mSpy vs Bark: Which Will Keep Your Children Safe?

One of the best ways to keep an eye on your child in today’s digital environment is to use a parental monitoring app. These apps let you see what your child is doing online, monitor who they’re talking to, and keep track of their location at all times.

However, not all monitoring apps offer the same features, and some are more invasive than others. It’s important to find the right balance and get the monitoring app that suits your family’s needs without spending a fortune.

In this guide, I’ll help you choose the best app by comparing mSpy vs Bark—two of the most popular parental monitoring tools on the market.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. mSpy vs Bark - At a Glance
2. mSpy vs. Bark - Pricing Compared
3. mSpy vs. Bark - Key Features
4. mSpy vs. Bark - Device Compatibility
5. mSpy vs. Bark - Customer Reviews
6. Verdict: Which Is Better, mSpy or Bark?
7. FAQs

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. mSpy vs Bark - At a Glance
2. mSpy vs. Bark - Pricing Compared
3. mSpy vs. Bark - Key Features
Show Full Guide
4. mSpy vs. Bark - Device Compatibility
5. mSpy vs. Bark - Customer Reviews
6. Verdict: Which Is Better, mSpy or Bark?
7. FAQs

mSpy vs Bark – At a Glance

Here’s a quick overview of the most important details you need to know about mSpy and Bark. mSpy offers a range of phone monitoring features, while Bark provides scheduling tools to control your kid’s screen time.

mSpy vs. Bark – Pricing Compared

Winner: mSpy. Although mSpy is more expensive than Bark, the ability to record your child’s screen and operate in stealth mode makes it better value for money.

mSpy and Bark both offer their monitoring tools at competitive price points. But does one app provide better value? I’ll dive into each app’s plans and explain which one gives you more for your money.

mSpy’s standard plan includes all the app’s features, such as call recording, social media monitoring, location tracking, and a hidden screen recorder. Pricing varies based on the length of your subscription.

This standard plan allows you to monitor a single phone, but mSpy also has a Family Kit plan that supports up to three phones. It costs $45 per month for a six-month subscription or $34 per month for a 12-month subscription. You can monitor all your tracked phones from a single mSpy control panel.

Bark offers two different plans for its app.

Both plans let you monitor an unlimited number of devices, so even if you have several children with multiple devices to monitor, you only need a single Bark subscription.

In addition, Bark offers a proprietary kid-safe smartphone with unlimited talk and text, called the Bark Phone, starting at $39 per month. There’s also the Bark Home device, which applies parental control and monitoring features to your gaming consoles, smart TVs, and other internet-connected devices. Bark Home starts at $6 per month.

While the Bark Jr plan is affordable, it doesn’t enable you to monitor text messages or social media, nor does it offer alerts for potentially harmful content. These are key features that help Bark compete with mSpy. So, while Bark’s starting price looks reasonable, you’ll probably need the more expensive Bark Premium plan.

Though Bark Premium is still cheaper than mSpy, it lacks crucial monitoring features like screen recording and a keylogging tool, which detract from its overall value. Another key difference is that mSpy can operate discreetly in the background of your child’s phone, giving you an uncensored view of their activity.

Because of these added features, I think mSpy offers better value for your money than Bark. However, the two apps are very competitive in price, so it really comes down to what features you need in a monitoring app.

mSpy vs. Bark – Key Features

Winner: mSpy. The app stands out for its ability to record more information from your child’s phone, including calls, photos, social media messages, and everything happening on their screen.

I’ll dive into the key parental monitoring features that mSpy and Bark offer and see how they stack up.

Call and Text Monitoring

Both mSpy and Bark allow you to monitor your child’s text messages. You can see who they’re chatting with and everything that’s been said.

However, there’s an important difference in their text message monitoring capabilities: mSpy will display deleted text messages, while Bark won’t. That’s because mSpy captures texts and saves them to your dashboard as soon as they arrive on your child’s phone, whereas Bark only shows you the content currently on your child’s phone when you open the app.

On top of that, mSpy offers a keystroke logger so you can see everything your child has typed—even if they never sent the message.

Another benefit of mSpy is that it will capture your child’s call log and record all their phone calls for you to listen to later. Bark doesn’t give you access to your child’s call log and doesn’t record calls. This feels like a big miss since savvy teenagers can easily use calling to get around Bark’s monitoring features.

It’s also worth noting that both mSpy and Bark offer access to photos and videos on your child’s device.

