Staff Pick: The Five Hottest Dating Apps Right Now

Find the best communities and the best amount of matches with our comprehensive dating app reviews!

Online dating has completely revolutionized the way we interact with others and find a prospective partner to spend the rest of our lives with. Or, maybe skip that last bit, since hookups and one-night stands have also grown in popularity over recent years. Whatever it is you’re looking for, you can likely find it on one of the major online dating services. But not all dating sites and apps are created equally. Some communities are vastly different from each other, filled with people looking for very different things. Some apps are simply more comfortable to use than others, too.

We’ve gone through all the most popular apps and websites, as well as a few of the smaller ones, and put together a list of the best ones we’ve found. We’ve come across the old saying that “bigger means better,” and it rings true for the most part — but there are also a few smaller communities on this list you may not have heard of yet. Let’s get into it.

1. Tinder

Tinder is the classic dating app. One of the first on the scene when online dating went mainstream, it’s since evolved into a massive global community that most people have at least heard of, even if they’ve never used it. It offers one of the easiest-to-use interfaces of any dating app, built around the now-famous “swipe left” and “swipe right” gestures to pass on or like someone. By cutting out a middleman entirely, like a traditional matchmaking service, it puts the matching decision directly in the hands of the person doing the swiping.

One of our favorite features of Tinder is exactly that interface. Every time you’re shown someone to consider, you don’t have to dig through a full profile stuffed with filler content or outdated information. All you see are a few pictures, their name, age, distance from you, and a short description they’ve written themselves. From there, that person has usually included any genuinely relevant information already, so you’re not matching blindly. And if something’s still unclear once you’ve matched, you can simply ask.

Since Tinder is such a popular app, you probably won’t have much trouble finding people near you, no matter where you are. Tinder automatically recommends people in your area, which gives you peace of mind that you won’t need to drive an hour just to meet someone you liked. Of course, you can always widen the search radius too, which helps if you live somewhere less densely populated and want to see more potential matches.

Tinder also tends to have the largest and most active user base of any app on this list, which matters more than people expect — a bigger pool means more variety, faster matches, and a better shot at finding someone genuinely compatible with what you’re looking for, whatever that happens to be.

2. Badoo

If Tinder was there for the online dating boom, you could say that Badoo helped pioneer it. Started back in 2006, Badoo is another giant in the online dating industry. Strangely enough, though, not many people seem to know about it, or it just doesn’t come to mind first when they think about online dating, despite its size.

Badoo handles online dating similarly to Tinder, following the same swipe system and matching people based on location. But it has considerably more profile fields than Tinder, letting you write about anything from books and movies to games and much more.

Although this might feel like writing a resume at first, you only need to fill it out once, which means you can skip a lot of the repetitive small talk that usually happens during that awkward early stage of getting to know someone. You can see almost immediately whether you’re genuinely interested in someone, or find shared interests to talk about while you’re still getting acquainted.

Badoo also isn’t limited to just dating. There’s a whole section of the community dedicated specifically to finding friends, which makes it a genuinely solid option for meeting all kinds of people, not just romantic prospects. You can find friends nearby and stumble into entire communities you never knew existed in your own city.

3. Happn

It’s still on its way to reaching full mainstream maturity, but Happn seems to be changing online dating in something like the way Snapchat once changed social media.

Instead of mindlessly browsing through endless profiles or waiting on suggestions from an algorithm you don’t fully understand, Happn revolves around your actual lifestyle and movement through the world. If you’re looking for a relationship, you might already be quietly scanning the room for someone interesting while getting your morning coffee. Happn essentially automates that instinct — if you cross paths with someone else using the app, you’ll get a notification, and you can decide from there whether to reach out.

If you’re an active person and walking is a regular part of your day, Happn might be a particularly good fit for you. The community is still relatively small compared to giants like Tinder, but it won’t grow if people don’t start signing up and giving it a shot. Who knows — you might get lucky and find someone sooner than you expect, especially in a busier city.

4. Blendr

Again, a name that’s not especially common, but one that’s been around since roughly the same era as Tinder. Boasting a community of nearly half a billion users, Blendr should never leave you struggling to find someone to talk to.

Blendr is very similar in its goals to Badoo, the network listed above at number two. Both apps have extensive profile options and large communities, and both offer a real chance at finding friends rather than just dates or hookups. We’ve ranked it slightly lower here mainly because it tends to mimic Badoo pretty closely in practice, without adding much that’s distinctly its own.

Still, we’ve given it the green light, since the community remains absolutely massive, and you’re bound to find someone worth talking to no matter where you happen to be located.

