In this day and age, real-world danger extends even to the internet. Bullying, abuse, and even discrimination have taken on many online forms. Instant internet access has made it much easier for our children to discover content not appropriate for their age. It might be easy to safeguard your kids physically, but the digital world is a whole other story. As parents, it’s important to ensure that our children are safe, regardless of the medium and the situation. That’s why parental control apps like KidsGuard Pro are such a must nowadays. In this KidsGuard Pro review, I’ll help you find out if this app can indeed protect your children’s physical and, more importantly, digital presence.
KidsGuard Pro Benefits
KidsGuard Pro is a parental control app by ClevGuard designed to give parents a certain measure of access to their children’s mobile devices. Like many free and paid spy apps, it can scan a kid’s phone and report the contents to you, including contacts, messages, social media apps, and more.
One of the biggest strengths of KidsGuard Pro is how easy it is to install. In just five minutes, you have a fully installed, functional, and concealed app that will let you monitor your child’s device from the get-go, even if you’re not particularly tech-savvy.
Plus, even if you don’t have root access to your phone, you’ll still be able to use KidsGuard Pro to some extent. Granting root access can be technical and risky, so it’s nice to know that this app can still be used to protect your loved ones even without it.
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KidsGuard Pro also features a wide variety of functions, such as the ability to uncover address books, messages, emails, and even social media and instant messaging apps.
You can also track your kid’s physical location with the GPS mapping function. With this feature, you can set virtual boundaries that will trigger an alarm when crossed. Aside from that, you can also give remote commands and monitor your child’s device in real-time.
All of these features come at a reasonable price of $23.99 for a one-month plan, with the price getting lower as the subscription length gets longer.
Interested yet? If you think KidGuard is a great match for you, you can easily start your subscription by clicking here.
If you need more information to decide, however, my detailed KidsGuard review below will give you a more in-depth discussion of the features, product compatibility, prices, and more.
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KidsGuard Pro Review
This is a detailed review of KidsGuard Pro. By the end of this section, you should have a better idea of whether or not this app matches your needs. To give you the most accurate information, I used an unrooted Android device to try out each feature of this spy app. According to KidsGuard Pro’s website, there’s no need to root or jailbreak the device in order for the app to work, so I’ll take them for their word.
Dashboard
The dashboard is your command center – the place where you will first land when you log in to a fully installed KidsGuard Pro app. From here, you should get an overview of the most important information about your child so that you can monitor their status at a glance. Here, you can see that KidsGuard Pro has many things to offer. On the left side of the full dashboard, you’ll see the main menu. You can use it to navigate to the specific function that you need. Meanwhile, on the right side of the screen, occupying the most space of the dashboard, you can see quick analytics of your child’s phone. In this window, you can see categories for your Account and Order Information, Device Information, Top Callers, Top Messages, and Last Known Location. Data is summarized cleanly and efficiently, and with just one glance, you can determine the overall status of your child’s device. If you want to see their specific stats, you can navigate to the exact function that you need by selecting the correct button from the sidebar.
Main Features
Here, I will review the app’s main monitoring features.
Call Logs Access
Knowing who your children are calling on their phones is a great way of knowing who they’re talking to in their daily lives. With this kind of knowledge, you can evaluate whether your children are associating with the right crowd or not. You can also tell if they’re being bullied or threatened by specific phone numbers. On the KidsGuard Pro dashboard, you can locate it under the Phone Files category in the left-hand menu. Upon clicking it, you’ll be brought to a window that displays all of the call logs on your child’s device. Here, you will see the name of the contact, phone number, call type, duration, and the call’s timestamp. You can sort these entries by date simply by clicking on the calendar button at the top. There’s also the downward arrow beside the Date section of the display. You can alternate between the most recent to the latest history display. Although the information displayed is very detailed, one problem I found is that it doesn’t display the most recent call logs at all. The latest call logs that the app gathered were from February 2020, even though I’ve been using the phone regularly for calls since then. That said, this incomplete information might be because of the unrooted Android phone I used for this trial, which goes against what ClevGuard said on KidsGuard Pro’s website that there’s no need for rooting.
