This is: FriendFinder

FriendFinder, with over 1.5 million active members worldwide, is an established dating website targeted toward singles looking for love, romance and marriage or just friendship and a community of like-minded people. You don't even need to give your email in order to browse the web, but if you want to see profiles, create your own and communicate with other singles, you'll have to register.

Besides the usual features, FriendFinder offers a blog section where you can post, video-chat and a magazine created by and for its members.

Costs:

This is: DatingDirect.com

DatingDirect.com is owned by the Meetic Group and can now boast over 5,000,000 members in the UK. The purpose of this site is for those on the lookout for a partner. Features on DatingDirect include things like singles events (which are great for getting you away from the computer and actually out there meeting people) as well as a Daily 6 matching algorithm.

As is evident, DatingDirect offers a lot of choice. There are event quizes that you can create in order to break the ice and get talking to people. That's ultiamtely the goal here: you want to make a connection with another human being and this is the way to do it.

Costs:

This is: UrbanSocial.com

Urbansocial.com is a flirt & chat site for all city dwellers who no longer want to spend their time alone. It’s where you can look for singles that may take your eye in your neighbourhood or nationwide. You can even keep a diary of your dating experiences or be matched in a dating carousel.

Not only that, the number of members is considerable! Our last count came to nearly 400,000 members.

Costs:

This is: UpForIt.com

UpForIt.com launched in 2007 and now has membership numbers in the region of 2,000,000 users. On a monthly basis, around 30,000 of them are active quite regularly. It describes itself as the naughtiest singles community. So it's a place where everybody has the same goals and nobody takes dating too seriously. The process to create the profile is a bit too long in our opinion, being this a personals site.

It has a mix of normal profile pictures and other very explicit pictures. So if you are looking for a more decent dating site, this is not for you.

UpForIt.com has lots of fun features (such as voice-video chat, text messaging, fun rating icons, gifts, winks, live-webcams...) and a tool-bar to reach those features easily. You can even see if someone is available to meet that night or the next day.

It has a modern design but a bit unstructured.

Costs:

This is: WhatsYOURprice

WhatsYourPrice.com is an online dating site with a different approach to what we are used to. It's a marketplace where members can buy or sell the opportunity to go out on a first date. Yes, you heard that right! You either pay your date (if you are the generous man) or you get paid for the date (if you are the attractive woman). Their point is that, if this has been done for charity, it can also be done for love.

WhatsYourPrice.com provides a platform for those with high standards, and willing to pay for the chance to go out on a date with beautiful and attractive people. After all, around 10,000 singles login to WhatsYourPrice each day.

Whether this is considered right or unethical, you can check it out for yourself and decide if you want to participate or not.

Costs:

This is: Lovestruck.com

If you are a busy professional living and working in a big city, finding the time to meet somebody new can be difficult. So it is refreshing to have a dating site that understands this. Lovestruck is such a site. With 200,000 members in London/SE, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney, it is designed to help single professionals who live and work in the same city find each other!

Add to that Lovestruck’s profile verification, exclusive events and parties and mobile apps for iPhone and Android, and you’ve got yourself one pretty good dating site. They have even received numerous awards.

Registering takes no time at all. Just fill out the typical profile information, upload a pic and write a short narrative about yourself. However, it should be noted here that Lovestruck might take up to 24 hours to approve your profile. This might seem at first a negative, but this is an important step to minimize the number of fake profiles and make sure that you are not wasting your time.

Their website design is solid, looks nice and easy to navigate with a clean interface.

If you happen to live in one of the cities that they are operating in, then we highly recommend them!

Lovestruck is currently available in the following UK & Ireland cities:

London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin.

Costs:

This is: MySingleFriend

MySingleFriend brings a new idea to the online dating field. They introduce people to each other, but with a twist: you can get a friend to write the profile for you! Created by TV presenter Sarah Beeny, MySingleFriend.com has innovated a modern approach to finding likeminded people and now has a site that claims some 200,000 registered singles.

A plus point is that you can see profiles even before you sign up with your email address.

It is a very transparent platform (sometimes difficult to find in this niche), where you can see at every step of the process where you are and what you still need to complete, the prices, the monthly renewals are also openly showed...

In a nutshell: mysinglefriend.com is a social network of single people, described by their friends. Groups of friends are linked together making it, unlike any other dating website, a community.

Costs:

This is: Oasis.co.uk

Oasis.com is one of the fastest growing online dating sites in the world with around 16 million members worldwide and is continually attracting over 300,000 new members each month. The Oasis dating site provides you with possible matches, and enables you to search their database for potential partners yourself.

Oasis.com is a moderated service where each profile is checked manually. Their anti-fraud software further protects members from online scammers.

You can chat with your contacts using the Oasis Dating IM (personal details are always kept private.)

Costs:

This is: Flirt.com

Flirting is the name of the game of Flirt.com… For UK singles, this is a good way of getting to know other people and seeing what happens. There are around 1,000,000 members and many more people are joining every day. In addition, women are able to message men for free!

This means that the features on Flirt.com are fully geared towards communication and people getting to know one another. When you login, you can also check out the Match Feed which shows you who is online now and what’s happening.

Costs:

This is: Mamboo.com

Mamboo.com is one of the fastest growing dating sites in the UK. Only two months after its launch the site registered 100,000 members. Today, there are over 300,000 members. Once you have set up your free profile which can include photos, you can browse other members’ profiles and select those of interest to you.

The site is very social, easy and fun to use. The design is modern, clear and without many distractions.