5. eHarmony

Ah, bringing it back home with the classic eHarmony. If you’ve been around for a while, you may have heard of eHarmony years ago, since it has remained one of the most enduringly popular dating services around, long before most of the apps on this list existed.

The main difference between eHarmony and the other services listed above is that you don’t do the matching yourself here. You’re not in the driver’s seat quite as much, but in some ways, that’s actually a good thing. eHarmony bases its matches on data from already-successful marriages and the specific factors that tended to lead to those marriages working out. This is genuinely useful, because when you’re matching yourself manually, it’s easy to not really know what you want, or to gravitate toward the same type of person again and again even when it hasn’t worked out before.

eHarmony has been in the game for a long time, which alone should tell you something about how trustworthy the platform is, and how successful its matching approach tends to be at actually pairing compatible couples together over the long run.

Which site should you be using?

These short reviews should be enough to prime you on what each network is generally about, but if we dig a little deeper into the types of communities on each one, some will clearly suit you better than others.

For instance, Tinder is incredibly popular with people between roughly 18 and 30. Do you know what else tends to be popular in that age range? Hookup culture. One-night stands, clubbing, and casual relationships all fall broadly into this category. So if that’s what you’re after, or if it’s something that genuinely interests you (or you simply fall into that age range yourself), Tinder is likely going to be your best option here.

Badoo is great for landing an actual date, but it’s also great for meeting new people who might just become friends instead. Since the community is much larger overall, even if you’re from a smaller town, you’re still fairly likely to meet someone new and interesting.

Blendr, on the other hand, might work better in areas with larger populations, since it isn’t quite as well known despite its massive user base. Giving both Blendr and Badoo a shot is probably the smartest move if you’re not sure which one fits — there’s no rule against trying more than one at once.

Happn is fantastic if you’re on the cutting edge of things and already live a fairly active, out-and-about lifestyle. If you’re constantly up and roaming around your city, you might as well get matched while you’re at it. Your social currency also goes up a little when you get to tell people, “Yeah, I used Happn before it was cool.”

Finally, there’s eHarmony. If you’re looking for a more serious relationship with people who are also genuinely looking for something serious, eHarmony is your best bet on this list. Let their professional matchmaking approach do some of the early filtering for you, and save the time you’d otherwise spend sifting through matches yourself.

A few tips before you dive in

Whichever app you end up choosing from this list, a handful of habits will make the experience noticeably better. Take your time on your profile before you start swiping — a couple of clear, recent photos and a short, honest bio go further than people expect, and they cut down dramatically on mismatched expectations later. Our full guide on building a dating profile that works goes into more detail on this. Avoid using photos that are more than a year or two old; nothing sours a first meeting faster than someone feeling misled before you’ve even sat down.

It’s also worth pacing yourself. Matching with dozens of people in a single evening feels productive, but it usually just means you end up with a dozen shallow conversations instead of a couple of genuinely promising ones. Slow down, actually read what people write, and prioritize quality conversations over sheer quantity of matches.

Finally, treat safety as part of the process, not an afterthought. Video chat before meeting in person if the app supports it, meet your first date somewhere public, and let a friend know where you’ll be. Every app on this list has its own version of a safety center or reporting tools — it’s worth knowing where they are before you need them, not after.

Making the most of whichever app you pick

Whichever of these you settle on, the app itself only does half the work. A thoughtful profile, a bit of patience, and a willingness to actually read what someone writes before responding tend to matter more than which specific platform you’re using. Once you’ve matched, the way you flirt and keep a conversation going matters just as much as the app you picked. People often bounce between two or three apps before settling on the one that fits their dating goals and local dating pool best, and there’s nothing wrong with doing the same rather than committing to the first one you try.

Trying more than one at once

There’s no rule saying you have to pick just one app and stick with it exclusively. Plenty of people run two apps in parallel, at least while they’re still figuring out which community fits them best — maybe Tinder for casual dates and eHarmony for something with more long-term intent. Just be mindful of your own time and energy if you go this route, since juggling conversations across multiple platforms can get overwhelming fast if you’re not deliberate about how many active conversations you can realistically keep up with at once.

Conclusion

Your preferred app might not be on here, and that’s completely fine. There are tons of apps built for smaller, more specific niches, like Grindr and Bumble, that simply weren’t the focus of this particular list. This roundup is just our staff picks — the ones we’ve genuinely liked using recently. If you think your favorite app deserves a spot on this list, let us know why, and we’ll take a look. But as all-around platforms for the average person looking to date online, these five are, in our opinion, the strongest starting point. If you’re looking for something new and haven’t tried these yet, they’re well worth a shot.