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Zoosk Review

A popular site across the globe with a large Facebook following but isn't as free as it looks. So how does it weigh up against the competition?

Zoosk has millions of members in the US and across the globe - largely down to it's popularity on Facebook. So how does it fare on UK shores against the big players of Match and eHarmony? We signed up to find out for ourselves what the Zoosk dating experience is really like. Keep reading to find out how much Zoosk costs and what conclusions we made.

Is Zoosk a free dating site?

The homepage might lead you to think so but it's pretty much a standard subscription based site - if you want to send and reply to mails then you need to be a fully paid up member. See our membership table on the right for current Zoosk subscription prices. Be sure to cancel your subscription before it's over though to avoid paying for the automatic auto renewal. Beside that you can still get a good feel for the site on a free account and most importantly see how many members are in your area using the location search before deciding whether you want to upgrade.

First impressions of using Zoosk

Not enough members in our area! We live in a large UK city that has dozens of pages of potential matches on Match.com etc but on Zoosk it could barely stretch to a second page. There just wasn't enough members to convince us that we could find a compatible match here. This is something you have to try for yourself though so sign up with the free account and get a feel for how popular it is in your area first, hopefully you'll have better luck than we did!

Advertising - we weren't a big fan of the design which is peppered with some large adverts to external sites that we thought detracted from the overall experience and made it feel like a lower quality free dating site. Ads aside Zoosk offers a search that works well and you can narrow it down with lots of parameters, you can also see how recently other members were on the site and any changes they've made to their profile.

ZSMS – The Zoosk Scientific Matchmaking Service

The Zoosk matching service is a fun feature where a selected match is emailed to you and you get 24 hours to vote on whether you like them or not. If you do then you both get added to each other’s Zoosk Messenger so you can start communicating.

The Zoosk Messenger is their own chat software that you can download from the site and is a handy way to communicate with potential matches without having to wait on emails.

Our conclusion and summary of Zoosk

On the plus side Zoosk has some lively community forums as well as great Facebook integration and mobile apps for using the site on the move. On the downside are the on site ads to external sites and most notably the lack of members in our area compared to other popular dating sites. It's worth signing up for free to have a look around, it reminded us a bit of Plenty Of Fish so if you like that you may like Zoosk too. It's early days for Zoosk in the UK but they need to do some catching up with the competition for us to be able to recommend it.

Pros and Cons

Good forums, instant messaging and Facebook integration.
Not enough local members to impress us. Ads are distracting, poor design.