Social Media Monitoring

mSpy and Bark each help you keep an eye on your child’s social media activity across a wide range of apps. While Bark focuses more on traditional social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, and X, mSpy focuses on direct messaging tools like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat, Kik, Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype, Line, and Viber.

Bark makes social media monitoring pretty automatic. It uses natural language processing to alert you of troubling content or offensive language in your child’s social media posts or direct messages. In addition, it lets you see posts your child makes to their timeline or feed across most apps.

However, Bark does have limitations. For example, it only displays posts on your child’s Facebook timeline, not comments on threads or posts they make in groups. Similarly, it can monitor your child’s posts, direct messages, and searches on Instagram, but not their stories or reels.

mSpy lets you read all your child’s direct messages across social media apps, which is great for monitoring who they’re talking to online. Although it doesn’t display content from your child’s news feed, the app’s screen recording capabilities make it easy to see everything they view on social media.

While it takes time to watch the recordings—especially if your child spends a lot of time each day on social media—you get a much more holistic view of what your child is doing online than you can with Bark.

Screen Recording and Keylogging

Only mSpy offers the ability to record the screen of your child’s device and log all of their keystrokes. This is a huge advantage because it provides a complete view of what your child is doing on their phone. You can review their web searches, see everything viewed on social media, and spot if they have any hidden apps they may not want you to know about.

The keylogger also ensures you can track your child’s conversations and search history even if they delete data from their phone or don’t send messages they’ve drafted.

Location Tracking

mSpy and Bark are both reliable GPS location-trackers, but they work a bit differently.

With mSpy, you can get your child’s real-time location by activating their phone’s GPS in the background. mSpy displays their location on a map and even highlights locations they visit frequently.

In Bark, there are two ways to get your child’s location. You can turn on real-time location tracking, which works similarly to mSpy. Alternatively, you can request a check-in from your child. They’ll get a push notification on their phone and must manually approve sharing their location with you. This offers a happy medium for teens who may want a greater degree of independence and don’t want to be tracked constantly.

Both mSpy and Bark support geofences—virtual boundaries you can draw on a map around frequently visited locations (like your child’s school). You’ll get an alert whenever your child enters or leaves a geofenced area. It’s an excellent way to ensure your child arrives at school safely. You can also use geofences to find out if your child is somewhere you’ve told them not to go.

Screen Time Management

One of Bark’s standout parental control features is the ability to manage your child’s screen time. The app offers highly customizable schedules that put you in control of when your child can use their device and certain apps.

For example, you could disable your child’s phone after 8 pm to encourage a good bedtime routine. You could also disable social media apps during school hours or limit YouTube use to a certain number of hours per day.

Bark also lets you block specific apps and websites entirely, which is a good way to keep your child from accessing inappropriate content. It even offers the option to block whole content categories, like sexual content or gaming, disabling access to a wide range of harmful websites and apps.

mSpy doesn’t offer tools to manage your child’s screen time or set schedules for app use. However, it does let you block apps and websites you don’t want your child using. mSpy lists all the apps installed on your child’s phone, and you can block any of them with just a tap.

Alerts

Bark and mSpy each offer alerts to help you stay on top of your child’s activity without checking the app’s dashboard 24/7.

In Bark, you can get alerts whenever your child enters or leaves a geofenced area or attempts to visit a blocked website. The app also uses natural language processing to recognize inappropriate content or content indicative of bullying and grooming. If Bark finds this content, it will send you an alert that includes a snippet of text from the relevant conversation.

In mSpy, you can get alerts whenever your child enters or leaves a geofenced area. You can also create custom keyword alerts for specific words and phrases and get a notification anytime these keywords appear in conversations or internet searches. mSpy will send you the text containing the flagged keyword so you have more context.

mSpy vs. Bark – Ease of Use

Winner: Draw. mSpy is slightly easier to install on your child’s device than Bark, but both platforms are user-friendly once you’re up and running.

mSpy and Bark are each fairly easy to use, even if you’re not the most tech-savvy parent. The installation process for each app can be a little finicky, but once you get past that, it’s very intuitive to monitor your child.

To install mSpy on an iPhone, you’ll need to know your child’s iCloud username and password or have physical access to their phone. Although it can be a bit confusing, mSpy offers really helpful tutorials and video walkthroughs. The process is easier on Android and only takes a few minutes.

One great thing about mSpy’s setup is that you don’t have to connect your child’s social media accounts manually. mSpy automatically loads messages and other data when your child opens a social media app.

The process of installing and configuring Bark is slightly more cumbersome. To install the app on an iPhone, you first need to install Bark on your computer and then physically connect your child’s phone to it. The process takes 10 to 15 minutes and involves having multiple devices in the same place simultaneously.

