Comparing Family Safety Apps: MamaBear and Find My Friends

Choosing the right family safety app isn’t easy. We’d like to help you by comparing the features of the MamaBear app with a few other apps out there for Android and iPhone.

In our last comparison, we looked at Life 360. Now let’s check out the similarities and differences of MamaBear to Apple’s iPhone app Find My Friends.

Related: Comparing Family Safety Apps: MamaBear and Life360

Find My Friends is primarily a tracking app. With Find My Friends, users request connection to people they want to view location. Once a friend accepts the request and installs the app, a user can see their friend’s location and vice versa with the option to turn off location sharing.

MamaBear and Find My Friends share a few similarities.  

Users can:  

• View current location of people
• Proactively send location. Find My Friends calls it “Notify Friend” and MamaBear calls it “check in.”
• Set arrival/departure alerts

There are also a few key differences.

Here’s a the breakdown:

• Who it’s targeting. MamaBear’s emphasis is on family safety, whereas Find My Friends is marketed in part as a social app for use by adults and their friends and companions.
• Location history.  MamaBear offers a view of historical location points up to 7 days.
• Message feed.  MamaBear presents all alerts and messages received for up to 7 days.
• Social media monitoring. MamaBear notifies parents when their child makes a new friend on Facebook, follows someone new on Instagram or uploads a photo, gets tagged or @mentioned, receives a message that includes inappropriate words, bullying language or any other restricted words the parent sets.
• Driving speed monitoring. MamaBear offers alerts when kids drive or ride over a preset speed limit including how fast and where.
• Optional location sharing. Find My Friends allows all user to turn off location sharing. Families using MamaBear can’t turn of child logged in location sharing from the app, though the parent’s location sharing is optional.
• Temporary sharing.  Find my friends offers a group of invited friends to share location for a pre-set timeframe.

There are many great apps that offer a variety of fun and useful features! MamaBear strives to offer parents concerned about their children’s safety peace of mind and comfort.