Welcome to Dating Review Service

 1. Yahoo! Personals

 2. Match.com

 3. Date.com

 4. LavaLife.com

 5. Chemistry.com

 6. AmericanSingles®.com


 

- The Best Choice
 

 - Average

 

Useful Tips

First step in choosing a dating company is to read as many reviews online as possible. Also entering the search phases, like the name of the company followed by words scam, complaints, problems etc. in search engines is advised.
 

Most of the dating companies offer free signup where search is enabled, but messaging is disabled, so try it out before giving credit card info.
 

Pay attention to search results. Are there a lot of dates on a first search? Do dates look like a models, and most of the info is not filled in profile (if there are more these kind of profiles than profiles of regular people in search results, stay away from that dating company. It's probably somebody trying to steal personal info)?
 

Most of the dating companies show the activity for profiles (if it doesn't company should be avoided). If there are a lot of profiles that haven't been active in more than a week in top search results, something is wrong, so be careful. It's either that they don't have enough profiles to stay competitive, or dating company is of no interest to people (low popularity).
 

As with any other service on the internet, quality customer service is very important. Go for the dating company that provides phone number. If company offers just form on their web site to fill out, it probably means that it's operated by one person or a very small company that probably leased out a database of profiles from bigger company, and can't support the customer base.
 

Good thing to do before choosing dating site is to check out ratio between man and women. Free signup opens up the door to free search. If you are man, make note of total number of women and total number of man, and divide those two numbers. It would be optimal if there is the same number of man and women (ratio 1:1), but that's never a case. Usually there is more man than women, and good ratio would be 3:1 to 4:1 (total number of man for one dating site in local area (50mile range) is 9000 and there are 3000 women. That would be a ratio of 3:1, which is good). Women should check the ratio also. The higher the ratio is, more choices for the women, but at the same time more messages in inbox, which could make it hard to decide. This calculation is not perfect (because of fake profiles), but it's a good way to test
dating company.

Our job at Dating Review Service is to review and rate the most popular dating companies and pick the best ones. Finding your true love online is not as easy as it used to be. There are literally 1000s of dating companies in existence today, and they all claim to be the best. Not so. Dating industry is well know to use unethical practices (keeping the profiles of people active even though they were inactive for years, creating fake profiles, using intelligent programs to pretend to be live person etc). Trying a few dating companies is not a bad option, but it requires a lot of time and lost money. We hope our service will help daters that feel overwhelmed by so many choices pick the best dating company and avoid being scammed. 

Dating Reviews and Scores

Yahoo! Personals is definitely the BEST CHOICE for online daters. One of our reviewers spent close to 1 year on Yahoo Personals, and he couldn't be happier. Signup process was very easy (once you sign up for yahoo email, automatically access to personals is allowed). Where Yahoo really shines is number of search results, and very few fake profiles. Even though they don't have advanced system for finding matches like Eharmony and Chemistry.com, search criteria options are numerous (everything from age, distance, ethnicity to religion, love style etc). One important thing to note is that updating personal profiles including description, pictures and titles would put you in top spot for some time and there would be more activity (messages from prospective dates). That's why it's advisable to make changes to profile and replace old pictures from time to time. There isn't too much spam coming from Yahoo. One annoyance is getting emails when potential match puts up a new picture. Other than that, everything else looks very appealing, advanced and true, and that's why is our best choice among dating sites.

     Number of Results: 9/10                                      Price: $16.65 per month *

     Customer Service: 10/10                                     Features: 10/10

 Overall Score: 10/10
 

Match.com is the SECOND BEST in our view. 15 Million members couldn't be wrong, and Match.com delivers as promised. Free signup was painless and after logging in for the first time, most of the features (search, profile, free winks) were enabled. Search capabilities were very similar to Yahoo Personals capabilities, even though search results were not always accurate. For the zip codes that we tried, there was a lot of results (probably not as many as Yahoo Personals, but very close) and majority of the profiles appeared to be true. Out of all the other sites that we reviewed, Match.com had the fewest fake profiles. The best bet is to subscribe to their 3 month plan ($19.99), which offer substantial savings. After only a few messages that our reviewers sent, we got responses in our mailbox that were definitely not a scam. Profile pages are not as clean as for some other dating sites. There is text all over, and it might be a little bit hard to navigate. Still, we can't recommend it enough, which is why we put it as a second best dating company.     

