CircleUs vs Hauk

CircleUs is a location-sharing app for families and other invited circles, available on Android and iOS. Its live map refreshes every eight seconds. A privacy bubble lets members share a general neighborhood rather than an exact address, with visibility set per circle; people must accept an invitation before joining. Place alerts report arrivals and departures at selected locations, and one-tap SOS can notify circle members and contact emergency services with live GPS coordinates. Drive reports cover speed, phone use, hard braking, and a score after each trip. Elder care mode can learn routines, flag unusual inactivity, monitor battery, and send check-in pings. CircleUs says location data is end-to-end encrypted, is not sold or used for advertising, and can be exported or deleted in settings. The Free Forever plan costs nothing and supports up to five members, two circles, and three place alerts. Gold costs $9 a month billed annually; its listed features include unlimited members and alerts, 30-day location history, crash detection with 911 dispatch, driving reports, elder care monitoring, and AI smart alerts and routines. Gold's location history is deleted after 30 days.

Hauk is a free, open-source service for sharing a phone’s live location through a backend that users host themselves. With its Android app, a user can set how long to share, then send a link for others to follow the location on a map. Sharing ends when the set period expires or the user stops it, and anyone with the link can view the location while it is active. The app sends location data only to the Hauk server configured in its settings. Running it therefore requires a server with PHP and Memcached or Redis, including the corresponding PHP extensions. Deployment options include manual or scripted installation, an Arch Linux AUR package, and an official Docker image. The project supports end-to-end encryption, LDAP authentication, and Tasker share starts; the Android app also supports HTTP and SOCKS proxies. Hauk is licensed under Apache-2.0. Its public demo is limited to two-minute shares and is intended for demonstration. The project recommends HTTPS through a reverse proxy to protect data in transit.