Be Family

What is BeFamily app?

BeFamily is a family organisation and communication app with built-in smart assistants and other tools to help your family.

Link the app to your device calendar to avoid conflicting events, see everyone's plans, and remember important dates and times.

Communicate with your family using this app and link them to your calendar events and to-do lists. With a single source of family communication, nobody should miss a message because they checked the wrong messaging platform.

Schedule tasks, chores, and plans to reflect your family's lifestyle and each member's availability and capability.

Smart assistants provide even more support by using artificial intelligence (AI) to provide ideas and help.

Once you've created routines, the app doesn't just list them as a standard chores app or calendar might. The app will recognise if somebody's schedule clashes and reallocate to an available family member capable of doing the task. 

The 'Draft Note' smart assistant uses generative AI like the popular ChatGPT, as you can ask it to generate notes on any topic. It does a great job of producing an apt and clear message which, in many cases, you can use 'as-is', but you could also add a personalised line.

Other assistants in the app give you ideas for gifts and days out — they'll even tell you a joke if you need cheering up!

BeFamily is family-focused, but you can involve outside members on an ad-hoc basis. For example, when planning a party or holiday with friends, you can share a custom link to get them involved.

What we love about BeFamily app.

BeFamily unifies many ways families already organise and communicate into a single app. In itself, this has advantages.

With multiple communication channels like email and family groups, there is an increasing chance that a key message will go unseen. Having calendars in the same place as the messaging functions reduces the friction between learning of a timetable change and recording or communicating it.

When you use separate apps, everything is manual. With BeFamily, its smart assistants and tools help out. Create a routine for regular tasks, and the app will allocate them based on who is free and notify you when there is a conflict. As part of the routine's setup, you tell the app who can do each task so it won't allocate a job to somebody too young. A separate calendar and messaging app could not provide this level of assistance.

What skills does it teach?

BeFamily is a family communication and organisational platform and app. It does not directly teach skills and knowledge. Using BeFamily will help kids develop better organisational skills and avoid many problems forgotten messages and arrangments cause.

What age is it appropriate for?

BeFamily should be downloaded and set up by adults. As part of this process, they can understand how younger family members can use it, provide their consent and make it available.

Is BeFamily app easy to use?

The app takes new users through the setup process very well. It explains the features available and the benefits they offer. The app uses a layout that will be familiar to most users, making it easy to understand.

Those administering the BeFamily account invite other family members from within the app. They generate a link to send to others who must create a BeFamily account using email, Apple, or Google accounts.

How will students benefit?

Kids are not always timely or clear in their communications. BeFamily helps them assume an age-appropriate level of responsibility by giving them the tools to schedule and communicate. As well as reducing the stress of last-minute organisation, this will let them make the most of each opportunity.

In the long term, kids using this app are learning how to plan and organise their lives. These skills are valuable for later studies and future employment when they can't rely on another family member to come to the rescue.

How will parents benefit?

Family harmony is a goal of every parent and a result of many different factors. Communication and organisation are two crucial influences on how smoothly family life runs, which are what BeFamily helps with the most.

How will teachers benefit?

As a family communication app and platform, BeFamily is unsuitable for school use. However, helping kids improve their organisation and family communication will benefit them at school. Kids using this app have the tools to ensure their parents know about school events and don't forget them. Parents can use the app to set up routines which remind kids to prepare for school, such as packing their sports gear.

How much does BeFamily app cost?

There was no paid version at the time of this BeFamily app review. Everything you see in this review is free — no advertisements, subscriptions, or in-app purchases. The app's Gift-Ideas smart assistant will provide you with affiliated Amazon links to make your purchases, and the forthcoming grocery assistant will likely do the same. These do not add to the costs to you.

We don't know how long the app's baseline free cost might last, but it makes now a great time to check out a fully-featured family organisation app and see how well it meshes with your family dynamic.

Is BeFamily app safe to use?

BeFamily will require you to enter information that needs careful handling, such as location, times, and other details regarding your kids. The app will need to synchronise these across each family member's device, so BeFamily will need to upload the data.

Parents should administer the BeFamily account. Children under 18 should not create an account, and parents must consent to their kids' use of the app.

BeFamily's privacy policy details how the services use and store data. It further outlines how this relates to specific geographical regions such as the UK, Europe, Canada, and California.

What can BeFamily app improve on?

BeFamily is currently free, which is fantastic, but we'd like it to explain its plans.

Parents may not want to incorporate an app into their family lives without knowing what impact it will have on the family budget in the future or how long it will remain free.

We'd like this information to extend further to a fully-fledged support section of the app. Currently, the supporting website does not provide much support beyond illustrating the features, and the support section in the app leads to an email link. A knowledge base or FAQ section would greatly benefit potential and existing users.

It would be helpful for this section to incorporate a guide to embedding the app into family life.

Overall rating of the app.

BeFamily provides a significant step up over other family organisation and communication apps and a huge leap from using non-dedicated tools. BeFamily's features are precisely what busy families need, and its smart assistants add genuinely responsive help. The app is free to download and fully functional — you have nothing to lose by testing it for yourself. BeFamily is a five-star app.