Customer Ratings & Reviews

Purchased to use with AT&T fiber and was not successful. It did not keep connection

Love to use and enjoy life with it for longer time to come...

The Circle home plus is a great little tool for those who want to create a routine schedule at home without having to however around your childrens room figuring if they have put their devices away and gone to bed. I like to use the device to minimize time on device of my boys, I have a couple tablets they primarily use on trips to keep them entertained, but they also try and sit on them at home also. I set a time limit for things like youtube and games they may jump on while leaving the educational app still available. As mentioned earlier, my boys would also like to sneak their devices in bed and play or watch things at bed time, so setting their bedtime into their profile helped to stop this as they can't watch the videos as they would want. The one thing with this device is that more and more manufacturers are starting to implement these sort of features into router or phone/tablets already, and the need for some of the stand out features this device can do, may become a standard making the Circle obsolete. The circle is something I would recommend to those with a provided Modem/Router from their ISP, these are usually something simple with basic features, adding this to your network will easily help manage what your kids device usage without policing them once configured. Subscription is also a bummer, one year is included with purchase.

WE HAVE USED THE CIRCLE HOME PLUS IN OUR OFFICE SETTING AND IT HAS WORKED VERY WELL.

The Circle Home Plus is an excellent security and content solution for parents who want to protect their kids. You can set different schedules for each user, and it can monitor content on various types of devices, not just phones. You can allow or disallow specific apps, limit screentime, set schedules, set a bedtime shut-down, see a phone's location, etc. There are very few things you can't do. As the parent of a young teen, the type of configurability offered by Circle is tremendous. I have used other apps, but I really appreciate the many options and controls offered by Circle. But nothing is perfect. I would have preferred a better cord management system, but I guess it's good enough. And there are so many controls that it can be daunting to set up. But once it's up and running, it's amazing. Note, there is basically a $10/month charge for the app to monitor devices, but the device includes the first year free. Even at $10, that's not a bad deal. Other apps I've used accomplish far less and cost about the same.

Features I use: * Filtering * Bedtime (time windows) These two things together help me to keep my kids safe online and make sure they aren't waking up early or staying up late just to play online. I also block the Echo Dots in each of their rooms at bedtime so they're not up all night playing music, etc. This all helps to build good habits and keep "tech addiction" in check. I haven't used the reward system in the app yet, but at a cursory glance it's too binary - simply shutting off the bedtime internet cutoff vs just extending it for a certain period of time. Circle is nice in that it alerts you when a new device logs in to your network, helping to keep neighbors from jumping on your wifi if they happen to know your password for one reason or another. However, when it alerts you there's a new device, clicking on the notification doesn't take you to that device's properties so you can add it to a profile, pause it, etc. Additionally you can't just pause a single device; you have to add it to a profile in order to do so. So, the device & tech are solid, but I feel the app needs additional thought/work hence no 5 stars here. Don't forget, with this device you'll be downloading the "Circle Smart Parental Controls" app - not the "Circle with Disney" or "Circle Home" apps. This stalled me for a few days after getting this as I just couldn't get it set up with the previous app I'd used to configure Circle on my NetGear router!

Easy to set up. Accessible, and keeps kids away from bad stuff

Great to control home network. Easy to use!! High quality device!!

The VPN, which is what controls the internet access, can be bypassed by the kiddos, so a smart kid can turn this off anytime they’d like. Not impressed.

Using on multiple devices, 7 units and no concerns thus far.

We have had the original Circle by Disney for years. While it was far from perfect, it mostly worked the way we needed. This new circle requires a yearly subscription and it’s been making our kids devices either not work at all, or it doesn’t block unapproved content. Guess we will be looking for an alternative.

I see promise in the Circle Home Plus but there is a need for a better interface. I really do enjoy having the live notifications when a new product is added but there is no way to easily rename it on the fly. I spent hours and hours getting all the devices renamed and figured out on my network just to be lost after the Circle either reset itself, updated or had a power glitch, I still do not know what happened to this day. There is great features on the unit when it is setup correctly. Setting times for my kids on their devices is key and I love it for that reason alone. Also, like I noted above, live notifications of when devices are added is a top reason to add this to your home. Once they make the interface more user friendly and add live changes to the app for names, it will really be a top choice in any home. Also, getting the circle to work with Amazon tablets is not the easiest and needs work on their end. Most parents cannot afford good tablets for their kids and Fire tablets are cheap but the Amazon Fire does not work well with Circle Home Plus. I will keep this unit working and hopefully they respond with some insight, I really want this unit to work better.