Messages
SMS is still one of the most widely used forms of communication, so you need to be able to access it if you want to stay updated on your children’s interactions. This way, you will know if they’re ever approached by potentially dangerous contacts or if they’re being bullied. You can find this function on the KidsGuard Pro platform directly below the call logs button on the left sidebar. The messages window displays conversation threads in the form of chat boxes, which is an easily understandable and clean method of organization. On this window, you can see the name of the contact, the conversation, and the time stamp. However, it suffers from the same problem as the call logs – although it does display some data, this data is inaccurate and not up-to-date. Again, this could be because my test device is unrooted and can’t give maximum permissions to the app.
Contacts
Getting access to your children’s address book will reveal who they’re in contact with through SMS and instant messaging apps, such as WhatsApp. With this knowledge, you can more easily protect them from threats, especially if you find a suspicious contact. This function can be found right below the Messages button on the left menu. For this category, KidsGuard Pro performs adequately. The window displays the contact name, as well as other contact information, such as other numbers, emails, URLs, and addresses entered on the device. As far as I can tell, the list is pretty exhaustive. All the contact information saved on the phone is recorded on the platform, unlike both the messages and call logs functions.
Browser History
It’s also a great idea to know what your children are searching for on the web. The internet gives them very easy access to whatever content they desire, so they can easily search for age-inappropriate content, such as violence, drug abuse, and pornography. In the KidsGuard Pro app, you can access the device browser history by clicking the button right below the Contacts option, on the left sidebar. Unfortunately, this function didn’t work for me. The app couldn’t successfully sync with the phone’s browser and display the browsing history. This is strange since I did recently use my device. And yet, no matter how many sync refreshes I made, the phone’s browser history still didn’t display.
Gallery
Knowing what kind of photos and videos your children are taking and saving is useful to know where their interests are leaning towards. For instance, if you see that they’re savings inappropriate photos and videos, you know to start a conversation about the things they should and shouldn’t look at. On the KidsGuard Pro dashboard, these options can be found below the browser history button. Once again, KidsGuard Pro fails to deliver. My trial phone has a full gallery, and yet it yielded no results.
App Activities Tracker
Knowing how your child spends their time on their phone is important, regardless if you just want to know if they’re spending enough time on school apps or if they’re spending too much time on their favorite game. This can be done through an activity tracker. On the KidsGuard Pro dashboard, this function can be seen right below the Photos and Videos tab. This window displays the most recent app activity on the device. You can see the app’s name, version, size, installation date, today’s frequency, and today’s screen time displayed. This is a very useful function to have, especially since most spy apps I’ve reviewed previously don’t have that information available. With this kind of information, you can easily track how much time your children are spending on various apps and take the appropriate actions. For example, you can initiate a conversation if you believe they are spending too much time on social media or game apps, or praise them if you see them using school or learning apps often.
Keylogger
A keylogger records the keystrokes on a target device’s phone. This allows you to have a record of everything typed on the target device. This is useful in case you want to scour your children’s phone for a specific keyword, such as profanities, violence, and other inappropriate languages. This function is right under the Apps Activities button on the left-hand menu. To track key logs, KidsGuard Pro supposedly uses screenshots. This is indicated in the keylogger window. Unfortunately, upon starting up, the folder was empty, as you can see below. In order to try it, I typed something into the SMS app and waited for the keylogger to record it. However, the keylogger was not able to take a screenshot as promised, even after several sync refreshes.
Calendar Tracker
Knowing the target device’s calendar schedule is very beneficial. With it, you can learn what your child is planning to do on certain dates or their availability in case you’re planning to schedule something for the family. This function can be found below the keylogger on the left-hand menu. KidsGuard Pro worked to some extent in my experience when it comes to the calendar tracker. It was able to sync some calendar data from my device. You can see that the calendar window displays the event, start time, end time, event location, and notes on the event. In the example below, you can see that the calendar is laid-out into some sort of daily routine for the child. However, you can see that the data presented is not up to date at all. The most recent information is from November 2020, which is almost a full year from the current date, as of this writing. Plus, the presentation of the information is sub-par. This kind of item-per-item presentation might be good for list-type data, such as contacts or call logs, but it doesn’t look good at all when it comes to dates and schedules. With this presentation, looking for particular dates is unnecessarily harder, as you have to scroll through entire lists just to see one date. It would’ve been much easier if the information had been laid out like a regular calendar.
