Dating Awards 2023: Dating Apps & Services

It’s no secret that dating can be a confusing exercise.

Whether you’re single and a little lonely, or polyamorous with six partners and looking for a seventh, each new interaction you have is its own thing, and developing a clear understanding with one person doesn’t mean you’ll be able to get on smoothly with the next.

That these interactions will necessarily be somewhat fraught only reinforces the fact that apps set up to introduce you to people in a dating context need to think hard about the way they do it.

The difference between positive and negative dating app interactions does depend very much on the people involved, but the context in which they meet and begin to talk matters, too.

As such, not all dating apps are equal, and at AskMen, it’s our job to help you figure out which ones are the right fit for you. So without further ado, here are our picks for the 2023 AskMen Dating Awards, Dating Apps & Services edition:

Dating Apps

Best Overall Dating App

Hinge

Hinge retains its crown as the best overall dating app for a second year in a row by mixing top-of-the-line functionality, a seamless user experience, intuitive interface, thoughtful, connection-oriented features, and a sizeable and growing user base that’s big enough to offer a better overall dating experience than its more populous rivals can. If you’re in an area where it hasn’t caught on yet, or you’re exclusively looking for meaningless interactions, Hinge might not be for you — but for everyone else, it’s absolutely worth taking a chance on. As it turns out, the notion that it’s designed to be deleted once you’ve found someone to pair up with, rather than to keep you swiping indefinitely, is actually borne out by the experience.

Check out Hinge

Best Dating App for Queer Guys

OkCupid

Though it wasn’t created with the gay or queer community in mind, OKCupid‘s been ahead of the curve when it comes to LGBTQ+ dating for well over a decade now, and the fact that the primary gay dating apps currently out there are more hookup-focused than dating- and relationship-focused means that gay guyslooking for something serious might be better off using a popular, non-queer oriented app to find their person. In that case, we think OKCupid is the right pick.

Check out OkCupid

Best Dating App for Finding Relationships

eHarmony

While Hinge’s serious-dating focus still allows room for hookups, eHarmony and its user base are clearly not here to mess around with meaningless sex. It’s much more oriented towards serious relationships, up to and including marriage. If you’re keen to jump into something meaningful without wasting time on digital dating gadabouts, eHarmony’s the place for you.

Check out eHarmony

Best Exclusive Dating App

Tinder Select

For genuinely wealthy people, dating someone else who understands what it’s like to have a lot of money is an understandable interest. After all, you can’t complain about the capital gains tax with anyone you find on a dating app. Tinder Select offers the rare few among us with untold amounts of disposable income the option to supercharge their love lives at a cost of $499 a month. That gets you unrivaled access to the world’s Tinder users — you can message people without matching, show your picture to the people you’ve liked rather than having it be blurred out, have your profile shown to the most popular users, and test out upcoming features ahead of everyone else. Only hiccup? It’s also invite-only, meaning you need to apply (in addition to paying up big-time).

Check out Tinder Select

Best Elite Dating App

The League

Invite only? Check. Waiting list? Check. High standards? Check. Sick of all the filthy casuals on regular apps and want to date like a VIP, but don’t quite have the money for Tinder Select and aren’t famous enough for Raya? If you believe you belong among the cream of the crop, sign up for The League and see for yourself.

Check out The League

Best Free Dating App

Plenty of Fish

While basically every app on this list has a free version, the newly redesigned PoF is one of the only ones that allows you to message people without matching with them, making it a great option if you’re on a tight budget and sick of swiping aimlessly on the other apps without actually connecting with anyone. That being said, it’s very much a dating and relationships app, so don’t show up assuming you can pull an easy one-night stand without much work.

Check out Plenty of Fish

Best Dating App for Students

Friendsy

There’s an argument to be made that one of the most damaging business decisions of the 21st century was Facebook expanding beyond being a social media site for university students to one for everyone on the planet. Friendsy looks to correct that mistake by returning to the old-school model — literally. You need to have a university email account in order to sign up, meaning that college students can swipe on their classmates with abandon, without having to worry about the world at large. It offers you the ability to match with people as friends, hookups or regular dates.

Check out Friendsy

Best Dating App for Introverts

Bumble

If you’re a guy on the shyer side, dating apps where your matches expect you to make the first move might feel like a struggle. If you haven’t already, try Bumble, which mandates that women make the first move when they match with a man. Though it’s proof that just because women are less likely to send a non-consensual nude doesn’t mean they’re good at crafting a compelling opening message, if nothing else, Bumble solidly takes the pressure off shy guys to get the ball rolling, and that might be all you need.

