Circle Home Plus Review

Circle Home Plus's premium features like time limits and location tracking are a big selling point for the device, but at over $100 a year, they cost more than similar services like Net Nanny and others featured on our list of the best parental controls. Circle's basic features are very similar to the parental controls you can already access for free with most routers and streaming services, making the $129 price tag a little excessive.

Circle Home Plus costs about $129 up-front. You get one year of free app access with your purchase. After that, the app subscription costs about $10 per month.

Compared to other top parental control options, Circle Home Plus is pricier and doesn't offer as many features, like social media monitoring or geofencing. The little white box also adds an additional gadget to your home electronics setup, while other services are completely software-based.

On the plus side, it does have a more fun, user-friendly interface that has been specifically designed with parenting in mind, with terms like "rewards" and "bedtime" that reflect the parent/child relationship. We also like Circle Home Plus's internet pause feature.

Learn more about choosing a parental control.

The Circle device itself has a clean, modern look to it, with more rounded edges than the original Disney Circle. It uses cloud-based storage to manage your profile info, which lets it work faster and more reliably. It also has a backup battery so that even if a disgruntled child unplugs it, it will still work without a hitch.

The bad news about the Circle Home Plus improvements is that if you're an original Disney Circle user who wants to upgrade to the new Circle Home Plus platform, you'll have to start all over again. You'll need to download a new app, create new profiles, and set new filter preferences.

It's concerning when companies introduce new technology that isn't compatible with older technology, because it means future updates might be just as inconvenient and costly for current users.

Installing the Circle Plus is easy. Just plug it into your router and a power source. Scanning the QR code pairs the device with your phone. The Circle automatically recognizes all Wi-Fi enabled devices on your network and puts them into your list of devices. Each will be categorized as "unmanaged" until you link it to Home or to a specific child's profile.

Setting up the app on your smartphone and your kids' devices is time consuming. The tricky thing is that the devices have unrecognizable names (example: Android-1, Motorola Device, Apple Device, etc.)

Tech support suggests looking under each device's information to find its identifying MAC number and then searching through the devices on the Circle app list to match them up, which is what I did. Fortunately, with smartphones you can just download the Circle Plus app to the phone and then scan the QR code to link it to the Circle.

Once you've created profiles for each family member and connected your family's devices, you can assign devices to manage to each person's profile. The only catch is that a single device can't be assigned to more than one profile.

This was problematic for us, as my four kids share a laptop for schoolwork and videos. I worked around it by creating a separate profile just to manage the computer itself, but it makes it harder to set age-appropriate filters and time limits. When time is up, kids can just switch to another device and keep surfing.

Circle Home Plus comes with basic features and premium features. We tested all of these to see how well they worked.

Filtering worked perfectly, and the timed usage tracking worked well also, but it tracks only in five-minute increments.

Browsing history wasn't very specific: it showed dozens of random web addresses, and when I clicked on them I was often taken to mostly blank websites. Also, the history would say "youtube.com," but I couldn't see what videos were accessed, or what parts of a site were viewed.

Sadly, location tracking was a major fail for the Circle Home Plus. It showed my son's phone as being in the North Atlantic Ocean just south of Africa, and it listed the date as December 31, 1969. Unless my son's phone can bend time and space, it was clearly not accurate. The location tracking worked better for my daughter's phone, even though they have the exact same Android models.

The Rewards feature was an easy way to add extra time to my kids' devices, and I think calling it a "reward" in their app makes it more effective for encouraging good behavior and a better work ethic. However, the reward notifications usually came up only on Android smartphones, not on iOS devices. That's another drop in the bucket for the case against using iOS vs. Android devices for kids.

Circle Home Plus might be overkill if you just want to keep your kids safe online and set reasonable limits on screen time. It costs more than you really need to pay for a parental control service, and it has fewer options than similar services.

But if internet time is a major currency in your home and you want your kids to know when they've earned more time, and if you want to have more scheduling control over when the internet is used (rather than just setting time limits), then the Circle Home Plus might be a good choice for you.

To test the Circle Home Plus, we connected it to a home router and installed the parental control app on a parent's iPhone. We downloaded the kids’ app to two teenagers' Android phones. We also connected two laptops and an older model iPhone to the app for monitoring.

We tested the various features in a family/home setting with two teenagers and two elementary school-aged kids for over a week. To learn more about how we test and review products at SafeWise, check out our full methodology.

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