Which Dating Site Has the Most Users?

Tinder is the answer most men give, and it is a reasonable guess. But no neutral source publishes a clean ranking, and each company counts its users in a different way. The site with the biggest total is not necessarily the one with the most women near you. For your own search, the number that counts is how many active women within reach of your house you can actually see.

When a company says it has a number of users, find out what that number counts. Registered accounts include people who signed up once and never came back. Monthly active users count people who opened the app. Paying users are a smaller group again. A company is free to quote whichever figure suits it.

Add geography on top. A site can be huge in one country and barely present in another. A big site with thousands of members in your region and a handful in your town is a small site for you.

So treat any claim of a single winner with suspicion, including this one. It is a starting guess.

A large crowd has costs. More men use the largest app, which means more competition for each woman's attention. A big site can also carry more fake accounts and more people who are not looking for dates.

a dating coach says this about Tinder in the United States, where he finds a lot of fake profiles and thinks Hinge is the better choice in most big cities. He also says that in many places in Europe Tinder is nearly the only app anyone uses. The same app can be the right call in one place and the wrong one in the next.

The practical lesson is that a smaller app with real, active women who want to date can beat a bigger one full of people who do not.

coach mentions Match.com as an app that used to be the biggest and has fallen out of favor, but still has a small use. You can search and write to women there without swiping and without waiting for her to like you first.

That matters because on swiping apps a woman never sees you if she set an age range that rules you out. A search site lets you reach her anyway, which is why it can be worth a small test alongside the main app. Many of those sites charge for writing to women, and in that case he says it is probably worth it.

You can measure this in an evening.

Open an app, set your real location and distance, and swipe through a fixed number of profiles. Count how many are women you would like to meet, how many look active, and how many look like they were taken a decade ago. Do the same on a second app with the same settings.

The app where you run out of good profiles quickly has the smaller crowd for you, whatever the company says about its worldwide total. The app that keeps showing new, recent faces is the one with real users around you.

A large number of accounts says nothing about who is behind them. Some are women looking for a relationship. Some are men who are also looking. Some are people passing through, and some are accounts that no longer have a person behind them.

So when you compare two sites, compare the kind of person you see, not just how many you see. A site where the women are close to your age, live near you and have written something about themselves is worth more than one with ten times the accounts and none of that.

Crowds move. An app that is quiet in your city this autumn can fill up by spring, and one that was everywhere five years ago can fade. My example is Match.com itself.

Repeat the count every few months, and ask the women you meet what they are on. A woman telling you which app she opens daily is the best data you will get.

Pick the app with the most active local women, add a second that suits you, and put your effort into your pictures and your first messages. A man with strong pages and good openers on a mid-size app will beat a man with weak ones on the largest.

The size of the crowd decides how many women you can reach. What you send them decides how many answer.