13 Top Open-source Free Parental control Solutions
A parental control app is a robust tool primarily used by parents to gain control over their children’s smartphones and digital devices. These apps offer a range of features designed to enhance online safety and manage screen time effectively.
Why You May Need a Parental Control App?
- Content Filtering and Blocking:
- Parental control apps allow you to filter and block inappropriate websites, apps, and content. You can customize restrictions based on your child’s age and maturity level.
- By setting up filters, you ensure that your child accesses age-appropriate material and avoids harmful or unsafe content.
- Screen Time Management:
- With these apps, you can limit the amount of time your child spends on their devices. Excessive screen time can impact sleep, physical activity, and overall well-being.
- Set daily usage limits to encourage a healthy balance between digital activities and other essential aspects of life.
- Monitoring Activities:
- Parental control apps provide real-time tracking and monitoring of your child’s online activities. You can see which apps they use, websites they visit, and how much time they spend on each.
- Monitoring helps you identify potential risks, address any concerns, and have informed conversations with your child about responsible digital behavior.
- Safe Social Media Usage:
- Many parental control apps offer features specifically for social media monitoring. You can track your child’s interactions, messages, and posts on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat.
- Protecting your child from cyberbullying, inappropriate content, and online predators becomes easier with these tools.
- Creating Family Time:
- By limiting screen time, parental control apps encourage more family interactions. Kids can engage in other activities like homework, outdoor play, or quality time with family members.
- Balancing digital usage with offline experiences fosters healthier relationships and overall well-being.
In summary, parental control apps empower parents to guide their children’s digital experiences, ensuring safety, healthy habits, and responsible online behavior.
In the following list, we offer you the best we can find to help you achieve better managing for what can your kids see over the internet, however some of these projects require technical skills to install, configure and use.
1. KeexyBox
KeexyBox is a unique program designed for use with Raspberry PI, offering a range of services to enhance your home network experience. It provides parental control capabilities, blocks ads, limits telemetry, and enables anonymous internet browsing, without the need for software installation on your devices.
KeexyBox can also transform your network into a public Wi-Fi hotspot with a captive portal. Acting as a default gateway and DNS server for your home devices, KeexyBox forms a bridge between your devices and your router or internet box.
It intercepts all internet connections, enabling website filtering and Tor network browsing based on your configured connection profiles. This makes it a comprehensive solution for managing and securing your home network.
KeexyBox's Features
- Parental Control
- Ads Blocker (using DNS)
- Website Filtering
- Anonymous Browsing over Tor Network
- DNS forwarding over Tor Network
- Tracking Blocker (using DNS)
- Internet Privacy Protection
- Wireless Access Point
- Captive Portal
Cons
- Requires some tech skills to setup
2. KidSafe (Android)
KidSafe is a free and open-source Android parental control app. Designed by an Egyptian developer for children's safety and digital well-being, the app is installed on a child's device and linked to their parents' device. This provides parents with remote access to their child's device and control over various features.
Parents can manage their child's screen time, block certain addictive applications, track their real-time location, and set up a Geo-fence. If the child exceeds the Geo-fence or the set daily usage timer, the parent is notified, and the phone can be automatically locked.
In addition, KidSafe allows parents to view their child's installed apps, SMS messages, phone calls, and contacts. Parents can also call or message these contacts if necessary.
The app is ad-free and user-friendly, making it easy for parents to set boundaries for their children's smartphone or tablet use. Parents concerned about their children spending a lot of time on their devices should consider using KidSafe.
You can download the APK directly for Android devices, however it requires some knowledge to setup.
Mahmoud Mansour
3. Twert
Twert is considered the ultimate website and application blocker, designed for individuals and parents alike. Spearheaded by lkquan and twertinc, our tool is currently in the exciting beta stage.
Twert is not just an anti-procrastination tool—it's your partner in productivity, offering comprehensive scheduling options for blocking distracting applications and websites. Whether you're a student aiming for academic success or a parent hoping to regulate your child's online activities, Twert has got you covered.
4. Blocky
Blocky is a DNS proxy and ad-blocker for local networks, written in Go. It offers advanced features such as blocking DNS queries using external lists, configurable allow/denylists, advanced DNS configuration, and support for modern DNS protocols. Blocky also provides performance enhancements like customizable DNS answers caching and prefetching of frequently used queries.
For security, it supports modern DNS extensions, offers free configurable blocking lists, and does not collect user data. It also provides integration options like Prometheus metrics and Grafana dashboards.
Blocky is designed for easy installation and configuration, with support for single or multiple configuration files in YAML format.
It's stateless, supports x86-64 and ARM architectures, and can be deployed via a community-supported Helm chart for Kubernetes.
5. Time's Up
"Time's Up" is a Parental Control App specifically designed for Android devices. The application harnesses Native plugins to retrieve local data such as location and app usage, which is then sent to a database. This information is stored in cache, allowing parents to monitor their child's screen time effectively.
Parents can send messages and reminders to their children, for instance, when it's time to do homework or go to bed.
Even though the application is developed using Flutter, a versatile framework that typically allows for cross-platform development, "Time's Up" currently only supports Android. The primary purpose of the application is to track and record data from the child's device and convey it to the parents.
