New Gadget Obsession – I Can’t Believe I Didn’t Have This in My House All Along

Best Buy sent me a Cujo Smart Firewall for the sake of this review. The opinions in this review are true.

I’ve been thinking about getting a firewall for my house lately. With 12 devices online, a child under 13 and a business, it seemed like something I should be shopping for. I mean, you can never be too safe when it comes to your personal information and being able to govern what your children have access to seems like the best way to keep them away from adult content. So, when Best Buy asked me if I wanted to review the CUJO Smart Firewall, I had to say yes. Here’s my take along with some practical information on my newest gadget obsession.

First, let me set the scene here…

I work from home. I spend no less than 50 hours a week on my desktop. When I am not on my desktop, I am working on my phone or my laptop, (from home). My son is a YouTuber. He also works from home. He also watches countless videos and plays online games on his tablet. My other half is glued to his phone, usually playing games and watching Facebook or YouTube videos. When we are not glued to one of these devices, we are streaming from Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon on one of our smart devices. We have a PS4, a PS3, a Wii U, a ZTE Spro 2 Smart Projector, a Google Home and 2 Google Chromecasts. I kid you not, we are always online. And up until now, I’ve had no parental control beyond what I can manage on YouTube and PS4. So what does this all mean?

It means we are leaving ourselves wide open for cyber attacks and that I’m probably slacking hard in the parental control department. But, the CUJO Smart Firewall claims business level security to your home network which means, I am this mom just leveled up. But that’s far from all it does.

What is a CUJO Smart Firewall and What Can it do?

At a price point of $249.99 the CUJO Smart Firewall offers business level protection by securing all devices that go through my home’s WiFi router. It finds the malicious sites, viruses, and hacks that are a potential threat and blocks them from my devices. Need I say how important this is? Basically, it’s antivirus for my whole home network. Plus, it has incredible features that puts me in control of what my child can access. Check these parental controls out:

• It controls all the devices my child is on
• It has an internet filter
• I can set time limits on my son’s activity
• It monitors social media activity
• I can pause the internet on any device (hello bedtime for real)
• I get alerts when threats are present and a report of my home’s health
• I can set up user profiles and settings for each

How Do You Set it Up?

This is the best part. You download the app, plug it into your router, and into the power outlet. The end. Like literally, that’s it. I couldn’t make this sound complicated if I tried. But here are some pics in case you want to see for yourself.

So What Did I Think of CUJO?

I love that I can have this parental control. There is so much online that kids should not be exposed to (hello understatement of the year). I feel much more at ease knowing this is being monitored and that boundaries are in place. This is clearly a no-brainer for our house.

Something that really stood out for me (because let’s face it, CUJO is not inventing the wheel here), was the online and phone support. This was amazing! I have a dual band router and it always gives me a super hard time when I am trying to set things like this up. For most, you just plug in the CUJO Smart Firewall, install the app and boom, you’re ready to start leveling up your parenting and WiFi security. But for me, it wasn’t that simple.

What was totally simple was starting an online chat and then getting a phone call from a CUJO support person. They took over my computer and set everything up. And in no time at all, I was protected.

This is GOLDEN. I don’t have time to deal with technical issues, so having them there totally won me over.

The Take-Away

I’m officially obsessed with the CUJO Smart Firewall. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and it has proven to be awesome. I had four extra people in my house who evacuated from Hurricane Irma and they were all super impressed with it too. Whenever someone was blocked from a malicious website, I was notified. We all couldn’t believe how many times we would have gone to these sites had I not installed CUJO. My only blip was the price point, but I compared it to other top rated firewalls and they don’t have the parental controls. So, it’s definitely priced pretty spot on. I would like to see it maybe at $225 instead of $250.

Overall I’m feeling like a boss, feeling like a good parent and feeling like this is my new favorite gadget.