After weeks of testing Aura and LifeLock, it became obvious –  Aura is the better choice for family identity protection.

Aura catches threats to your family’s assets thanks to award-winning identity theft protection and credit monitoring capabilities. That means you can be proactive with your identity protection, stopping potential issues before they balloon into big problems.

Aura also offers more flexibility with their family plans by allowing up to five adults, so you can protect college-aged children, your parents, or your in-laws. 

And, if you or your family member falls victim to identity theft, Aura ensures you and your family can restore your name, credit score, and anything else a thief could take. Their threat resolution team is made up of industry experts and their plans offer generous insurance coverage. 

Plus, Aura’s pricing is transparent, and it doesn’t change. With our discount code, you can get Aura at an affordable rate for life.  

The same can’t be said for LifeLock. 

Though Norton LifeLock is a big name in the identity protection world, I found it struggles where it counts. It has difficulty catching threats, and its customer service is poor. Plus, LifeLock’s price increases after the first year. 

If you want to protect your family from cybercriminals and identity thieves, I recommend Aura, but I also understand if LifeLock piques your interest. With their flashy advertisements and bold claims, they certainly caught my attention. 

So, in this review, I provide a deep analysis of both services, allowing you to make an informed decision about your family’s protection.

             

Aura vs. LifeLock: Head-to-Head Comparison

Monitoring: Winner – Aura

Monitoring is the first piece of any top-notch identity protection service. With effective monitoring tools, you can catch threats before they become bigger issues. Aura is clearly the winner here.

When a service provides accurate monitoring, you’ll know if an email, password, or other piece of personal information is compromised. This allows you to take proper precautions. Simply changing a password or locking your credit could stop an identity thief in their tracks. 

If a service fails to monitor your identity, you’re just waiting for the worst to occur. It’s like leaving your front door unlocked when you go to work. A thief can roll right in and steal your most valuable assets. Sure, you have insurance to help you recover things, but wouldn’t it have been better to avoid the theft event? 

When it comes to monitoring, Aura goes above and beyond. Their tools are extremely accurate and fast. 

LifeLock, on the other hand, fails in this area. My testing showed LifeLock’s monitoring services just don’t work very well. 

Identity Monitoring

On paper, Aura and LifeLock both offer comprehensive identity monitoring with their top-tier family plans, including:

Aura goes a little bit deeper by including auto title monitoring, but otherwise, their services are advertised as the same. The difference is in their effectiveness. 

Let’s take their dark web monitoring services as an example. Aura found nine unique dark web alerts, while LifeLock only found eight. 

With password alerts, Aura found a whopping 15 alerts. LifeLock only found seven. 

Neither service found any public records alerts on me, but I imagine the story would be the same. Aura is simply more accurate in its monitoring.

Credit and Financial Monitoring 

LifeLock and Aura also both offer comprehensive credit and financial monitoring, including:

The way they offer these services differs, though. 

For example, LifeLock offers daily updates on your credit report and score, while Aura only offers monthly updates. This is a point in LifeLock’s favor, but Aura still comes out ahead in this area, especially for families. 

With Aura, you get family fraud alerts. This is a streamlined module that allows you to request and share alerts with your family. So, if there’s a fraud alert on your spouse’s credit, you’ll see it and can take action. The same goes for your parents or adult children. 

With most family plans, alerts aren’t shared between adult members for privacy reasons, but that can be a huge headache if you’re the family member taking the lead on identity protection. That Aura gives you the ability to share these alerts is a big win for families.

Threat Resolution – Aura

Even the most accurate monitoring service can’t stop every identity criminal. That’s why it’s important to choose a service that can help you resolve identity crimes. 

In this area, Aura wins without question. Here’s why…

Customer Service

Aura offers 24/7/365 U.S.-based customer service from industry experts that have an average of seven years of experience in identity protection. My experience with their customer service team has been nothing short of amazing. 

When I called on a Monday morning, I reached a person within one minute. They were helpful, answering all of my questions without hesitation. They were also easy to understand. I wouldn’t hesitate to call them again if I had questions or needed an identity threat resolved. 

