Free Life360 Alternatives for iPhone and Android: An Honest 2026 Guide

Yes, there are good free Life360 alternatives, and Life360 itself has a free plan. Which one suits you depends on your family’s phones. Apple’s Find My is free and enough for an all-iPhone family. Google Maps location sharing is the free option that works across iPhone and Android today. And if you want more place alerts than Life360 Free’s two, without paying, there are fully free options for that too. The hardest parts to replace for free are Life360’s paid crash detection and roadside help.

A note on who’s writing: we make GPSforFamily, one of the options below. So we’ve worked from Life360’s and every other company’s own pages (checked on 30 October 2026), and we say plainly where our app falls short.

The short answer: the best free Life360 alternative for your family

• All iPhones: Apple Find My. Free, built in, up to 25 location alerts. No history.
• A mix of iPhone and Android: Google Maps location sharing. Works both ways, shows battery and charging status, and allows up to 5 arrival or departure alerts per person. Everyone needs a Google account.
• A child with an Android phone: Google Family Link, with family places and arrival alerts.
• An Android family that wants safe-place alerts, SOS and more than one circle, with nothing to pay: GPSforFamily, with the iPhone app coming soon.
• A new teen driver: a paid Life360 plan may still be worth it for crash detection, which our app doesn’t have.

Is there a free version of Life360?

Yes. Life360’s pricing page calls it “Family Safety That’s Always Free”, and the Free plan doesn’t expire. At the time of writing (October 2026) it includes real-time location sharing, 2 Place Alerts, 2 days of location history, a Family Driving Summary and Tile tracking. The paywall starts when you want more of any of those, or the safety extras.

Each paid plan starts with a 7-day free trial and, Life360 says, covers everyone in your circle. Prices vary by country, and visitors outside the US are sent to a site without USD prices. Life360’s App Store listing describes Silver’s limits differently from its website, so we’ve used the website. The page is also inconsistent about whether crash detection is part of Free, so we haven’t counted it either way.

Why families look for a Life360 alternative

Prices are higher than many reviews say

Many reviews published in 2025 and 2026 still quote Silver at $7.99 and Gold at $14.99 a month. Life360’s US pricing page and App Store listing now show $9.99 and $16.99, with Platinum at $24.99. Paying yearly saves 17%, according to the page, but that’s still $99.99 to $249.99 a year.

Two places and two days

Two place alerts go quickly: home and school use both before you reach work, practice or a grandparent’s house. Two days of history means that on Monday you can’t look back at Friday.

Its record on location data

Many families who leave mention privacy. Here’s the record from primary sources, by date:

• 6 December 2021: The Markup reported that Life360 sold precise location data to about a dozen data brokers, including X-Mode, Cuebiq and SafeGraph, and earned about $16 million from location data in 2020, nearly 20% of its revenue.
• 27 January 2022: Life360 said it would stop selling precise location data to those brokers, keep providing precise data to Allstate’s Arity, and sell only aggregated data to Placer.ai.
• 12 January 2023: a proposed class action filed in federal court in Northern California alleged that Life360 sold location data without consent, The Markup reported. Life360 said it intends to defend against the claim.
• Today: Life360’s help centre says its drive detection, crash alerts, driving reports and drive history are “powered by Arity” and stop working if you turn off data sharing with Arity. Sharing driving data with insurers for quotes is opt-in, and opt-outs are in the app’s Privacy Center.

To be fair, Life360 changed course after the 2021 reporting and now gives users controls. Whether that’s enough is your family’s call. Our privacy checklist for location sharing apps shows what to look for in any app, including ours.

What “free” should mean: a 4-point test

Plenty of apps call themselves a free Life360 alternative and then repeat the same model: a free tier with the useful parts behind a subscription. Before you switch, check four things:

1. No trial clock. The features you rely on keep working after day 7.
2. No ads.
3. Alerts and history aren’t paywalled. You get enough place alerts for home, school and work, and some history.
4. Your location isn’t sold. The privacy policy says so in plain words, with no exception for “partners”.

Apple’s and Google’s built-in sharing has no paid tier, so there’s nothing to upgrade to, though neither shows a history; their data practices fall under your Apple or Google account’s privacy policy. Our app passes all four, with one caveat on the third: you get a timeline of today’s arrivals and departures and a 90-day alert log, not a route history.

A fair question is how a free app is paid for. We can only promise what’s in writing: our privacy policy says there are no ads, no in-app purchases and no analytics or advertising SDKs, that we don’t sell personal information, and that any change to how data is handled will be posted before it takes effect.

Free Life360 alternatives compared (October 2026)

Prices are US prices at the time of writing. “Not documented” means the company’s own pages we read don’t say; the feature may still exist.

The free Life360 alternatives, one by one

Google Maps and Find Hub: the free pick for mixed families

In Google Maps, tap your profile picture → Location sharing → New share, choose Until you turn this off and pick a person. Google publishes the same steps for Android and iPhone. The person needs a Gmail account; anyone without one can only get a link that lasts up to 24 hours.

