The time kids spend online is at an all-time high, but that exposure comes with privacy and security risks. A 2022 study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that 72% of kids have faced at least one cyber threat, including inappropriate ads, images, and content, as well as cyberbullying and sexual approaches.
As more parents are turning to parental control tools for their kids’ online safety, Aura and Bark lead as two frequently considered options. Both address digital risks for children, but differ in the scope of protections and the level of behavioral monitoring.
In this Aura vs. Bark guide, we’ll break down how they fare across key areas like monitoring, content filtering, screen-time controls, and overall value, so you can decide which is better for your family.
About Aura
Aura is a broad security and privacy suite that combines identity theft protection, parental controls, financial monitoring, and device security in one interface. This subscription service is available across iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac devices.
For kids’ safety, Aura offers parental controls like content filtering, screen time limits, custom scheduling, cyberbullying alerts, and identity and credit monitoring. The service also supports general-purpose privacy use cases like online data removal, VPN and antivirus, fraud remediation support, and identity theft insurance.
Aura's privacy policy states it doesn’t sell the personal data it collects for advertising purposes. Any data it collects, such as web history, device information, and location history, is used to provide and improve its security features.
Bonus: Find out how Aura holds up against other digital security and privacy tools:
About Bark
Bark is a parental control platform focused exclusively on children's online safety and digital well-being. It monitors your kids’ online footprint across texts, social media, and email, and alerts parents for risks like cyberbullying, predators, self-harm, and violent behavior.
Bark’s app is available on smartphones, tablets, and computers. You can also opt for branded hardware devices such as:
- Bark Phone with Bark’s monitoring, parental controls, and screen-time management built in
- Bark Watch that includes GPS location tracking, text monitoring, contact management, and an SOS button
- Bark Home device that connects to your Wi-Fi to enforce screen time rules and web filtering across all connected household devices, including TV, gaming consoles, and tablets
Like Aura, Bark collects and processes activity data from your child’s devices and connected accounts to deliver its safety services. According to its privacy terms, this data is never sold for advertising.
Aura vs. Bark Measured Across 7 Areas
While Aura and Bark often show up as child-focused monitoring tools, their strengths may not be the same. To see which fits your household better, let’s evaluate them across seven critical aspects:
- Content monitoring features
- App and web filtering
- Screen time management
- Identity theft protection
- Online and device protection
- Location tracking and geofencing
- Pricing structure
1. Content Monitoring Features
Aura and Bark take different approaches to monitoring a child’s digital activity.
Bark specializes in deep communication monitoring. It’s AI scans texts, emails, photos, videos, and activity across 30+ popular apps for risk signals like:
- Bullying
- Self-harm
- Sexual content
- Violence
- Slang
- Drug-related content
When something concerning shows up, Bark sends parents an alert with a snippet of the flagged content so you understand the context and gravity of the risk and act accordingly. However, Bark’s coverage varies by operating system. For example, it can’t monitor certain apps, such as Snapchat or TikTok, on iOS due to Apple’s strict restrictions, whereas it can on Android.
In comparison, Aura’s monitoring focuses on behaviour signals rather than message-level review. So while you won’t receive alerts for specific texts or emails, Aura will flag potential issues, such as anxiety, stress, or disrupted sleep, based on digital activity patterns.
A key differentiator in Aura’s parental control set is Safe Gaming. The feature uses AI to monitor voice and text chats within 200+ PC games for cyberbullying and predatory behavior.
2. App and Web Filtering
Aura and Bark offer comparable tools for controlling what your child can access online. Both let you block content across 25+ categories, including gambling, social media, and adult content. You can also:
- Block individual apps or URLs you don’t want your child to open
- Force SafeSearch on common search engines like Google and Bing
- Enable restricted mode on YouTube to filter out inappropriate videos
Both apps also give you reports of how often your child tried to access restricted sites or apps and when those attempts happened, so you can have timely conversations about safe browsing habits with your child.
3. Screen Time Management
Aura’s screen time tools are straightforward, while Bark offers more granular scheduling options.
Aura lets you set daily or weekly time limits for the entire device or a specific app, website, or category. You also get daily insights on how long your kid has spent on each app, along with their screen time trends and patterns.