GPS Tracker
More than just digital protection, KidsGuard Pro can also help us keep our children physically safe. A huge part of keeping them safe entails knowing where they are at any given time. This lets us know where they are in case they wander into a dangerous part of town, can’t find their way home, or need to be picked up. A GPS location tracker is needed to do these things. With a GPS location tracker, you can have real-time information about your children’s location so that you’ll always know where they are. On the KidsGuard Pro app, this can be found under the Location Tracking category on the left sidebar. In this aspect, KidsGuard Pro performed well. Other spy apps typically need root access to gain real-time access to the phone’s location, but this app did not need to go through such a complicated process. Even though my trial device was unrooted, the app was still able to track the phone very accurately. Here, you can see that the location tracking window is divided into several tabs. The main tab shows the real-time geographic location of the target device, and it can even pinpoint the actual location on the map. You can also zoom in and out to better orient yourself on the map. Below that, you can see that other historical locations are also recorded. Other information, such as the address, coordinates, and timestamp is recorded. You can also go to the GoogleMap view of these recorded locations. For a spy app that doesn’t require root access to function, the GPS tracking service is quite impressive. With this, you can track your child’s real-time location, as long as the GPS on the target phone is turned on.
Geofencing
Geofencing allows you to create a “fence” around a geographic area on the map and alert you whenever the target device leaves that vicinity. You can set it up around known dangerous places, such as bad parts of town, in order to get an alert in case your child enters it. You can also set it around the area that you know your child will be in to get alerted if they leave it without permission. If you want to use this function, you can find it right below the Locations tracking button under the Locations Tracking category. The first time you set up a geofence, you will get the following message explaining the function. If it’s your first time, KidsGuard Pro will first need to know the location of your browser. You will then have the option to set up a geofence around your chosen area. You can edit the name of the geofence and set the restricted location by dragging the green pin across the map. The minimum radius range is 50 meters, while the maximum is 1,000 meters. You can also set a Guard Time for the geofence. This function allows you to set what days and times you turn the geo-fence on. This is a powerful function that allows you to limit monitoring times to only certain dates. This is useful if you need to restrict your children only on certain days of the week – for example, if you don’t want to let your children go to the mall or leave school during school days. Once you have saved your settings, just click Save. In addition to this, you can also opt to be alerted via email. This way, you can receive geofencing alerts on the go, without having to leave the KidsGuard Pro platform on at all times. Once you’re done fine-tuning your geofencing alerts, just hit Save once again, and the platform will record your alerts.
Wi-Fi Logger
Last in this app’s location tracking arsenal is the Wi-Fi logger. This function is useful in case the GPS on the target device is turned off. Wi-Fi logging will allow you to pinpoint your child’s location by tracking which Wi-Fi they are connected to on the map. On the platform, this function can be found under the Geofencing button, the last item on the Location Tracking drop-down menu. To try this feature out, I first turned on the Wi-Fi setting on my test device. KidsGuard Pro was then able to display this exact connection on the platform screen. Information such as the Wi-Fi name, connection start time, connection end time, connection duration, and even the location was recorded. You can even see the Wi-Fi location on the map with Google Map view. But upon further inspection, the map’s accuracy was off by a few hundred meters. However, for something that doesn’t use the GPS location and also doesn’t require root permission, I believe that this is a great value to be had, even comparable to top names in the industry. With this function, you will at least have a general idea of where your child last connected to the Wi-Fi, even if their GPS tracking hasn’t been turned on.
Social App Tracking
Most children spend the majority of their time on social media apps and instant messaging platforms. This is especially true once the pandemic hit because children had to flock to social media just to stay in touch with friends. If you’re not checking your children’s social media, you’re missing a huge part of their social lives. If you ever want to have a full understanding of who your children are, knowing their social media is a big must. Thankfully, it seems like KidsGuard Pro is up to the task. All of the social media monitoring tools can be found under the Social Apps drop-down menu on the left sidebar. From the get-go, I can already see a wide list of apps that the app can allegedly track, from Facebook Messenger and Instagram to WeChat and QQ. While my trial device doesn’t have every app on the list installed, it does have the most popular ones: Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Opening the Facebook Messenger tracker, I see that every single chat bubble is uploaded into an unsorted pile of information on the window. The app syncs in real-time, which is great, but it’s defeated by the utter lack of organization on the platform display. I have to say, this list-type conversation is not great for careful monitoring. All you get is the name of the contact and their messages, all piled on top of one another. Unfortunately, the app could not display any information from WhatsApp. You’ll need a separate app for that, it seems.
