OkCupid     CompareDating Site Review/okcupid/

Member Quality & Choice:

OkCupid’s image is fun and quirky, so the audience tends to be a bit younger, open-minded and more nerdy than average (compared to plentyoffish.com or match.com for example, which are a bit more mainstream). However, OKCupid now is one of the biggest free dating site in the world, so there are plenty of older people in their fourties and fifties as well. The audience however remain skewed towards the young and urban.

Many of the profiles are well-written, and most users clearly spend some time on them, giving you quite a lot to read and take in. Most profiles also have multiples photos.).

Okcupid is mostly famous in the US, so one downside is that the choice of people will be much more limited if you live outside of the United States.

As a free site, OkCupid also does not have money to invest in ads, so not so many new members sign up every week, compared to the big paid sites such as eHarmony or Match (see our review of eHarmony and Match).

Matching / Searching:

OkCupid really shines with its matching algorythm. It has thousands of interesting questions you can answer at your own pace.The goal is to match users based on their personalties.

Some questions are generated by OkCupid’s staff, but the majority are created by users. This makes for more interesting / crazy questions, but some might also offend you if you are on the conservative side.

Some questions are quite standard (“Are you a cat person or a dog person?”), some are just quirky (“Are you fond of late night walks to no place in particular?”), but quite a few get graphic and sexual (“Have you ever had sex in a place where there was a high risk of being caught?”), so keep that in mind if it might bother you. All in all, we would say that answering questions on OkCupid is quite a fun experience!

Based on your answers, an algorythm will match you with other users in your area (or all over the world).

You’ll get a precise match percentage, so you can see that you match someone at 83%, for example. The more questions you answer, the more accurate this gets. We suggest you to be very honest when answering the questions, so that your matches will be accurate later. This is not about writing what you think people want to hear, but about showing your real personality and quirks.

During our tests, we found the algorythm to work well, if you make the effort to answer a few hundred questions. If you talk to someone who matches you at 95%, it often feels like talking to a long-lost friend.

Many users, however, do not answer many questions and browses simply based on profile text and pictures.

You can freely search for other users in your area, or all over the world. You can use a wide variety of filters (age, religion, education, location, recent activity, etc) to find the right match for you.

When browsing a profile, you can see the date the person last came to the site. You also can see if the person replies often or selectively to messages. This gives you an idea of how approachable they are, and you can decide if you want to give them a shot.

Ease of Use:

OkCupid’s website is very ease to use. The interface is clean and intuitive. The chat function is a bit outdated and lagging. There is also no option for audio or video chat.

If you choose to, you can make your OkCupid profile interact with your Facebook profile.

Limitation without paid upgrade:

Your inbox will get full quite quickly and you will need to keep deleting messages in order to receive new ones. Other people can also see when you visit their profile. A paid upgrade gets rid of this for only $4,95 per month.Paid members do not see ads and have more filtering options.

Privacy / Safety:

It’s easy to block a user if you are getting annoyed or harassed.

You can also choose to “hide” a user in the search results, so you never get to see their profile again. This is quite a time-saver as people will change their profile picture often and you could visit the same profile again and again, thinking it is the same person. Instead, just hide the user and you’ll never have to see their profile again.

Our conclusion:

Although it does have its share of problems, OKCupid is one of the good free sites out there. We would recommend it over its main free competitor, Plenty Of Fish , but we also think paid options can be time-savers and connect you with more serious, committed members; for these options see our reviews of Match and eHarmony.