Qustodio Review 2025: Is It Legit? Is It a Scam?

Qustodio Review 2025: Summary

As a parent in today’s digital world, limiting your child’s time online might be challenging.

Also, it’s hard to say “No” when your kids are addicted to their phones and can’t imagine a world without social media.

For this reason, many parents seek assistance, and here is where tools like parental control applications can be useful.

Monitoring software like Qustodio doesn’t require parents to be tech savvy. However, users should be mindful of the subtleties of the chosen software.

It is the worst product ever. The vast majority of the time, Qustodio will not function properly.

A laptop is rendered useless by monitoring since it prevents all internet access regardless of whether or not any restrictions have been imposed.

It can monitor up to half of all internet traffic; however, it slows down your connection so much (3-4 times slower) that you must delete the program.

This Qustodio review will include the app’s features, pros and cons, and overall impression.

Qustodio Review 2025: In-depth

There’s no point in keeping this subscription active because it consistently causes problems and slows down connectivity on all machines where it’s installed.

uMobix is the most effective method for fixing this issue.

It’s only natural to look for the optimal answer and evaluate several possibilities. Keep reading if you’re interested in learning more about the Qustodio app!

Installation And Setup

Qustodio’s account creation process is as simple as it gets. To begin, visit the Qustodio website (found at www.qustodio.com) and register for a new account.

You can create a Qustodio account at the Family, School, or Business level based on your needs.

After registering, you’ll have the option to either install the app on your own or your kid’s device or configure it remotely using a web interface.

As a new subscriber, you will receive a free 3-day trial of Qustodio’s premium plan once you’ve installed the software.

Notably, no financial information of any kind is required. Qustodio has a silent install option that hides the app from the kid when installed on their smartphone.

The next step is to make a profile for your kid by giving details such as their identity, gender, and age. This can be done over and over again if you have multiple children.

You can completely activate the parental control software by following the setup tutorial that appears after you’ve downloaded and installed the app.

Qustodio Usability And Alerts

Less tech-savvy families will have trouble using the Qustodio interface to create clear boundaries for their children’s devices.

The Activity Timeline and the Panic Button are claimed to be two of its coolest additions.

The Activity Timeline provides a minute-by-minute summary of your kid’s phone use, including app usage, website visits, and social media post sharing, rather than just a list of the pages they’ve visited.

The Qustodio software does more than just let you let or disallow general types of websites; it can also notify you when your child visits a specific website, such as a file-sharing or chat site.

Children can visit some questionable but not necessarily dangerous websites with your knowledge and supervision.

Screen Time Limits

Qustodio doesn’t excel at its stated purpose of limiting screen time.

You can set limits on the amount of time, the number of times per day, and the kind of apps that your kids can use on their own devices.

This is compatible with both mobile devices and desktop computers. Qustodio can only restrict and manage select apps on iOS devices.

As of this writing, that number has grown to over 6,000, and if you wish to ban an app that isn’t already supported, you can ask the development team to add it.

Applications like Roblox, WhatsApp, and Clash Royale that “use special internet connections that can’t be stopped or accurately reported by Qustodio” are exceptions.

On Android, you can restrict your subscription to YouTube in both the web browser and the native Android app.

You can see which videos they’ve seen and which they’ve searched for with Qustodio.

Depending on the app and the day of the week, you can configure a different time limit for use.

The only limitation is that you cannot set time limits for specific app usage.

In other words, you can only restrict access to the gadget at specific times of the day; limiting TikTok before school would require altogether restricting access to the device.

Each week’s hour can have its own grid with access allowed or denied. That gives you the freedom to set varying schedules for their screen use throughout the week.

The main drawback is that more nuanced controls are unavailable, such as disabling a gadget from 9:30 pm to 7:30 am. On the hour, any blocking will begin and finish.

Blocking And Filtering

Qustodio facilitates internet censorship in the same way that other access control software does.

Qustodio’s cutting-edge technology effectively filters out pornographic and other harmful materials. It is functional even when using incognito mode.

Narcotics, betting, pornographic, VPNs, and violence are just some of the over 30 content types that can be blocked.

Either you can let them, forbid them, or have the software notify you if any of these content categories is viewed.

It’s also possible to disable access from unknown domains and devices.

Regrettably, Qustodio does not have access to privacy-focused search engines, so you cannot restrict children’s access to certain web pages based on keywords.

Call And Texting Management

Even though this is an Android-exclusive function, Google currently forbids Qustodio from implementing it in the Qustodio app available through the Google Play Store.

You’ll need to sideload a modified version of the program from Qustodio’s website to spy on your kid’s phone calls and messages.

When you update the app on your kid’s device to this version, the changes won’t take effect until you restart the device.

Then, go to the parental dashboard and look for the options there.

The call and text control features are very similar to the online filtering area, allowing you to permit or disallow all incoming or outgoing calls or block certain phone numbers.

