Best for a relationship
Which app is built for people who want one, rather than one that tolerates them.
Hinge 4.5/5
Only 2 of the 3 reviews score this line, so this is the data we have rather than a ranking.
Best dating apps
The best dating apps in 2026, with nothing to sell you
Every other ranking of this kind is paid for by the apps it ranks. This one cannot be: we take no commission, no advertising from dating companies and no free subscriptions, so the only thing a recommendation here can be based on is the evidence. That cuts both ways — it also means we will not rank an app we have not assessed, and most of them we have not yet.
We track 24 dating apps and have assessed three of them so far. Below: what those three are good and bad at, with the number behind every claim; what the pricing data already answers for the other 21; and the queue for the rest. Where we do not know something yet, the page says so rather than guessing.
How the 100 splits
- Matching quality25
- Safety and verification25
- Honest pricing25
- Ease of leaving25
Two kinds of piece live here — A researched review weighs up the public evidence — app-store and Trustpilot ratings, independent tests, user reports, the company’s own documentation — and is rated out of 5. A tested review means at least 28 days inside the app on a real profile, paid for out of our own pocket, and carries a Signal Score out of 100. Every piece says which it is at the top, and the three below are all researched: no Signal Score has been awarded yet, because no 28-day test has finished.
The apps we have assessed
Ranked by our rating
3.8/5
Review · Hinge
Hinge review 2026: is Hinge really worth using?
“Designed to be deleted” is the most ambitious slogan in online dating. Hinge structures conversations better than anyone — and still has the worst Trustpilot score of the big three.
The easiest of the big three to recommend — for free
3.5/5
Review · Bumble
Bumble review 2026: is Bumble still worth using?
Bumble has removed the women-message-first rule that defined it for a decade. The app is easier to use and harder to explain — and Premium is much harder to recommend than the free version.
Worth trying free, hard to recommend paying for
3.6/5
Review · Badoo
Badoo review 2026: is Badoo still worth using?
One of the oldest dating apps still running, with a bigger network than its reputation suggests and a rating better than Bumble’s or Hinge’s. Whether it works for you is mostly a question of geography.
Try it free; the paid side is three products pretending to be one
Best dating app for…
Each pick below is the highest score on that line across the reviews that assess it, and the score is printed next to it so you can disagree with the working. Where only one of the three reviews scores a line, the pick says so — a winner from a field of one is not a ranking, it is the only data point we have.
Best free dating app
Whether the app is usable without paying, or a demo of itself.
Best for safety and verification
Photo and ID verification, what happens to a report, and how hard it is for a stranger to reach you.
Bumble 4.5/5
Best for a large pool
Liquidity solves problems that clever design cannot, especially outside big cities.
Badoo 4.5/5
- Badoo 4.5
Only 1 of the 3 reviews score this line, so this is the data we have rather than a ranking.
Easiest to actually use
How much friction there is between opening the app and having a conversation.
Best value if you pay
Whether the subscription buys better matching, or just more reach.
No clear winner 3/5
The best score here is 3 out of 5. That is the least bad of the three, not a recommendation.
So which one should you use?
Taking the picks above together, and only for the three apps that have actually been assessed:
- You want a relationship, and you live in a city
- Hinge, on the free tier It scores highest on relationship focus and on profile quality, its free version is genuinely usable, and its premium tier is the one we are least able to justify.
- Safety tooling matters most to you
- Bumble Highest safety score of the three, with photo and ID verification, an AI deception detector and the most developed reporting flow — though its free tier is the most restricted and its premium value the lowest.
- You are outside a big city, or you travel
- Badoo The only one of the three whose user-base size we have assessed, and it scores highest of anything we have rated on it. Its weakness is that the paid side is three products pretending to be one.
- You were about to pay for one of them
- Wait Premium value is the lowest line in all three reviews. Nothing in the evidence so far says a subscription buys better matching rather than more reach — and the free tiers of two of the three are rated 4 out of 5.
If the app you use is not on that list, it is because we have not assessed it, not because it is bad. The queue below is the honest version of that answer.
Cheapest, dearest, and the ones that will not say
These are facts about published prices rather than verdicts about apps, so they cover all 24 we track, including the ones nobody here has assessed. Checked 19 August 2026, US pricing, monthly tier unless noted.
Cheapest dating app
What the lowest paid tier actually is, before anyone tells you it is worth it.
Lex Free
- Plenty of Fish $7.50–23/mo
- OkCupid ~$7.95/mo
- Badoo ~$9.99/mo
Cheapest is not the same as best value, and none of these three has been assessed.
Most expensive dating app
The top of the market, which is further up than most people expect.
The League $399–2,499/mo
Membership tiers that cost more per month than most apps cost per decade.