Bark also prompts you to create screen time schedules for your child’s device and choose apps to block when you first open the monitoring app. It also asks you to log in to each of your child’s social media accounts to connect them for monitoring. This means you’ll need to know the username and password for each app. Overall, it can feel a little overwhelming to have so many options when you first launch Bark.

Once mSpy and Bark are up and running, both apps offer a pretty seamless user experience. mSpy provides a web-based dashboard with panels for different types of data on your child’s phone—including their contacts, text messages, calls, photos, and social media messages across different apps.

There’s also a library of screen recordings, which you can sort by app to review your child’s activity on various social media platforms.

Bark offers an app for iOS and Android that you can use to monitor your child’s device. It has tabs for alerts, location tracking, and screen time management, while other monitoring options, like keyword tracking, are contained in a settings menu. The “alerts” feed is especially useful, allowing you to focus on potential threats to your child and review harmful content with a tap.

Overall, mSpy is easier to install than Bark, but once you’re up and running, both tools are relatively seamless. So, ease of use doesn’t feel like a major distinction between the two apps.

mSpy vs. Bark – Device Compatibility

Winner: Bark. The app is compatible with most smartphones, tablets, and computers.

Bark is compatible with a range of smartphones, tablets, and computers, whereas mSpy only works for Android and iOS devices.

Most kids spend their time texting, surfing the web, and scrolling social media on their phone or tablet rather than a desktop computer, so mSpy’s compatibility with iOS and Android devices will cover most parents’ needs. However, Bark’s extended compatibility can be helpful if your child switches between different devices or tries to use a computer to avoid being monitored.

mSpy’s standard plan supports one device, but the Family Kit plan can monitor up to three devices simultaneously. Bark’s plans support an unlimited number of devices.

mSpy vs. Bark – Customer Reviews

Winner: Draw. Both mSpy and Bark have received glowing reviews from parents.

Both mSpy and Bark have received positive reviews from parents who have tried these monitoring apps.

mSpy has a 4/5 rating on Trustindex with more than 1,900 reviews, with users hailing the app’s reliability and user-friendliness. One reviewer stated:

“The screen recording feature is truly remarkable. It allows me to monitor everything happening on my son’s phone, giving me peace of mind knowing I can keep an eye on his digital interactions.”

Another said:

“I’ve tried a few monitoring apps, and mSpy stands out for its reliability. It doesn’t crash and provides accurate data. The support team is responsive and helpful. A bit pricey, but worth every penny for the peace of mind. I no longer have to worry about what my kids are up to online.”

A handful of negative reviews pointed to issues with mSpy’s customer service or billing. However, mSpy responded to most negative reviews with actionable steps to address their concerns.

The Bark app has a 4.2 rating in the Apple App Store with more than 25,000 reviews and a 4.2 rating in Google Play with over 7,800 reviews. One reviewer said:

“As a mom, it gives me peace of mind knowing I have an app to help me monitor my child’s phone use. I can’t catch everything, and this app makes me feel like I have ‘backup.’ If anything is concerning the app let’s me know immediately and we can address it then. I can not recommend this app enough!”

Another said:

“I really love this app! I have two children with multiple devices and I love having all of their monitoring done in one place. I get daily notifications from Bark of things that are questionable and it opened up the opportunity for me to talk to my kids about what they’re going through.”
Many reviewers noted that installing Bark was confusing, but the app’s documentation was helpful, and the support team was very responsive. Most of Bark’s 1/5 reviews focused on the Bark Phone device rather than the Bark app.

Verdict: Which Is Better, mSpy or Bark?

mSpy and Bark are both excellent parental control apps with a lot to offer. I think mSpy edges out Bark thanks to its unique monitoring features like screen recording, keystroke logging, and call recording. These features make it much more difficult for your child to evade your monitoring efforts and engage in harmful behavior without your knowledge.

I also like that mSpy gives you more insight into all your child’s communications—including their messages on social media platforms. As messaging apps become increasingly popular, mSpy’s ability to capture this data gives it a considerable advantage over Bark.

That said, Bark can still be a good option for parents who want to take a more hands-off approach to monitoring and only receive alerts when their child views potentially harmful content. Bark’s screen time management tools are also unique and can be beneficial if your primary goal is to limit the time your child spends on their device or specific apps.

Still not sure if mSpy or Bark is right for you? Check out this full mSpy review and the best parental monitoring apps to learn more.

FAQs