It upholds the privacy policies established for its users and does not collect data for third-party companies.
Furthermore, it offers a parent dashboard to control and oversee the apps used by the child. As it evolves, there may be potential for iOS support in the future, but for now, it remains an Android-exclusive application.
JordyHers-org6. LittleBrother
LittleBrother is a parental control application for Linux that monitors and limits children's play time across multiple hosts.
It terminates processes when play time is exceeded, but provides several notifications beforehand to allow for a graceful logout.
marcus677. AhMyth Plus
This app (AhMyth Plus) classifies as RAT, A RAT is a program that, once installed on a target device, allows remote administrative control. In malicious contexts, RATs are typically used to gain unauthorized access to a device for purposes such as data theft, surveillance, or system manipulation. However, when used ethically and with permission, as in the case of parental control apps, they can provide a means of supervising and regulating device usage.
While these features could be theoretically used for parental control purposes – such as monitoring location, viewing contacts, accessing call logs and SMS, and restricting access to certain apps – AhMyth Plus also has many functionalities characteristic of a Remote Administration Tool (RAT).
The features of AhMyth Plus include location tracking via GPS, microphone recording, viewing of contacts, SMS logs, sending SMS, call logs, a file explorer & downloader, camera access, the ability to see and run installed apps, device locking, link opening, calling a number, file or folder deletion, real-time microphone listening, and even wiping out the device.
It is important to note that AhMyth Plus is an open-source project and the developers explicitly state that the tool should be used for good purposes only. Misuse could result in the project being removed. Therefore, if AhMyth Plus is utilized as a parental control app, it should be done with careful consideration and transparency, ensuring the privacy and rights of all parties involved are respected.
VenomDino8. Parental-Controller-Android
Parental-Controller-Android is a useful application for parents looking to monitor and manage their child's smartphone use. This app gives parents the ability to restrict certain activities on an Android phone and allows them to remotely track their child's behavior.
The app's features are designed with parental control in mind. One of the key features is that it can send the child's SMS messages to the parent's device, providing parents with an insight into their child's communications. Additionally, it can forward the child's SMS/MMS messages to an email account for easy access and review.
Another important feature is that it sends phone call notifications from the child's device as SMS messages. This means that parents are notified every time their child makes or receives a call. These phone call notifications can also be forwarded to an email account for added convenience.
Moreover, Parental-Controller-Android has a location tracking feature. Parents can request the phone's location via an SMS message from the parent's device. This can provide peace of mind for parents, especially in cases where the child may not respond to calls or messages.
Features
Other features include:
- Can request for phone location by a SMS of parent device
- Record phone call in audio file forwarded with notification if parent asked for those (forward by email only)
- Send phone location with a time period
- Forward pictures
- Send a random screen shot of videos play in phone (forward by email only)
- Remote start/stop mic record with keyword in SMS and forward the audio file by email
- Access to contacts list in child device
- Disable/Enable applications list with keyword in SMS
- Keep reminders about child
gihankarunarathne9. Leia Parental Control (Chrome Extension)
Leia Parental Control is a tool that allows you to monitor your children's internet usage. It is written in JavaScript as a Google Chrome extension.
However, it is not available on the Chrome Web Store, so you'll need to download, install, and run it using Node.js on your local Chrome browser.
paganaye10. Productivito
Productivito is a versatile tool, ideal for both home and business use. It logs keystrokes, emails sent and received, and keeps track of all events in a neat timeline. But it doesn't stop there. This tool also monitors website browsing and app usage, and records opened documents.
One cool feature? It pops up attention checks on employees' workstations. Plus, it allows remote desktop viewing and system info checks. In a nutshell, it's great for managing employees, parental control, and boosting productivity.
11. WS2P
Hazem Abbas
Not-Baguette12. ChatGPT-based Parental Control Browser Extension
The ChatGPT-based parental control is an experimental browser extension designed to enhance the safety and flexibility of web exploration. Currently, it should be viewed as a proof of concept prototype and should not be relied upon as the sole parental control application.
Traditional parental control applications tend to rely heavily on blacklists, which can be limiting, especially for mixed-content sites like Wikipedia. Some leverage AI to filter explicit content, but they often fall short in blocking subtler yet harmful content such as racism, bigotry, and disinformation.
This is where the ChatGPT-based parental control extension comes into play. It proposes the use of Language Model Learning (LLM) as a content filter for parental control. By delegating content supervision to GPT, the extension aims to tackle the limitations of existing tools, providing a more flexible and safer online experience.
Its implementation is straightforward: it sends the page content to the OpenAI API, and consults GPT to determine the appropriateness of the content. Please note, as this is an experimental tool, its installation and operation require some developer skills. This extension is a stepping stone towards a smarter and safer web browsing environment.
13. PornAway
This is a free and open-source app written using Java to enables parents to block porn websites from displaying on their kid's computers.
Pornaway provides hosts files that can be used to filter porn sites and related ads. A dedicated android app has been released on XDA. You can use the hosts file on any machine. Hit Google to know how to enable hosts file on your system, browser, or through adblocker.
mhxionIf you know about any other open-source app that we did not mention here, ket us know.