Apps that change the price by who you are
The same plan, a different number, depending on your age, location or platform.
5 of 24
Hinge’s own tier has been observed between $14 and $33 for identical features. How much dating apps actually cost has the full picture.
Apps that publish no price at all
Hidden until you are signed in, or set per territory.
6 of 24
Where we could not establish a price, the row says so rather than carrying a guess.
The finding that runs through all three
Not one of them is a clear recommendation to pay for
Premium value is the lowest or joint-lowest line in all three reviews — Hinge 3, Badoo 3, Bumble 2.5 out of 5. The subscriptions mostly buy reach and visibility rather than better matching, which is exactly what the pricing data predicts when growth stalls and revenue per paying user becomes the only lever left.
Support is the worst thing about all three
Customer support reputation scores Hinge 2, Badoo 3, Bumble 2 out of 5. Account bans with no usable appeal, and billing disputes with no human on the other end, are the single most repeated complaint across every platform we read — and they are what the Trustpilot pages are mostly made of.
Where an app is rated decides what it scores
Every one of these apps is rated far higher in the app stores than on Trustpilot — a spread of Hinge 3.2, Badoo 1.7, Bumble 3.0 points. That is not one score being wrong. App-store ratings are prompted inside a working app; Trustpilot is somewhere you go on purpose, usually after a ban, a billing dispute or a support failure. Each review charts both rather than averaging them into a number that describes nobody.
What “best” means on this page
A Signal Score is 100 points split evenly across the four things readers actually ask us about. The weights are published below so the score can be argued with, and an app that changes under you is re-scored rather than grandfathered. None of the three reviews below carries one yet — a Signal Score requires a finished 28-day test, and a researched rating out of 5 is what we publish until then.
25/100
Matching quality
Whether the people the app shows you are plausible, and whether a match becomes a conversation. Measured from how many matches produce a reply rather than how many matches arrive — an app that hands you two hundred dead ends has not matched you with anyone.
25/100
Safety and verification
Photo and ID verification, whether verification is visible at a glance or buried, what happens to a report, and how hard it is for a stranger to reach you before you have agreed to it. A reported profile still live on day 28 costs an app most of this quarter.
25/100
Honest pricing
Whether the advertised price is the price you pay, whether the subscription buys matching or only reach, and how many separate things you are asked to buy. Personalised pricing, a headline rate that turns out to need a twelve-month commitment, and a second currency on top of a subscription all lose points here.
25/100
Ease of leaving
How many steps it takes to cancel, whether cancelling is possible in the app that sold you the subscription, whether deleting the account deletes the data, and what arrives in your inbox afterwards. An app designed to be deleted should be deletable.
Ratings out of 5 and Signal Scores out of 100 are not the same measurement and are never rescaled into one another. Where a review shows a rating, that is what the evidence supported at the date on the piece; where it shows a score, somebody paid for the app and used it for a month.
The apps we have not assessed yet
These are in the scoreboard with a verified price and a named source, and nothing else. No rating, no verdict, no ranking — because we have not done the work, and copying someone else’s verdict is the practice this publication exists to point at. Each links to its row, which is what we can actually stand behind today.
The scoreboard sorts every app into one of three groups. Big apps are the ones most people mean by "dating apps" — the largest pools, the most advertising, the most aggressive monetisation. Relationship-first apps sell intent: fewer options, more questions, usually a higher price. Community and identity apps are built around who you are rather than how many people are nearby, and are the group where the pricing is least transparent — 3 of the 6 apps that publish no price at all sit here.
Big apps
Relationship-first
- Feeld $29.99/mo
- Coffee Meets Bagel $34.99/mo
- eharmony $19–37/mo
- The League $399–2,499/mo
- Raya $19.99–24.99/mo
- Thursday ~$14.99/mo
- Boo Not established
- Inner Circle Not established
What we are testing next
In this order. A Signal Score out of 100 arrives when that app’s 28-day test finishes, and a researched rating out of 5 may arrive sooner. Neither arrives early.
- 1 Tinder The largest app we track, and the biggest gap on this page. Unscheduled
- 2 Grindr One of only three apps that publish a price we can read off their own help centre. Unscheduled
- 3 OkCupid Heavily promotional pricing that needs checking from inside an account. Unscheduled
- 4 Feeld Publishes its pricing openly, which is rare enough to be worth rewarding with a look. Unscheduled
Why there are no affiliate links on this page
Almost every “best dating app” list you will find is a commission business. The site is paid a bounty when you sign up, which is why the rankings are so stable, so positive, and so similar to one another. We take no commission, no advertising from dating companies, no paid placements and no free subscriptions, and we pay for every app we cover. If we tell you to pay for something, that is the whole transaction — there is no second one behind it.
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