Aura’s Focus Time feature helps create distraction-free time blocks where only pre-approved apps and websites are allowed, which is ideal for planning their study sessions or family time without constant micromanagement.
Bark also offers similar flexible options, but in addition to basic daily/weekly limits, it lets you build custom routines—for instance, one for school, bedtime, and play time—and tailor what’s allowed and blocked during those specific hours. Here’s a sample routine for reference:
Routine | Rules |
School | Block all social media and games; allow only educational apps |
Play time | Block adult content; allow games and entertainment |
Bedtime | Block browsers, social media, games, and YouTube; allow audiobooks |
Both services also let you pause internet access instantly with one tap, which helps enforce boundaries during homework, dinner, or bedtime.
4. Identity Theft Protection
Identity theft protection sits at the core of Aura’s offerings, while Bark doesn’t include any identity or credit safety tools.
As an all-in-one digital security platform, Aura bundles dedicated tools to protect you and your family against identity theft, such as:
- Three-bureau credit monitoring
- Data breach alerts
- Dark Web scans
- Address and public records monitoring
- Identity theft insurance up to $1M per user
- Fraud alerts and remediation support
For families using Aura's Family Plan, identity protection extends specifically to children and includes child SSN monitoring and assisted child credit freeze. These are important safeguards, as child identity theft can go undetected for years and lead to long-term credit damage.
If protecting your child’s personal data and identity is a priority, Aura adds a lot more value compared to Bark, especially since these features are part of all Aura subscriptions.
5. Online and Device Protection
Another major Bark vs. Aura difference lies in cybersecurity and device-level protection.
Bark offers parental controls and dedicated hardware to enforce rules and monitoring. Aura goes a step further and adds wider protections from various online threats. You and your kids can access:
- Antivirus software to stop spyware, malware, and viruses that target phones
- VPN to protect your child’s web traffic on public Wi-Fi
- Password manager to keep your passwords secure
- Online data broker removal to remove your information from 140+ sites that sell personal data
- Spam text & call protection to cut down scam calls and phishing messages
- Safe browsing tools to prevent accidental visits to phishing websites
6. Location Tracking and Geofencing
Aura doesn’t offer location tracking, while Bark shows your child’s real-time location on a map, which is useful for quick check-ins during school hours or outings.
Bark also supports geofencing, which lets you set virtual boundaries around specific locations, such as home, school, or a friend’s house. When your child arrives at or leaves one of these locations, you get an automatic alert. Bark keeps a location history of up to seven days.
7. Pricing Structure
Aura offers four subscription plans, but parental controls are only available in the Family and Kids plans*:
- Individual: $15/month
- Couple: $29/month
- Kids: $13/month
- Family: $45/month
*Prices based on monthly billing
You’ll get identity theft protection, financial and credit monitoring, and device security features with all plans.
Bark's pricing structure includes software subscriptions and standalone hardware devices. Here’s an overview:
Plan/Product | Pricing | What’s Included |
Bark Jr. (app) | $7/month | Basic plan for screen time schedules, web filtering, and location tracking |
Bark Premium (app) | $14/month | Everything in Bark Jr., plus advanced monitoring for texts, email, and 30+ social media apps |
Bark Phone | $240 for device + wireless plans starting from $29/month | Dedicated Samsung A16 with built-in Bark Premium features that can’t be overridden |
Bark Phone Pro | $600 for device + wireless plans separate | Samsung A36 smartphone with built-in parental controls |
Bark Watch | $169 for device + $15/month wireless subscription | Kid smartwatch with GPS, texts, monitoring, and SOS button |
Bark Home | $6/month | Wi-Fi network device for whole-home filtering and monitoring |
Bark’s narrow focus on parental monitoring allows it to offer its base services at a lower price. Its hardware offerings are also unique. However, Aura is more cost-effective if you want richer digital and device protections for your entire family.
Bark vs. Aura: User Reviews and Summary
When comparing Bark vs. Aura parental controls, the latter has received generally higher ratings across major public platforms:
Many users say Aura is easy to set up and sends useful alerts without being overwhelming. Reviewers also praise its customer support for resolving setup or account issues effectively.
Bark users are also generally happy with the results, particularly families using Bark Phone or Bark Watch. Parents often say Bark helped them spot unsafe conversations and step in early. A common complaint is that the app can be hard to set up and manage, and that alerts can feel overwhelming until you fine-tune the settings.
