Simple, private parental controls for your home.
“Like a light in the window, Lantern Watch quietly watches over your family when you're not thinking about it.”
Runs 100% on your router. No cloud accounts. No subscriptions.
Most parental control tools ask you to trade your family's privacy for protection. We don't.
Everything runs locally on a small router you own. Your family's activity never leaves the house.
Blocks adult content, malware, and trackers at the DNS level for every device on the network — no app to install on each phone.
Set bedtimes, focus hours, and daily limits. Pause the internet for any device with one tap when it's time for dinner.
See every device on your network and manage each one individually — kids' tablets, the family TV, guest phones.
Optional notifications to a parent's phone when something needs attention — delivered privately via ntfy, Telegram, or email.
When a blocked site is hit, kids see a warm reminder with Psalm 119:105 and a link to helpful resources — encouragement, not shame.
Every line of code is public on GitHub under the MIT license. Anyone can inspect exactly what it does — nothing hidden.
A small router sits in front of your home network. Plug it in, and every device is protected automatically.
Connect a Lantern Watch router between your internet modem and your devices. No complex networking knowledge required.
A simple first-run wizard walks you through your password, filtering level, and schedules — in plain language.
Every device on your Wi-Fi is now filtered and managed from one friendly dashboard. That's it.
Watch setup walkthroughs, full feature tours, and device management guides.
Lantern Watch runs on affordable GL.iNet hardware. Buy the device once and enjoy free protection forever.
Wi-Fi 6 router with blazing speeds and massive RAM for households with multiple kids, game consoles, and streaming devices.
Pocket-sized Wi-Fi 7 router. Perfect for family road trips, RVs, hotels, or small apartments wanting portable protection.
A dedicated wired gateway that sits cleanly between your modem and existing mesh Wi-Fi system (Eero, Orbi, Google Nest).
Devices that real users have installed Lantern Watch on and reported working — confirmed in the wild, not lab-tested by us. Running it on something else? Tell us and we'll add it here.
A user let us know Lantern Watch runs beautifully on the Brume 2. Same 1 GB RAM and wired setup as the Brume 3, so it feels right at home. Thanks, Benjamin!
Works, but its 256 MB of storage is tight for more than a device or two. If you're set on this one, adding a USB thumb drive gives it real breathing room.
Got Lantern Watch running on a different GL.iNet or OpenWrt router? Let us know — we'll add it to this list so the next parent can find a device that just works.
Install directly through your GL.iNet router panel with zero command-line tools needed.
In the GL.iNet panel: Applications → Plug-ins → Manage Sources.
Add:
Name lanternwatch
URL https://lanternwatch.org/repo
then Apply.
Click Refresh, search lanternwatch, and click Install. Give it about two minutes.
Open http://192.168.8.1:8081 and choose a password. That's it — protection is already on.
Lantern Watch is built on top of AdGuard Home, which handles the actual DNS blocking. Lantern Watch adds the parental-control layer on top — schedules, screen time, dashboards, and alerts — and runs on GL.iNet hardware.
Lantern Watch is free for everyone — families, churches, camps, and organizations — forever. No subscriptions, no licenses, no catch. If it's protecting your family, consider leaving a tip to help put a router in a home that can't afford one. 100% of tips go toward putting fully-loaded routers into homes that need them and supporting continued development.
No pressure — the software stays free either way.The questions parents ask most, answered straight.
Lantern Watch includes and manages its own copy of AdGuard Home on the router, and all filtering happens there. It is built to be the single filter for your whole home, sitting at the front door where every device passes through.
Running a second DNS filter behind it (a separate Pi-hole on your network) usually just causes confusion, and Lantern Watch's bypass protection will try to pull devices back to its own filter. If you already have a Pi-hole setup you love, Lantern Watch may be more than you need. If you want pause, schedules, screen-time limits, and alerts on top of filtering, that is exactly the part Pi-hole and plain AdGuard do not do.
Yes. A whole-home VPN on the router and Lantern Watch work together. Filtering and schedules are applied before traffic reaches the VPN tunnel, so blocking still happens.
One thing to check: if your VPN pushes its own DNS servers, turn that off in the GL.iNet VPN settings so lookups keep going through the filter (or let Lantern Watch's bypass protection handle it). A VPN installed on one child's device, rather than the router, can route around DNS filtering entirely. That is true of any DNS-based tool, and Lantern Watch will alert you when it thinks a device is doing this.
No, and this is important to understand. Lantern Watch works at the DNS level, which lets it block or allow whole sites and apps but not see inside them. Modern apps use encrypted connections (HTTPS), so once you allow YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or similar, Lantern Watch cannot filter the individual videos, posts, or messages within that platform.
The tools that help here are the platform's own restricted modes (Lantern Watch has a one-tap YouTube Restricted Mode), keeping the stricter social profiles turned on, and using pause and schedules so those apps are only reachable at times you choose.
Everything comes back on its own. Filtering, schedules, screen-time limits, and any pause that was running are all restored automatically when the router boots. A bedtime that was in effect stays in effect. A one-hour pause picks up where it left off. There is nothing to re-arm and no window where the network is unprotected after a power blip.
Generally no. Consoles, smart TVs, doorbells, and thermostats keep working normally. They are just filtered for ads, trackers, and known-bad domains like everything else.
Lantern Watch never auto-pauses your router, mesh nodes, NAS, or printer, and it labels infrastructure devices so a schedule cannot knock out your network. Port forwards, DDNS, and game console NAT settings live in the GL.iNet router config, and Lantern Watch does not touch them. If one device genuinely needs its own DNS server, there is a per-device toggle to exempt it.
Lantern Watch is free and open source — no access request needed. Just install it (or grab it on GitHub). Got a question, an idea, or hit a snag? Drop us a note. And if you've tested Lantern Watch on a router we haven't listed, we'd love to hear it — we'll add it to our community-confirmed list to help the next family.