Check out Bumble

Best Dating App for Professionals

Match

Match has been in the online dating game for longer than many Tinder users have been alive, but it’s managed to maintain its relevance rather than slowly fading into obsolescence. Boasting a distinctly modern look, millions of users and an algorithm geared towards helping you find meaningful connections, it’s a great option for people who are too caught up with busy jobs to devote much time to mindless swiping in order to find something meaningful.

Check out Match

Best Mature Dating App

SilverSingles

It’s no secret that online dating is a young person’s game, and digital destinations like SilverSingles recognize that people born before 1975 might have a tougher time on the more popular apps. There’s no shortage of sites for older people, but SilverSingles is our favorite, thanks to its comparatively sizable user base and modern, user-friendly feel.

Check out SilverSingles

Best New Dating App

Archer

It’s too early to tell whether Archer will hit its target — if you’ll pardon the pun — but it’s a promising new app for gay guys looking for a Grindr alternative. Features like insisting on face pics shift the vibe away from anonymous meetups towards more holistic connections. If you’re sick of the hookup grind, try giving Archer a shot.

Check out Archer

Best New Dating App Feature

Tinder Matchmaker

Every so often, big companies take their users’ advice, and Tinder just did that by introducing Matchmaker — a feature that recognizes that a non-trivial portion of the fun of dating apps is derived from people taking their friends’ phones and swiping for them. Matchmaker, which is still being rolled out, will allow Tinder users to invite their friends and/or family to browse profiles for them and recommend potential matches. It’s dorky, and it might not be for everyone, but it’s a great example of an established brand recognizing that sometimes people develop new ways to use their products organically, and catering to them is never a bad idea.

Check out Matchmaker on Tinder

Best Dating App Paid Upgrade

Tinder Gold

Figuring out which functionalities to offer for free and which to demand money for is not an exact science. Every dating app approaches it slightly differently, but nowhere does paying for an upgrade radically change the experience the way it does when you subscribe to Tinder Gold. Unlimited likes, unlimited do-overs, five Super Likes a week, worldwide browsing, and no ads — Tinder Gold is the happy-medium Goldilocks option of Tinder’s main three paid tiers, and if you have the money to pay for it, it’s well worth taking out for a spin.

Check out Tinder Gold

Dating & Relationship Apps & Services

Best Online Relationship Course

Esther Perel’s “Turning Conflict Into Connection”

Unfortunately, romantic relationships are not all sunshine and rainbows. No one understands this better than couples therapists, and it’s possible no couples therapist understands this better than Esther Perel. She’s made a name for herself in recent years thanks to her podcast Where Should We Begin?, and now she brings her wisdom outside the therapy office and onto your digital devices with her online course, “Turning Conflict Into Connection.” It features an hour-long session where she breaks down common issues that couples have with conflict and shows you in engaging and actionable ways how to move past these roadblocks.

Check out Esther Perel’s “Turning Conflict Into Connection”

Best Sex Ed Service

Tabú

Rare is the person who reaches the age of 18 already knowing everything they need to know to have a healthy and productive sex life. Unfortunately, far too many people make it well past that without learning much more about sex. Make your sexual uncertainties and areas of ignorance a thing of the past with Tabú, which will teach you everything you wanted to know about sex, plus lots of things you didn’t even realize you didn’t know.

Check out Tabú

Best STI Testing Service

TBD Health

Sexually transmitted infections are no picnic, and many people deal with the stress of catching one by ignoring the issue as much as possible. Compounding this issue is the fact that sexual health services are not uniformly available throughout the U.S., and seeking them out in person can feel extra daunting even if you’re able to get to them with ease. TBD Health addresses the issue by mailing you a test kit, and once you’ve mailed it back to their labs, having a medical professional walk you through your results remotely.

Check out TBD Health

Sexy Apps & Services

Best Overall Hookup App

Tinder

While Tinder’s relative dearth of personality-oriented features means it has struggled to keep up with its smaller competitors as an option for people looking for something even remotely serious, if you’re primarily interested in no-strings-attached action, Tinder remains the place to go. It’s the most populated online dating destination in the world, which means that, no matter where you find yourself, there’s bound to be someone who is also down to fool around, and the recently introduced feature that lets you put a badge on your profile showing what kind of connection you’re looking for only (Short-Term Fun!) definitely makes this simpler.