Calling LifeLock’s customer service was a VERY different experience. 

First, it’s nearly impossible to find LifeLock’s customer service number. You have to be pretty determined to get it, clicking through several “Contact us” pages before they finally give you a number. 

It took three minutes to reach a person once I found the number to call (I honestly expected much worse at that point), but to say that person was helpful would be an exaggeration. They were clearly working off a script and were difficult to understand. 

Identity Restoration Services 

Both Aura and LifeLock offer U.S.-based identity restoration specialists to help you restore your identity should you fall victim to a thief. 

These specialists will, in theory, walk you through the process of restoring your identity in full. They’ll help you issue credit disputes, arrange calls with your bank, and file the appropriate paperwork. 

After talking to Aura’s customer service team, I fully believe that they are ready to help day or night. And, I have no doubt they’re capable of helping. 

I can’t say the same for LifeLock. 

Their customer service representatives didn’t seem like identity theft experts. Perhaps, had I truly been dealing with an identity theft issue, they would have passed me through to a “U.S-based restoration specialist” as promised, but I’m not so sure. They seemed pretty set on going through their customer service script, regardless of my question or needs.  

After reading several Trustpilot reviews, it seems I’m not the only one who had a bad customer service experience with LifeLock. There are many complaints about not being able to reach U.S.-based representatives when needed. 

Lost Wallet Protection 

Both Aura and LifeLock provide lost wallet hotlines that you can call if you find your wallet has been stolen or lost. Their representatives will help you cancel and replace bank cards, personal identification documents, and insurance cards. 

After my experience calling LifeLock, I don’t think I’d use this service – even with a dedicated hotline available. I’m afraid it’d be easier to call my bank myself. 

With Aura, I wouldn’t hesitate to call and use this feature. Their customer service team inspires complete trust, and I have no doubt they’d be able to help.

Family Plans – Aura

While Aura and LifeLock both focus on family protection, Aura offers more flexibility and more tools for parents, making them the winner in this category. 

Aura offers a couple’s plan for up to two adults and a family plan that includes up to five adults and an unlimited number of children. Including five adults is a fantastic feature because it means you can include your college-aged kids, parents, and your in-laws. 

With LifeLock, things are a bit more rigid. They also offer a couple’s plan for two adults, but their family plan is much more restrictive. It allows for two adults and five children. You CAN’T include college-aged children or any additional family members. 

Parental Control Features 

As far as parental control features go, Aura wins here too. 

Aura offers Circle Parental Controls, which allows you to filter harmful sites and set time limits for specific apps, like YouTube and Snapchat. You can also limit access to the Internet entirely. 

Circle works on Android and iPhones as well, so parents can monitor their children’s internet access across devices. 

LifeLock offers Norton Family parental controls, which are similar to Circle’s controls in many ways. It also works across devices and allows parents to set time and site limits.

It also includes a handy “school time” feature that allows parents to see how long their kids are spending on school-related sites. And, Norton provides device locations, so you can see where your kids are going online. 

However, Norton Family seems to have some glitches, specifically with Android phones. When I looked at user reviews on the Google app store, many users reported issues with loading and crashing. 

I don’t have an Android device, so I can’t back these reviews up with my own experience, but given the number of users reporting the issues, these seem like legitimate complaints. 

Safe Gaming and Anti-Bullying Monitoring

One of the (many) reasons I’ve become such a fan of Aura is their commitment to protecting children online. Predators flourish on online gaming platforms, so Aura partnered with Kidas, a company that develops anti-cyberbullying and predator protection software. 

Kidas uses machine learning and AI to analyze voice and text conversations in 220 popular online games. With their ProtectMe platform, included in Aura’s family plan, this technology can detect sexual harassment, cyberbullying, grooming tactics, and racism. 

If ProtectMe picks up anything, parents receive immediate threat alerts. They also get weekly summaries showing what games their children are playing and how often they’re playing it. 

LifeLock doesn’t offer anything like this. 

Instead, LifeLock publishes lots of articles, including a step-by-step guide on how to talk to your kids about cyberbullying. While that’s helpful, it’s not very thorough. 