You can easily send, receive and read messages via IM if the selected person is online. And if you are on the go, you can use Mamboo’s mobile app (free downloadable application).

Costs:

This is: PlentyOfFish

PlentyOfFish.com can probably be seen as the largest free online dating site in the English speaking world. Like most dating sites, though, your success on PlentyOfFish (sometimes referred to as POF.com) will depend heavily on where you live and what country you live in. In the UK, PlentyOfFish members often find it difficult due to the strange way the postcodes are laid out (this is unlike the United States where it is a lot more regulated and regimented!).

Membership of PlentyOfFish in the UK is not so high, unfortunately. Although on a worldwide scale they boast 3 million active members every day.

Costs:

This is: Quickflirt.com

The purpose of Quickflirt is just that… to get flirts, fast and on the go. There are over 1,000,000 monthly users who are active and these numbers are growing in the UK. However, this particular flirt site is aiming to keep its members protected and even offers things like Extra Security features to ensure that you’re always safe.

Don’t forget other little features such as winks for flirting and breaking the ice… as well as their chat rooms which allow you to take part in discussions in real time. And of course, these also let you encounter as many people as possible.

Costs:

This is: GirlsDateForFree.com

Just as the name implies, GirlsDateForFree.com is an online dating site where female subscribers get to search, chat and date totally free. The idea is this: Wherever there is a lot of women, men will follow. And if this is the case, then this site is the site that men will want to join to find all of the women.

With 1,600,000 photo profiles, a free toolbar, unique services like a “Photo Wall”, which has a picture of every person in the community, so if you see someone you like, just hold your mouse over their picture and their details pop up, and “Fast Flirt” where a user can message hundreds of members all at the same time, you should not have any problem finding a date. Talk about a win-win situation.

Other than the “girls date for free” gimmick, GirlsDateForFree.com is pretty much like all the other standard online dating sites out there. Free to set up a profile. All other features are only available to members who choose to pay for an upgrade.

Costs:

This is: OkCupid.com

OkCupid is a mix between a personals ads site and an online matchmaking website, which uses extensive questionnaires and quizzes to find suitable matches for its users. The feature that makes OkCupid stand out from all other matchmaking sites is that you are able to message other users for free.

Although in America they have some 4,000,000 members, in the UK there are just over 200,000 visitors per month.

You begin by answering a series of questionnaires and quizzes concerning your likes, dislikes, preferences, turn offs etc. The more you answer, the more likely your best match will be found for you. Once you have finished answering all of the questions, you are able to search through profiles of other users.

If you prefer, you can let OkCupid do the work and find a match for you by using one of their matching services. One of them is called  “quickmatch”. Quickmatch searches for a suitable match based upon your answers to the questionnaires. It uses and displays three figures when it finds a match. They are: Match %, Friend % and Enemy %.

Overall, the free messaging service is great, but the matchmaking questions and quizzes take way too long to asnwer. And they try to be all over the place instead of specializing either as online personals site or matchmaking site, which makes it more difficult to offer a good service at both.

Costs:

This is: PalTalk.com

Flirting and chatting are the main points of PalTalk for UK singles: and it is a much more relaxed dating platform as well. With around 4,000,000 users, you’ll not only be able to find options for dating but you can even make new friends.

The features on PalTalk.com are focused on interactivity. Therefore it’s possible to use multiple chat rooms for getting to know others, as well as hold video conversations. You can also see the trending videos of active members in the internal members’ area.

Costs:

This is: PlanetPersonals

The hook behind Planet Personals is that you can ask dating questions to Matthew Hussey, a celebrity dating coach. You can search the membership database, browse profiles, add diary entries, see who's online and see who has been looking at your profile free of charge. Planet Personals provides an anonymous SMS text service so you can send and receive texts messages without giving out your mobile number.

This site is somewhat between an online personals site and a matchmaking site, since one of the key features of Planet Personals is the "Match" area, which lets you know which profiles match your age/location and ideal person criteria. When we went online, around 400 members appeared to be available.

Costs:

This is: Meet4Love.co.uk

At Meet4Love.co.uk you’ll find a whole range of different people, from divorced singles to those who are looking for their first love. Meet4Love considers itself a “traditional” online dating site and does indeed look that way. However, don’t be fooled by the somewhat old-fashioned layout: around 60,000 members can be found in the UK.

There are also some nice active features such as creating a gallery and video profiles. This will help to add a bit of life to your dating profile. It will also give you a better idea of what others are like and therefore make you feel a bit more comfortable about meeting them!

Costs:

This is: Swoon

With 1,600,000 active users, Swoon seems to be becoming player in the first league of the dating world. As in other dating sites in this category, Swoon is not going to give you a lengthy personality assessment or present you with a report of potential suitors. According to them, "that would take the magic out of dating."

But Swoon will tell you things about yourself and your prospective date that will help you to make it work, by revealing what makes you, and other daters on the site, tick.

Swoon has teamed up with Trevor Silvester, an internationally recognised relationship therapist and life coach, who will share with you the tricks of their trade to help you date and find that special someone for you.

A good point is that you can see who is looking for someone like you.

Costs:

This is: LoveandFriends

LoveandFriends is a place to meet new people, either just for friendship or for love and claims to have around 300,000 registered members. That's why they are called 'Internet Dating for Thinking People', with most of their members being well educated, successful professionals.

Their database of singles is not huge, but they mainly target UK and Ireland.

Very, very simple design but structured sign up process (although you can not see other profiles until you finish that 9 step process.) You won't see your profile immediately since profiles need to be approved by an admin before being activated. But that assures the quality of members there!

Costs: