Life360 review: Family monitoring made easy

Do you like to check in with your kid regularly? Is your child prone to losing their stuff? Do you want to be able to see if they’ve gone anywhere unusual lately? Have they recently gotten their P-plates? If you answered yes to any of those questions, Life360 may be the solution for you.

This family monitoring app works by tracking the location of each family member’s phone (or any tracked items—we’ll get into that later), thus allowing you to keep an eye on where everyone is at all times. But how is it in practice? We put Life360 to the test.

Life360 offers four plans—one free and three paid. The free version is actually quite decent and packs many of the same features as the cheapest paid version (Silver), which costs $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year.

That said, if you opt for a paid plan, you will get more features, more days of location history more "places" (i.e. frequently-visited places you can register to receive alerts when a family member arrives or leaves, e.g. work, school, friends' houses). It’s also worth noting that only one member of the family needs a paid plan for everyone in your “Circle” to benefit from the same features.

After a recent overhaul of its plans, we wouldn't exactly call Life360 affordable anymore. However, there are more features on offer than before, some of which may make the monthly fee worth it for your family.

Here’s a full breakdown of how the free and paid plans differ.

Life360 isn’t a traditional parental control app. It lacks any of the device monitoring features found in the likes of Qustodio and Bark, opting instead for a focus on only location monitoring. However, if you’re after an app to watch over older kids and teens while still giving them some independence over their online lives, Life360 may be the perfect middle ground.

It’s easy to set up—simply get everyone in your family to download the app, and then you can invite them (and whoever else you’d like) to your Circle. For Life360’s location monitoring to work best, it does require background app refresh to be enabled, along with constant access to your phone’s location services. Unfortunately, both these prerequisites will cause your phone’s battery to drain faster than normal.

The app works by tracking their phone’s GPS location, so you can see where they are at all times, as well as where they’ve been, thanks to location history. You can even see how much battery they’ve got left on their phone.

One thing that Life360 does better than other monitoring apps is the ability for two-way location tracking. Yep, not only can you see where they are, but they can see where you are, which holds both parties accountable and builds trust. After all, it’d be hypocritical to get mad at them for ducking out of school early to go to a friend’s place if they caught you skipping work to go to Maccas!

Both you and the rest of the family can use the app to discretely send an SOS message to your Circle (or even other emergency contacts who don’t have the Life360 app), along with a link to your location.

Life360 also tracks driving and offers safety features like crash detection and speeding detection. It can even tell if you’re using your phone while you’re driving, making it a great tool for parents of new drivers. It’s not a completely foolproof feature, however—it “detected” me using my phone while driving even though I was actually in the passenger seat.

You can also track the location of objects in the app, thanks to Life360’s acquisition (and subsequent integration) of Tile trackers in 2021. Tiles can be purchased through the app (or at just about any electronics retailer) and can then be attached to personal belongings and tracked through Life360. Tiles come in a few different shapes and sizes, including a credit card-sized Tile that can be easily slotted into your wallet, a dongle that can be attached to a backpack or set of keys, and there are even Tile stickers, which lack Bluetooth connectivity but display a QR code that, when lost, can be scanned by the person who found the item, alerting you and enabling you to arrange for its retrieval. Perfect for the kid who’s always losing their drink bottle. And lunch box. And everything else.

In April 2024, Life360 added more safety features to new higher-tier paid plans, including roadside assistance, emergency services dispatch, stolen funds reimbursement, and disaster, medical and travel assistance. 

As we mentioned earlier, Life360 is quite unusual as far as parental control apps go, since it eschews any online or device monitoring for solely location-based monitoring. As such, we think it’s better suited to families with older kids, or even grown-ups looking for a solid personal safety app. But if you’re keen to see how it stacks up against the competition, here’s a breakdown of the best parental control apps.

You might be wondering how Life360 differs from Apple’s Find My app—after all, they both rely on tracking a person’s device location, right? The difference comes down to features. While Find My shows you the device’s current (or last recorded) location, it doesn’t update that location in real time, nor does it show you location history. Life360, on the other hand, tracks location in real time and displays up to 30 days of location history. It also offers driving monitoring and other features that Find My lacks.

The only upper hand Find My has in this battle is AirTags. Tile’s trackers are great, but in our testing, we found they were less accurate when pinpointing an item’s location compared to AirTags, which are boosted by Apple’s expansive Find My network.

Life360 is an easy-to-use, safety-focused parental monitoring app with the ability to track not just family members, but their belongings, too. As long as it’s introduced to the family in a constructive way, it can also help build trust by holding not just the kids, but the parents accountable as well. The battery drain is an issue, and those looking for more robust parental controls will need to look elsewhere, but overall, Life360 is a good option for both parents and kids.