As a parent, I’m all for talking to my kids about the dangers of the internet, but cyber predators are typically older and smarter than the children they prey on. 

That means talking isn’t enough. I want a service that watches my children’s internet usage in real-time, especially when they’re playing games online. Aura gives me that, and I consider it a MAJOR benefit.  

Theft Insurance – Aura

Aura offers fantastic theft insurance coverage, especially for families. LifeLock’s insurance coverage leaves a little to be desired, especially at its lower-tier options. 

With Aura, theft insurance coverage increases with every adult you add to the plan – up to $5 million total. This can be used towards cash recovery, expense reimbursement, home title theft, or cyber extortion. 

LifeLock’s coverage increases too. At its top-tier, Norton LifeLock offers $1 million per adult, just like Aura – but that’s only at its top tier. 

Lower tiers also offer increasing coverage, but their starting point is very low. The lowest level, “Select” plan only offers $25,000, and the mid-level, “Advantage” plan only provides $100,000. 

With Aura, the $1 million per adult is standard. You don’t have to pay more for it by upgrading to a higher tier, which is why Aura comes out ahead here. 

Ease of Use – LifeLock 

This is one category where LifeLock comes out on top. With the software-giant Norton’s backing, LifeLock has created a product that’s streamlined and easy to use. 

The dashboard is intuitive and aesthetically pleasing. Aura’s user interface looks clunky in comparison. 

My major issue with Aura is that it hides its more useful features. Most of the main page is devoted to things you’ll set up once and then not need again, like parental controls and your “watchlist.” Alerts are hidden in the top corner, making them easy to forget or ignore. 

I’m not saying Aura’s interface is bad or that hard to figure out, it’s just not as nice as LifeLock. 

Online Safety Features – Aura

One of LifeLock’s biggest selling points is that it comes with Norton Antivirus software. And it’s true Norton provides some of the best antivirus software available. On top of this, LifeLock provides: 

Aura also provides antivirus software, a VPN (for up to 50 family devices), an ad tracker blocker, a safe browser, and a password manager. 

Unfortunately, Aura’s antivirus software and VPN aren’t the best I’ve ever used, LifeLock’s are better. Still, they are usable, and Aura offers a few other features that win it this category – namely, a privacy assistant and smart vault. 

The privacy assistant removes your personal information from data brokers, helping you limit annoying telemarketers and advertisers. This can also help protect you from scams. 

The smart vault lets you store digital files and passwords so that only you and your family can see them. This is a huge asset for families who want to share securely online.

Cost – Aura

Aura isn’t the most affordable identity protection service out there, but it provides the most value by far (and with our discount code, it’s hard to find a less expensive service for families). 

Meanwhile, LifeLock looks inexpensive at first, but it doesn’t stay that way. LifeLock raises their price after the first year – and not by just a little bit. Their lowest level, Select plan, starts at $28.99 per month for families. After the first year, that rate jumps to $38.99!

And, if you want all the features we’ve been discussing, you’d need their top-tier plan. At that point, the cost is outrageous – starting at $48.99 per month for families and renewing at $81.99!

Overall Winner: Aura

Keeping your family safe from identity thieves starts with choosing the best protection service. Based on my testing, that service is Aura. 

Aura’s monitoring is fast and accurate, allowing you to catch threats and do something about them before they become bigger issues. 

If you or anyone in your family ends up a victim of identity theft, you know Aura’s expert team is there to help you fix the problem. Plus, you’ll have $1 million in insurance coverage per adult to take care of expenses. 

Aura also offers flexible family plans, too. They let you include up to five adults and unlimited children. Even better, these plans come with features parents need – like screen time controls and cyberbullying detection.

With Aura, you get a full suite of online privacy features as well, including data broker removal services. 

Best of all, you get all of this at a cost that doesn’t go up later. When you use our discount code, Aura is much more affordable than LifeLock, and it stays that way.

LifeLock has a big name behind it (and a big marketing budget), but it’s NOT the best choice. It can’t protect your family the way Aura does.

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