The choice between Aura vs. Bark ultimately depends on your parenting style and priorities:
- Bark is a good choice if you want to closely monitor your child’s activity, including the actual content of texts and their real-time location.
- Aura works well if you want basic parental controls as part of a broader safety setup for the whole family.
However, parental control tools aren’t enough if you want to safeguard your child’s personal data, online activity, and location.
Aura or Bark: What Parents Often Miss
Tools like Aura and Bark are useful, but they’re not designed to address the threats within your mobile network.
Traditional networks rely on outdated, vulnerable systems and trust-based models to route your calls and texts. This means your kids’ and family's location history, call patterns, and SMS texts can be intercepted. SIM swap attacks (SIM cloning or hijacking) are also frequently conducted to facilitate identity and financial fraud, causing over $48 million in losses in the U.S. recently.
You can refer to our telco data breach timeline to see the sheer volume and breadth of cellular breaches and attacks in recent years, impacting millions of customers across carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Mint Mobile.
The most straightforward way to close this gap is to pair digital security tools with a secure cellular network like Cape, built from the ground up with privacy in mind.
Cape: Built for Security, Convenience, and Peace of Mind
Cape is a privacy-first mobile carrier designed to protect your communications and personal data. Just like other carriers, we provide premium, unlimited, and nationwide call, text, and 4G/5G data. Unlike other carriers, we don’t harvest your information; our network is built to ensure most data never leaves your device in the first place.
We achieve this through several features:
What Cape offers | How it works |
Cape doesn’t ask for your name, address, or Social Security number. We only collect the information necessary to provide service, and we retain that information for the minimum amount of time possible. | |
Traditional carriers rely on a fixed International Mobile Subscriber ID (IMSI) to connect your device to cellular networks. This is a vulnerability that lets carriers, advertisers, and bad actors identify and track your device. Cape lets subscribers automatically rotate their IMSI every 24 hours, making it infinitely more difficult to track you or your device. | |
When you pay for Cape, we don’t collect your name or billing address. Instead, Stripe tokenizes your payment details so they’re never stored by Cape or tied to your account. | |
Many services ask for your phone number, but sharing it exposes you to spam, scammers, data brokers, and a variety of other risks. VoIPs, on the other hand, don’t work with 2FA, cost extra, and aren’t encrypted. With Cape, you get 2 free additional SMS/MMS lines that are middle-to-end encrypted. | |
Most U.S. carriers store your call and text metadata for years, sometimes indefinitely. Cape is built to forget, so call data records (CDRs) are deleted after just 24 hours. | |
One-time passwords (OTP) can be intercepted by bad actors if SMS messages aren’t encrypted, exposing your bank accounts and other sensitive data. With Cape, you can encrypt and route all SMS/MMS messages through the Cape app, so even if they’re intercepted, nobody can read them. This feature is currently only available on iPhone. Android coming soon. | |
Cape nullifies the threat of SIM swapping by completely removing humans from the loop. During signup, you receive a 24-word phrase that generates a private key tied to your number. This effectively means that no one (but you) can move your number to a new carrier or device, not even Cape. | |
Legacy network protocols, like SS7, leave you vulnerable to hackers that can track your location, intercept your calls and texts, and steal sensitive information. Cape’s Network Lock relies on a proprietary signaling proxy to verify that your device’s physical location matches the network it’s trying to attach to. If we detect anything out of the ordinary, Cape automatically blocks the connection, nullifying the potential threat. | |
Traditional voicemail systems are outdated, unencrypted, and another security hole bad actors can exploit to gain access to your sensitive information. Cape encrypts all voicemails, ensuring only you can access them. | |
While roaming, your phone connects to local telecom providers to enable service. But, who knows who might be listening on the other end. Cape provides you with peace of mind by routing your traffic through our U.S.-based mobile core, ensuring your identity, data, and communications remain private and secure. |
Get Cape To Access Unlimited Data, Peak Network Performance
You can sign up using our anonymous onboarding process here and test out Cape in practice for just $30 for your first month. You get up to 15 GB per month of international roaming, included in your monthly plan.
To extend protection beyond the network, Cape partners with Proton. Subscribers can get Proton Unlimited or Proton VPN Plus for only $1 for six months.