It is not possible to block text messages; instead, a separate setting allows you to read the text of any incoming SMS messages while still missing any incoming MMS (photo/video) communications.

Once activated, this function performed as expected.

We recently tried several apps, and Qustodio was the only one that retained the ability to block calls and receive text messages, so if this is an important function for you, it should be near the top of your list.

YouTube Monitoring

Qustodio parental control allows you to keep tabs on what your kids are up to on YouTube across multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.

Depending on your subscription level, you will have access to different features. Your child’s search history is viewable to you, including any videos they may have watched.

Based on your preferences, you can also restrict access to YouTube or even completely block it. Please note that only paid subscribers have access to this content.

If you’re using the most recent build of the Qustodio app, YouTube tracking is enabled automatically.

Communication Monitoring

Android devices allow you to log and monitor your messages and phone calls.

While Apple is to blame for the lack of a fix for the iPhone, this issue also impacts other parental control apps.

Solutions exist that “bug” the phone to record calls and record your child’s keystrokes to piece together their SMS chat, but this is real spy stuff and somewhat off the beaten path.

Location Tracking

With Qustodio’s GPS monitoring, you can rest easy knowing exactly where your children are at all times, provided they have their smartphones on them.

The real-time location of your employees can be viewed on your desktop or mobile dashboard.

You may see whether they are actually studying at a friend’s house or have gone somewhere else by looking at the map with their avatars placed on it.

However, the app lacks the geo-fencing ability, which is a major setback. It claims to offer this feature, but several users have complained that it doesn’t exist.

App Blocking

You can restrict your kid’s access to inappropriate content on their mobile devices with the help of Qustodio’s app and game-blocking features.

This is an excellent method of controlling their screen usage and restricting them to suitable apps for their age group, but Qustodio fails to deliver the required quality here.

As an additional security measure, you can restrict their use of certain apps to particular time periods. You could, for instance, give them 30 minutes of Snapchat time per day.

In addition to the standard app-blocking option, you can choose which apps your child is allowed to use.

When your child asks for permission to use an app, you can immediately authorize or block it.

Qustodio Flaws

The security of Qustodio is respectable, but there is no way to be notified if your kid attempts to alter the app’s configuration.

Oftentimes, parents will upgrade their smartphones and tablets and then give them to their children, but if the devices are too old, the Qustodio parental software configuration may not be compatible with them.

If you want to make sure that Qustodio will work on your computers, check out the site to see what operating systems and browsers it supports.

When you attempt to install Qustodio on a Mac you might encounter a number of incompatible messages from your security suite; indeed, the Qustodio website specifically discourages doing so.

After installing Qustodio, the business suggests reinstalling antivirus software.

Qustodio exclusively monitors Facebook activity, which is a major limitation. That’s completely unacceptable.

Qustodio isn’t the only company with this issue. Many apps on iOS have fewer features than their Android counterparts. iOS’s default configurations are to blame in part for this.

How Much Does Qustodio Cost?

While Qustodio for Families isn’t cheap, there is always the option of using it for free. The free version can only track one device at a time and only maintains the last seven days of data.

Filtering the Internet and setting time limits on specific apps are also included as standard fare.

Qustodio offers three different paid subscription plans, including Small, depending on the size of the household.

Yearly fees for the first two tiers start at $54.95, with the third tier costing $137.95.

Up to 30 days of surveillance and monitoring, app-based time limitations, and location monitoring are just a few of the premium features that set these plans apart from the free tier.

To put it simply, Qustodio is not limited to households.

Qustodio for Schools is geared toward preventing pupils from wasting time on a school network, while Qustodio for Business is meant to ensure that workers are actually doing their jobs and not, you know, watching cat videos.

These alternatives are comparable to Qustodio for Families in terms of functionality. The price is the primary distinction.

Customer Service

Qustodio’s paid customers have access to email support. In order to complete the online form, you will need to sign in to your account.

Care Plus is an optional add-on to any of the premium plans that grants you access to additional benefits, including regular check-ins, tailored assistance in both English and Spanish, and a help desk.

Care Plus costs an additional $12.99 per month for those on the Small plan but is included at no extra cost with the Medium and Large plans.

If you have any further questions about your bill, your subscription, or a technical issue, you can refer to Qustodio’s comprehensive help area.

However, if your issue is particularly pressing, you may want to try Youtube, Fb, Insta, Dailymotion, or LinkedIn to get in touch with the business.

In Summary, the best spy apps in 2025 are;

Review Verdict

This Qustodio review covers not only the functions of the software but also its installation and configuration basics.

The biggest issues with Qustodio are the high price tag and the fact that Android sideloading is required for call and text monitoring to function.

Qustodio isn’t our top recommendation when it comes to monitoring apps.

We think uMobix is superior, so we suggest it to you. uMobix makes it simple for parents to monitor their children’s smartphone use.

Although uMobix is compatible with both Android and iOS, several functions are currently only available on iOS.