll need to keep your kids safe.

One thing worth noting is that Qustodio’s features work slightly differently on iOS devices due to the operating system’s restrictions. For instance, the call & messages feature must be set up on a macOS or Windows desktop first and then synced to the iOS device to function properly.

Also, Qustodio on iOS also creates a VPN for monitoring purposes and routes your kids’ traffic through this VPN to ensure monitoring can be enforced. This is why you may notice the VPN symbol at the top of your kids’ iOS device after setting up Qustodio.

Web Filter

Qustodio has one of the best web filters available in a parental control app. It gives you full control over the websites your kids can visit, letting you block specific websites or entire categories that you think are inappropriate. Once the filter is active, your kids won’t be able to visit the specified websites, and you’ll get alerts every time they try to.

Another highlight is that Qustodio’s web filter can help enforce additional security by blocking any unrecognized websites, enforcing Safe Search, and blocking unsupported browsers. Stopping unsupported browsers is especially helpful, as it ensures your kids don’t accidentally use browsers with vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit.

Screen Time Limiting

Qustodio makes it simple to customize how long your kids use their devices. The screen time limiting feature lets you specify a screen time allowance for your kids, ensuring they don’t use devices more than they’re allowed to.

I also like that you can choose what happens when kids use all their screen time. You can either block internet access on their devices or block all apps entirely and lock them out of the device.

Routines

Qustodio lets you set specific routines on your kids’ devices, ensuring they always do what they should at specified times. You can set a study routine that only lets them access educational websites or a focus routine where they’re locked out of the internet and have to focus on any tasks they must complete.

I especially like that routines in Qustodio are highly customizable. You can set them for specific times or days and fine-tune what your kids can do. This ensures that kids never use their devices to procrastinate when they’re supposed to be studying or focusing on their school work.

YouTube Monitoring

Since YouTube is where kids often waste the most time, I like that Qustodio has a reliable YouTube monitoring feature that lets you manage how long they use the platform. This feature lets you set exactly how long your kids can watch YouTube in a day and locks them out of the app and website once their time limit is exceeded.

App and Game Rules

If you’re worried about kids spending too much time on games, you’ll be pleased to know that Qustodio provides complete control over your kids’ app and game activity. You can specify which apps/games are allowed and which are blocked, and you can even set time limits on the games and apps that kids are allowed to access.

You’ll also get alerts whenever kids use a new app or game, letting you instantly decide whether they’re allowed to use it or if it should be blocked. Another highlight is that this feature splits apps and games into various categories, letting you quickly navigate through all the apps your kids use to decide which ones they can continue to access.

Call, Message, and Social Media Monitoring

Monitoring your kids’ call and message activity is crucial to keeping them safe. Thankfully, Qustodio offers a reliable monitoring tool that lets you see your kids’ text messages and see who they’re calling. This lets you remotely supervise all their communication and quickly see if they’re receiving any concerning messages or calls.

Another highlight of this feature is that Qustodio automatically alerts you when a message has suspicious content. The alerts feature uses AI to determine whether a text message has alarming content and lets you know if it’s something to be concerned about.

What’s great is that Qustodio’s monitoring also extends to social media apps. Whether your kids use WhatsApp, Instagram, or something else to talk to their friends, you can still monitor all their messages and quickly see if there’s any concerning content in the messages.

Location Tracking

Knowing where your kids are at all times is essential, which is why I was pleased to see that Qustodio’s Family Locator offers regular location alerts. It monitors your kids’ location and updates it every few minutes to tell you exactly where they are and where they’re going.

Qustodio also provides geofencing via its Family Locator feature. This feature has a My Places function that informs you every time your kids enter or exit a specified area.

SOS Button

The SOS button is extremely helpful if your kids are ever in a dangerous situation. This button instantly sends panic alerts with their location to all trusted contacts, letting trusted adults immediately know where they are and that they need help. It’s really simple to set up and worth using because of the increased safety.

Parental Dashboard

The parental dashboard is Qustodio’s centralized monitoring interface that you can easily access from the browser or the Qustodio for Parents app. This dashboard contains a summary of all your family members’ devices and a full overview of their recent activity. You can also use it to turn protection on/off on someone’s device or add new family members to monitor.

Timeline

The Timeline is a feature in Qustodio’s parental dashboard that lets you get all the details about what your kids have been doing. It lets you know what apps your kids used, their online web searches, their conversation history, and who they’ve been calling.

The Timeline also has a useful filtering feature that lets you look for specific things. If you’re worried about your kids searching for inappropriate things online, you can easily filter the timeline to show only search results, letting you quickly navigate through them.

Uninstallation Protection

Uninstallation protection is among Qustodio’s critical features. It ensures your kids can’t uninstall Qustodio and remove restrictions from their devices. Every time your kids attempt to remove Qustodio through their phone’s app drawer, it’ll just reappear on their device as if nothing happened.

Tech-savvy kids may try to circumvent this by going directly into the phone’s app settings and removing Qustodio from there. Thankfully, Qustodio’s uninstallation protection can block access to the device’s settings, ensuring there’s no way for your kids to remove Qustodio or its various protections from their devices.

The desktop app even lets you hide Qustodio, meaning your kids won’t know if it’s on their devices. Since it’s harder to enforce uninstallation protection on desktop platforms, using this feature is a great way to make sure kids don’t find and remove Qustodio.

Keep your kids safe with Qustodio

Installing Qustodio on your kids’ devices is simple — all you have to do is add your kids to your Qustodio account and set up the apps on their devices. The following guides will explain the whole process in a step-by-step manner.

Adding Kids to Qustodio

Installing Qustodio for Kids on Android

Installing Qustodio for Kids on Windows