eHarmony vs. Match

Online dating can be a daunting subject. Part of it is that so many people are doing it, so it’s easy to feel as though your best chance for romance lies in a website or mobile app. In a 2022 survey of more than 6,000 adults, the Pew Research Center found that 30% of respondents participated in online dating. The number jumps to 53% among people aged 18-29, among whom 20% said they met their current partner through an online dating platform.1

Another daunting aspect is the sheer number of platforms to choose from. Some sources we’ve found count upwards of a thousand online dating services. Whether or not that’s true, we’re sure many of you can recall at least half a dozen names off the cuff. In such a saturated market, it's easy to feel overloaded by choice.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by your options, you might consider one of two platforms that have stood the test of time: eHarmony and Match. They’ve managed to thrive in the market for nearly 30 years and continue to go strong among today’s online daters.

In this comparative review, we discuss the key differences between eHarmony and Match, identify their areas of excellence, and help you decide which one best suits your needs. As for which one is best, that depends on your goals. For those in a rush, here’s a quick rundown — read on for all of the details.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

For this analysis, we tried to use a methodical approach similar to our work in other wellness areas. We began by identifying the key differences between eHarmony and Match and weighing them against common goals among online dating populations. We also studied the scientific literature on topics such as romantic compatibility, consulted publications on relevant subject areas, and used each platform ourselves so we could provide accounts of the experience based on practical knowledge.

Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this guide was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

We judged the two platforms across criteria that are likely to influence consumer choices:

• Dating goals: Can the platform meet the needs of most online daters?
• Cost: Which one is the more affordable after accounting for every subscription tier?
• Refund policy: If your subscription doesn’t live up to expectations, can you get your money back?
• Features: Not only what features are available, but do they facilitate the online dating experience?
• User experience: How easy or enjoyable is it to use the platform?
• Customer support: If you have a problem, how quickly and easily can you resolve it?

In the following sections, we’ll explore how eHarmony and Match squared up in each criterion.

(Note: We wanted to include a "user base" criterion since, statistically, the more users a dating platform has, the higher one's chances of landing a date. However, official numbers on user bases aren't readily available, and the numbers we did find told us nothing about active versus inactive accounts.)

Dating goals

Winner: Match

A good North Star here is the 2022 Pew survey we referenced in the introduction. According to its findings, respondents’ main motivations for using an online dating platform were:1

• To find a long-term partner: 44%
• To date casually: 40%
• To have casual sex: 24%
• To find new friends: 22%

In other words, even though a sizable minority of people seek long-term partnerships, a majority of daters (64%) are in it for lower-commitment arrangements, which Match’s brand infrastructure is currently better suited for. Match can accurately be described as a "general dating platform”; it caters to just about everyone, so you can hop on and ride no matter what your goals are.

But because it does cater to everyone, Match is also not our recommendation for those of us seeking serious relationships. If you’re in this camp, your prospects are better with eHarmony, which has built its brand on connecting people seeking serious long-term relationships built on compatibility. While you could certainly use eHarmony for casual dating, that isn't the foundation on which the company has constructed its reputation, so assume you'll have a harder time facilitating casual hookups with the eHarmony user base.

Cost

Winner: Match

Match really blows eHarmony out of the water in a cost comparison. If you look exclusively at Match’s most expensive subscription option (12-month Platinum) and eHarmony’s lowest-priced tier (6-month Premium Light), you see that Match is almost $150 less. The price difference is enough to purchase another three months of Match Platinum and have money left over to put toward a coffee date.

The difference is starker, of course, when you start looking at Match’s lower tiers — Bronze and Silver — but we’re ignoring them here; frankly, as we explain later, they offer virtually no value compared to free membership, so they aren’t really comparable to eHarmony Premium.