People you share with see your recent location, battery level and charging status. They can add up to 5 arrival or departure notifications for you, and Google emails you when they do. On Android, the same shares appear in the People tab of Find Hub (formerly Find My Device), which added its own arrival and departure notifications in May 2026. Compared with Life360 Free, you get more place alerts (5 per person against 2) but no history, and Google says notifications don’t work for anyone under 13. Our guide to sharing location between iPhone and Android has the steps in both directions.

Apple Find My: the free pick for all-iPhone families

Set up Family Sharing, then go to Settings → Family → Location Sharing. For place alerts, open Find My → People, choose a person, then Notify Me → Add Location Alert, and pick arrives, leaves, or isn’t at a place at set times. You can create up to 25, more than any Life360 plan below Gold. The person is told when you set one, and recurring alerts need their approval.

The catch: Apple says both people need an iPhone with iOS 15 or later to share Live Location, so one Android phone in the family rules it out. Apple’s Check In, in Messages, is a useful extra for a walk home: it tells a friend if you don’t arrive as expected, and both phones need iOS 17 or later.

GPSforFamily: fully free, on Android now

We built our app to pass that four-point test. Everyone in a private circle shows on one map with their battery level, charging state and network type. Safe places with a radius from 50 m to 1,000 m send arrival and departure alerts, with nothing held back for a paid plan because there isn’t one. An SOS button sends an alert with your location to your circle; it doesn’t contact emergency services. You can run several circles, say your household and your parents, and they never see each other.

What it lacks: crash detection, driving reports, support for Tile or other trackers, and a route history. And it’s on Android now, with the iPhone app coming soon, so a mixed family can’t all move to it yet.

Google Family Link: for a child’s Android phone

Family Link is parental supervision with location built in. Parents can use it on Android or iPhone, but Google says iPhones can’t be supervised, so the child needs an Android phone or a compatible Fitbit. Family places such as Home and School can trigger Arrives and Leaves notifications. Children under 13 can only share real-time location with their parents: the right default for young kids, but not a whole-family map.

Samsung Find and Glympse: for narrower needs

Samsung Find’s People tab shares your location for 1 hour, 24 hours or indefinitely. Its requirements list only Galaxy phones and tablets, the other person needs Samsung Find, and a family group can add up to five more people. Glympse sends a link anyone can open without logging in, and the share expires automatically: good for a road trip, not for everyday family sharing.

Freemium look-alikes: GeoZilla and Findmykids

Both work much like Life360’s model. GeoZilla’s Premium, from $5.99 a week to $69.99 a year on the US App Store, adds unlimited location alerts, unlimited circles and two weeks of history, which tells you where the free tier stops. Findmykids gives every feature free for 7 days, after which only online location stays free.

What you give up when you leave Life360

Life360’s paid plans do things the free alternatives don’t try to. Here’s each feature mapped to a free replacement, where one exists:

Life360 has owned Tile since January 2022, according to its SEC filings, so if your family keeps Tiles on keys and bags, that’s a real loss. If you have a new or nervous driver, crash detection is a reasonable thing to pay for, and Life360 is the honest pick. If you mainly use the map and a couple of places, the free options cover it.

Some people leave over battery life. That depends on how an app schedules updates more than on whose app it is; our guide to whether location sharing drains your battery explains what to look for.

Life360 vs Find My vs Google Maps

Life360 vs Find My. For an all-iPhone family, Find My covers live location and up to 25 place alerts at no cost, and it’s already installed. Life360 adds Android support, history (2 days on Free, 30 on Gold and Platinum) and driving features. If anyone in the family has an Android phone, Find My is out.

Life360 vs Google Maps. Google Maps works on iPhone and Android, shows battery and charging, and allows up to 5 alerts per person for free, against 2 on Life360 Free. Life360 adds history, Tile and, on paid plans, crash detection.

For a mixed family today, Google Maps is the free pick. Choose Life360 if you need history or driving features and will pay, or can live with Free’s limits. Our guide to the best free family locator apps compares these alongside Samsung Find, Family Link and more.

How to switch your family without a fight

1. Explain why. Cost, privacy or features: say which, and what stays the same. Everyone will still see each other.
2. Choose for everyone’s phones, not just yours. If one person has an iPhone, an Android-only app won’t work for them yet.
3. Set it up together, on each person’s own phone. Recreate your places and grant background location: Always on iPhone, Allow all the time on Android. Here’s how to get notified when someone arrives or leaves on each type of phone.
4. Run both for a week. Check that alerts arrive and nobody’s location goes stale before you remove anything.
5. Then leave the old circle and cancel any paid plan where you bought it, such as the App Store or Google Play. Deleting the app isn’t the same as cancelling. Before you go, review your data-sharing choices in Life360’s Privacy Center.

In our app, nobody joins by guessing: a 6-character circle code only sends a request that an admin must approve, or you can invite people by email. Anyone can pause sharing from More → Share my location.