The internet is a wild beast and parents need to protect their children from inappropriate content, dangerous sites and excess time spent on the screen. The Circle Plus does all that. If you do not already have a built-in tool that does the same thing on your router, the Circle is great. The app is easy to use although it requires some manual work to set up profiles. The big limitation is that you actually control devices, not users. What that means is that if you allow some and prevent other members of the family to access a site or application, you will have to make sure that they do not share their devices. Worse, if all they have is one device, then you are out of luck, unless you grant the same access to all. Of course, most if not all similar tools for home use have this limitation. Limitations apart, the behave-and-you-get-more-time-or-access reward is a welcome idea and makes it sound less dictatorial. Also, the fact that you can add devices to a profile is good as it allows you to control more than one device at a time. It is especially useful when access is similar to more than one family member. Subscription is probably my biggest criticism. Many modern Wi-Fi routers come with similar tools built-in and the service is free in most cases. The Circle Plus seems to be easier for many parents and if you do not own one of those routers, it is definitely worth it.

It's way to easy to get around circle. All I needed to do on the laptop and computers was switch networks.

The Circle Home Plus is a great way to safely manage your families internet usage and rid the worries of browsing the web. Setup: Setup is super easy. Connect the Circle to the wall outlet and to your router via the included Ethernet cable. Once you have Circle connected, start the Circle app which will walk you through the setup process to get your family started using circle. You install Circle on each of your family devices to manage there device. Use: Once you have everything setup, the app is super easy to use. You can set filters for certain websites or mature content. You can also enable safe search for Google to filter out searches that may be for adults only. The app also lets you set screen time limits to turn WiFi off at certain times or when ever you feel a family member has had too much internet. The filtering is really easy and takes the complexity out of parental controls. The app also features neat perks like rewards. You can give your kids rewards which is a fun way to grant them extra game or internet time. The filtering works really w3ll and does a great job doing exactly what it says it'll do. The Circle also comes with one free year of service. So you won't have to pay for anything for a whole year which is nice. Overall this is a great product to manage your family internet usage easily and effectively. You'll definitely be happy with the functionality of this product.

The pervasiveness of the web and the multitude of applications found in many homes bring a number of benefits. However, many parents find themselves struggling to find ways to effectively monitor and moderate the internet activities of their children at home. The Circle Home Plus, with it's full range of features and simple setup, is a welcome and effective tool. Download the companion app, plug the unit into your router, and you're immediately ready to begin. After identifying devices, you assign them to family members, or to the home in general, or whatever designation you like. Then you can set individual filtering levels, hours of use, total time on, and other parameters for each label you've established. There's even a 'reward' feature for rewarding someone with extra connection time. For clarity, you should know that the Circle Home Plus is not a router. It plugs into your router and controls it. Many of these features are found, in a basic form, on modern smart routers. However, few (if any) give the full range of controls found on the Circle Home Plus. That, coupled with it's plug-and-play simplicity, makes it an excellent value. Depending on the number and variety of devices you have, it may take some work to correctly identify them at first. I had more than one show up as 'Apple Device'. So I had to turn the internet off and on for them until I could identify them - and label them accordingly. Once that was accomplished, I could control them with confidence. The Circle Home Plus fills a clear need for modern families.

I can’t get it to work and can’t get help. I consider myself technical when it comes to computers but this wasn’t working for me. There’s self help but that didn’t work for me. Returning

It stated your kids can’t remove from device, wrong. Mine had figured it out. We also had our Xbox with time limits, didn’t work properly and caused many issue with playing on it. It was completely a waste of our money.

For the parents who know their kids have access to every device, you want them to know and live with technology but you also want to reign it in! The Circle Home is just that and more. My favorite part is that as a youngster it was easy to take away my tech but my parents never understood how to reward me with time and my toys. This cube does! You can set rewards for a profile on your network as a gift for doing chores or homework which is neat! We have a small daycare in another town and so we will probably add this to the center. I can see all the squirming that the kids will do when they aren't listening and realize their internet has been limited. There is so much balance to be had with the Circle through lots of features like GPS tracking a little one in case they are playing in the backyard or viewing their history to make sure that they are researching their homework topics. Not just for kids though, you can add teen and adult profiles so the Circle Home has applicable features for each person in the home. It was so easy to set up and it doesn't need to stay wired through ethernet either so you can have it look like a small art piece on a book shelf or side table for conversation as well. Now you do have to pay for access to premeium features after a year but that would give me enough time to evaluate the value for the whole family this device brings. Ultimately a game changer for a busy household where no one wants to forfeit screen time. Now it is not an option, if mom and dad choose!

We have 11 connected devices in our home. Some Apple, some Android. Right off the bat there were issues with some of the Android devices and an older iPad trying to connect and quite frankly, the hassle of installing the app on every device was annoying. Plus, with so many ways to get online, setting limits for individual profiles was useless. Our kids aren't dumb and figured out quickly that switching devices was an easy work around and it's not practical to keep everything locked down at all times. We keep things pretty secure through parental controls on our devices already but thought a few of the features of the Circle Home Plus would come in handy. Unfortunately, the ones we are most interested in like bedtime are premium features that will require a paid subscription after the initial trial period of 12 months. A year free is a pretty generous offer but without doing much that we can't already control through the devices themselves, routers and settings in individual apps and services and good old fashioned parental oversight, I'm not inclined to pay a monthly fee in a year so why get used to using it? If there were less devices all on the same platform I'm sure it would work fine but it's not for us.