Remote Controls
Maybe you want to record a phone call as proof that your child is being bullied, or maybe you just need to know what your children are doing at an exact time. Whatever your reasons, having the ability to record phone calls is a handy tool to have. Luckily for you, KidsGuard Pro has remote control options, which include call recording, screenshot capture, and taking photos. With these functions, you should be able to remotely command the target device to perform these actions. The Call Recording function can be found under the Remote Control category, on the left-side menu. For your first phone call recording, you will get the following instructions. To test the feature, a trial call was made on my unrooted Android device. However, KidsGuard Pro could not detect the test call, even with the option active. Again, this might be because of the lack of root access to the device. To execute the comment for capturing screenshots, you need to press a button. Fortunately, unlike the Call Recording function, this one is fully functional. Every time the button is pressed, a screenshot of the real-time state of the phone is taken. I was glad to know that there are no shutter sounds or anything like that to give it away as well. Lastly, to its credit, the remote camera option did try to execute the command. However, it was detected by the device’s security system. Even when I manually hit “Allow” on the target device, the command still wouldn’t work. Overall, out of the three remote control options, only the capture screenshot command worked as intended.
Data Export
If you want to save the information that you have on the platform to somewhere else for storage, you’d have to export the data manually. Thankfully, KidsGuard Pro makes that very easy with its Data Export function, which is located second-to-last on the menu. From here, you can choose which modules and how many individual items of those modules you want to export. You also have a choice of deleting the exported data entries. When you press the blue Export button, the data will be exported into a CSV file format. Upon trial, the call logs were successfully exported and then immediately downloaded to the desktop computer as a CSV file.
Permissions Check
Lastly is the permissions check function. This is a unique and useful feature by KidsGuard Pro that lets you see the status of the permissions on your phone. With this module, you can see all the permission types the app needs to work on the target device, its status, and even the path that you need to take to locate the said permission. This is a useful tool, especially if you experience some anomalies in the performance of the app. When the app malfunctions, the permissions should be the first thing you need to check. After all, sometimes the target device may modify those permissions when it detects a potential security breach. If the target device disallows the needed permissions, that will cause the app to stop working properly.
Battery Consumption
One of my main gripes with most spy apps is their excessive battery consumption. In my experience, there are some spy apps that are fairly decent, but almost unusable because of how much they shorten a phone’s battery life. Of course, a phone will understandably experience faster battery consumption if there’s a spy app installed. Spy apps run in the background 24/7, which means they have the tendency to cause the device to heat up more than usual and use more battery power. However, too much of this can significantly reduce the target device’s user experience and even reveal the presence of a spy app that you’re trying to hide. That’s why it’s crucial for a good spy app to have minimal battery consumption. Fortunately, KidsGuard Pro is very good at this. From the moment it was installed, the trial device I used did not overheat, and there were no noticeable changes in battery consumption.
Ease Of Installation
Installation is one of the most challenging parts of using a spy app. Some products require that you have some amount of technical knowledge about smartphones – especially those that need your phone to be rooted to work. Thankfully, KidsGuard Pro has a pretty easy installation method. All you have to do is run it and press some buttons. It’s done in literally five minutes, at least in my experience. In the next sections, I will show you how easy it is to install KidsGuard Pro to your mobile device, whether it’s an Android device or an iPhone.
Android
Before we begin, I’d like to clarify that there are going to be differences in the installation method between an Android device and an iPhone. Also, since this app is a paid subscription, the first thing you will have to do is to purchase your desired subscription length on the company page.
iPhone
The installation instructions for iOS devices are different since the KidsGuard Pro iOS version is not the same as the Android one. If you’re on Android, you just have to install the app to the target phone and you can already monitor it remotely through your web platform, but the iOS version is completely different. There are two main methods of installing KidsGuard Pro iOS on an iPhone or an iPad and it depends on which version you’ll get. The first one is called iPhone Monitoring, and it can be done by installing KidsGuard Pro on the computer and connecting the target device to it. This is incredibly inefficient, as it can only scan and monitor the device after you plug it in. It also works with iTunes backups, as long as the computer with KidsGuard Pro has iTunes installed on it, as well. KidsGuard Pro can then show all the contents in the backup. The only reason you might opt for this method is if you don’t have access to the target phone, but you know that the family computer’s iTunes has a backup of your child’s iOS phone on it. The second method, which is the easier and more popular one, is called iCloud Monitoring. It involves logging in using the target device’s iCloud email address and password. Once you’ve done that, you can view the contents of their phone, with no jailbreaking needed. However, you’ll need physical access to the device in order to complete the process since a 2FA code is required.