     Number of Results: 8/10                                       Price: $20.00 per month *

     Customer Service: 9/10                                        Features: 10/10

 Overall Score: 9/10
 

Date.com is a good dating site with around 2 Million members. The first noticeable thing is a very simple looking web site, which is certainly an advantage. Everything from simple search to contacting a member is upfront and very easy to find. Gallery view could be improved a lot. Currently it only shows a picture and user name, without location and activity, while profile view looks much better. As we expected, there weren't as many results as with Yahoo Personals and Match. For a zip code (50 mile radius) in Chicago, we got around 300 matches and most of them looked very legitimate. Basic and advanced search give enough search features to find any type of date person wants. Out of 300 results for our search criteria, we only found a small number of fake profiles. Audio and video messaging is available to paid members. We recommend this site because of it's functionality without any learning curve, and average number of quality dates. It'd make a very good entry dating choice for online newcomers.    

     Number of Results: 7/10                                       Price: $19.98 per month *

     Customer Service: 8/10                                        Features: 7/10

 Overall Score: 7/10
 

LavaLife.com has something unique that we haven't found in other dating sites. Mostly dating companies offer only long-term relationship type of dating or just casual type of dating (intimate dating), but LavaLife offers both. They separated different dating categories by tabs, so if person is interested in long-term relationship they can click on it, or they can go with intimate type and click on intimate tab, or they can just go with short term dating (friends). So, overall there is something for everyone, and that's why it's so unique. List view for search results was not bad, but we were looking for gallery view and couldn't find it. We found more fake profiles than on other dating sites, but considering they have over 1.3 million members, it's still not that big of a deal. One other turnoff is the fact that a lot of profiles that we checked were not active for a long time for different zip codes that we entered, and total number of results for certain areas were less than we would get with Yahoo! Personals and Match.com. But still, their website setup, accurate search results and appeal to various audience made us put it in number 4 on our list of best dating web sites.       

     Number of Results: 5/10                                       Price: $18.99 per month *

     Customer Service: 7/10                                        Features: 8/10

 Overall Score: 6/10
 

Chemistry.com is more like a personality and physical matching company than regular dating company which uses very simple matching techniques. That's why we didn't get too many matches, but the ones that we got were very similar to what we've been looking for based on personality and physical characteristics. Signing up for a free trial and filling out personality profile was very interesting and educational. They also had some of the eye catching exercises that don't look like they have anything to do with dating (it probably would make more sense to psychological experts). It took anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes to complete all necessary exercises and find matches. We weren't impressed with number of matches, but also not too many fake profiles were present. Comparing to other dating sites subscription price was on high end. Not exactly sure if it's justifiable, even though a lot of features are offered. It is a very good choice for people interested in finding their real matches based on their personality and physical characteristics, without the need to browse through 100 of profiles like it is on other dating sites, and that's why we recommend it.  

     Number of Results: 4/10                                       Price: $33.32 per month *

     Customer Service: 8/10                                        Features:8/10

 Overall Score: 5/10
 

AmericanSingles.com is not a bad dating site, but it definitely needs a lot of improvements to catch up with Yahoo Personals or Match.com. First thing that we noticed was that search capabilities were not as good as for some other dating sites. Keyword search is not offered and even basic search lacks some functionality. Another annoying thing was missing activity date (last login) in gallery view. In list view it does exist, but it's for some reason shaded, which makes it hard to see last login for person we are interested in. On a good note, they do show the exact time when person logged in, which we haven't found in other web dating sites. There was a lot of results for zip codes that we entered, more fake profiles were posted on AmericanSingles than on other dating sites. Also, only up to 4 pictures can be uploaded, which is less than average. Overall, it's still not a bad option, but we cannot recommend it as a first choice.

     Number of Results: 4/10                                       Price: $19.99 per month *

     Customer Service: 7/10                                        Features: 3/10

 Overall Score: 4/10
 

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