Check out Tinder

Best Hookup App for Queer Guys

Grindr

Well-meaning entrepreneurs have tried to unseat Grindr, but there’s no sign that any of them will be successful anytime soon. If you’re a man looking to have some form of physical intimacy with another man, despite the app’s shortcomings, Grindr unquestionably remains your best bet. It introduced the concept of ordering anonymous sex like a pizza over a decade ago, and it’s still delivering, hot and fresh.

Check out Grindr

Best Kink-Forward Online Destination

FetLife

Let’s get one thing straight: FetLife is not an app, nor is it a dating site. It’s an online gathering space for kinky people, closer to an early-2000s bulletin board/forum than a Tinder-style mobile hookup space. But if you’re looking for somewhere online to meet and interact with people in the kink community, even if it’s not a straightforward dating site, FetLife is just too popular with the community in question to be ignored in this category. Sign up, poke around, interact respectfully, and there’s a decent chance that before long you’ll find yourself meeting people who are DTF (down to fetish).

Check out FetLife

Best Non-Monogamy-Friendly App

Feeld

It’s by no means a perfect app — with perhaps the glitchiest mobile version on this list — but Feeld is built to cater to people not interested in the constraints of monogamy from the ground up. Beginning life as a threesome-oriented, Tinder clone, it’s since blossomed into a dating app that genuinely addresses a growing market of people who want to date more than one — if not many — people at a time. With a wealth of features that take this into account, the app has become a genuine go-to destination for people looking for anything outside the ordinary.

Check out Feeld

Best Free Adult Site

Pornhub

Look, we can argue all day long about whether PornHub‘s success and business model have helped or hurt the industry. But what we can’t argue about is that it represents the single biggest cache of erotic material in human history. That alone would probably make it the best free porn site out there, but it genuinely backs up its wealth of content with a bevy of useful features that make navigating all that smut not just doable, but exciting.

Check out Pornhub

Best Paid Adult Site

Vixen

There are lots of studios producing high-quality XXX content, if you’re willing and/or able to pay for a subscription, but at the moment, no one‘s doing it better than Vixen. With a slew of series catering to all the most popular porn niches, they bring consistently high production value, a slew of big-name industry professionals, and just the right amount of balls-to-the-wall horniness to justify taking this title for a second year in a row.

Check out Vixen

Best Female-Friendly Adult Site

XConfessions

Erika Lust’s ethical porn site XConfessions lives up to its name, producing high-quality, female- and queer-friendly porn around the erotic confessions of its users. Besides how lovely it is to see where the ideas for the videos come from, rather than assuming they’re all algorithm-driven, the stuff on XConfessions is seriously hot — and different enough from traditional mainstream porn that you might find yourself getting aroused almost by surprise. It’s seriously worth checking out, whether with a partner or solo.

Check out XConfessions

Best Audio Erotica App

Quinn

There’s more to porn than just visuals — ask people with visual impairments, or just those who grew up with scrambled cable porn. Whether you’re coming for ASMR experiences, or just well-produced audio versions of every kind of sex scene you can imagine, Quinn is an incredible trove of erotic material for your ears. Just make sure you don’t accidentally Bluetooth it to another set of speakers…

Check out Quinn

Best Cam Site

Jerkmate

Time was, if you wanted to jerk off with someone else, you had to be in the same place at the same time. No longer! Cam sites have made requirements like that a thing of the past, and for our money, Jerkmate remains the best in a quite crowded field, boasting incredible numbers of models of all body types and sexual inclinations, plus a robust search function so you can easily find the ones who really get your motor running.

Check out Jerkmate

Best Chat Site

OnlyFans

OnlyFans has had the good fortune of becoming one of those apps even your extended family has heard of. And while it’s a great place to see sexy content, it’s a great place to support your favorite sex workers, and it’s (apparently) also somewhere you can follow fitness instructors, it shouldn’t be overlooked as a place where you can pay to chat with the people starring in the porn you watch. Lots of other sites and apps allow you to have sexy conversations with strangers and streamers, but this one allows you to talk to people you knew you were attracted to before you logged on, and that is a pretty unique feature in the contemporary online sex space.

Check out OnlyFans

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