Product Compatibility
A spy app needs to be able to run on multiple platforms – after all, what use is an app if the target device can’t even install it? Thankfully, KidsGuard Pro is compatible with both Android and iOS, although there are marked differences in their operation and the features available to them. Even between the two iOS versions, there are some differences. For instance, the iPhone monitoring option will only show the location history of the device, but not its real-time GPS location. This is only available to both the Android version and the iCloud monitoring option. Similarly, real-time monitoring features are not available on the iPhone monitoring option, even though they’re available on the two other options. On the upside, the iPhone monitoring option can see over 20 different file types, while the iCloud monitoring option can see only eight. Lastly, for the iPhone Monitoring option, you can download the KidsGuard Pro app on both Windows and Mac computers. There’s no KidsGuard Pro app that can monitor computers, but Clevguard does have a completely different app called MoniVisor for this.
Price
KidsGuard Pro has a simple, three-tier payment plan that depends on the length of your subscription and the type of product you want. The Android version and the iCloud Monitoring option are the same price. The one-month option costs $23.99, the three-month option costs $39.99, which is $13.33 per month, and the one-year option costs $79.99, which is $6.67 per month. Meanwhile, for the iPhone Monitoring option, a one-month subscription costs $29.99, a three-month subscription costs $49.99, which is $16.66 per month, and the one-year option costs $89.99, which is $7.50 per month. All of this app’s subscription tiers are premium, so you get access to all features of the app no matter what subscription length you pay for.
What I Liked About KidsGuard Pro
Strong location tracking capabilities. One of the best things that stood out during the trial was the fully-enabled location tracking abilities of the KidsGuard Pro app. Other spy apps require root access to use the full functionality of the location tracking app, but this app can track GPS location even without it. It can also set geofences, and track using Wi-Fi IP addresses.Functional address book access. Besides location tracking, one of the most functional features that this app has is access to the contacts of the target phone. It can show all the contacts on the target device in a well-organized presentation.Minimal battery consumption. I spent a few hours trying out KidsGuard Pro’s various features and I didn’t notice any noticeable heating or faster battery drain. This makes it an ideal app for covert monitoring so that you can see how your child normally behaves without your supervision.Easy installation. This app’s installation process is so quick and easy that I’m sure even non-tech-savvy parents out there can manage it. It also has on-screen photo directions and a floating assistant ball to help you navigate back to the main installation window.
What I Didn’t Like About KidsGuard Pro
Doesn’t have content restriction functions. Although you can supposedly track the content that your children explore online, this app doesn’t have the content restriction functions that other apps have, like Qustodio and Norton Family. For an app that’s dedicated to parents, it should have some type of managerial feature.Limited remote control functions. The remote control functions are one of the most valuable features of a spy app because they allow parents to get the information that they want at a specific point in time. However, out of the three remote control functions of this app, only one of them worked as promised.Most phone file access functions were not accurate. This might be because of the lack of root access, but most of the file access functions did not display up-to-date information. Call logs, SMS, gallery, and key logs either lacked sufficient information or did not work at all. Although these features are pretty basic, this kind of information is still useful to have in the right conditions.Disorganized social app tracking. This app was able to monitor and even record several messages on Messenger, but the presentation of those messages was very confusing. The chats were not arranged by chatbox and content and instead were stacked on top of each other, making navigation and sorting difficult and ineffective.iPhone monitoring version is ineffective. One of the worst aspects of this app is its iPhone monitoring option, which isn’t so much a monitoring app as it is a backup-viewing app. It can’t monitor real-time, and instead will only start showing data after you plug in the target device.
KidsGuard Pro: Is It Worth It?
If what you’re looking for is a robust location tracker on Android even without root access, then this app is certainly worth every buck. For everything else, KidsGuard Pro performs adequately, but it has minor problems and design issues that pile up, reducing its quality. If you plan on using this app for its entire range of features, then you might fare better with a rooted Android phone. If you’re an iPhone user, though, I don’t think I can recommend this app. Installing the iCloud Monitoring version isn’t a hassle, but it can only see eight file types and the features are limited. The iPhone Monitoring version can show over 20 files types, but you need to connect it to a computer first. It doesn’t even have real-time or close to real-time monitoring. Overall, our KidsGuard Pro review shows that it’s a decent Android parental control app, especially for the price, but the iOS versions definitely need a much-needed improvement. Did you like this article? Let us know in the comments below!