Refund policy

Winner: eHarmony

Both companies have 3-day refund policies, but only eHarmony’s policy applies to all of its users. With Match, your eligibility for a refund depends on where you live. Only Premium subscribers in the following 12 states qualify:

Match’s limited eligibility is hardly fair to subscribers in any of the 38 other states. Also, considering that you need a Platinum subscription to have even the chance to get your desired dating outcomes, we’d say Match poses a fairly high financial risk for most Premium users in the United States.

Features

Winner: eHarmony

With either company, upgrading to a Premium subscription is the only way to gain features that serve any use to an online dater. eHarmony just has more such features and doesn’t misrepresent them to prospective customers.

eHarmony allows every Premium member to do the following:

• Read/reply to messages
• View unblurred photos
• Receive regularly updated matches
• Filter matches
• Search matches by distance
• See who has viewed their profile
• Complete a detailed personality profile
• Get a free review of your profile

The only appreciable difference between Premium Light, Plus, and Unlimited is the number of matches you can message. At the Light and Plus tiers, you can message 15 and 30 matches per month, respectively. At the Unlimited tier — as you might guess — there’s no limit.

Match, however, takes a convoluted and frustrating approach to its features. Bronze and Silver members can view unlimited profiles and send unlimited Likes, but they can’t read the messages sent to them; daily Intros are the extent of their communication with prospective partners. Only starting at the Platinum tier can members chat freely with matches. It’s the one truly useful feature the platform has, and Match restricts it to the top general subscription level.

Meanwhile, Match seems to do everything it can to obscure the fact that messaging isn’t available to everyone. Rather, it outright misrepresents the feature’s accessibility, claiming that even free members can communicate with others — which is true only if you consider one daily Intro to count as communication.

User experience

Winner: eHarmony

The eHarmony platform is fairly straightforward. It pretty clearly outlines the limitations of free membership and the features you get by paying for a Premium subscription. Should you choose to upgrade to Premium, you get the features you were promised. It’s a matter of basic functionality and transparency — the least we can ask of an online dating service.

Match fails to meet that minimum standard. As soon as you begin researching whether Match is a good dating platform, the frustrations begin, as the company has done a superlative job of obscuring key information that would influence a user’s decision to upgrade to Premium. Here's a short list of details you'll have a very hard time clarifying:

• What features do free users get? There are inconsistencies throughout Match's website, and user testimonies we've read further contradict the website copy.
• What features are available at different subscription tiers? Ditto the above.
• What are the subscription tiers? At first, it was shockingly difficult to tell how many tiers were even available — Standard versus Premium? Bronze, Silver, Platinum, and Diamond?

Then, when it comes to using Match as a site or an app, you might get your account blocked for some inexplicable reason. We had several testers sign up for Match, and each of them was blocked within a few hours (in one case, minutes). Again, no clear reason why. We followed the sign-up instructions to the T and were careful not to defy the terms of service, yet Match denied us access.

Based on user testimonials from various sources, we’ve found that inexplicable account blocking on Match isn’t uncommon. The company’s Better Business Bureau and Trustpilot profiles display several complaints about this very issue.

eHarmony gave us no such problems. We made just one account that remained active throughout our research and testing. Then, when the time came to scrub it from the Web, we could do so easily, within seconds.

Customer support

Winner: Draw

Because all of our Match accounts were blocked, each tester had good reason to contact customer support about the reason and the resolution. They also sent several emails asking which features corresponded with which subscription levels. Not one of them received a single response, even after nearly a week.

With eHarmony, though our testers had no real reason to contact the support team, they contrived a question anyway (“What are the differences between the three Premium subscription levels?”). We waited several days and didn’t hear back.

So, yes, in our eyes, Match and eHarmony are equal in their customer support — equally unresponsive. We imagine, then, that each platform’s subscribers tend to have a hard time resolving more serious disputes, like billing and refunds.

eHarmony and Match are both online dating platforms that target general rather than niche populations. They have several superficial basic qualities in common:

• Accessible via desktop and mobile
• Require users to be at least 18 years old and unmarried
• Use SMS to verify identities

Match is actually the platform that ushered in the first generation of online dating. Registered in 1995, it went live at the head end of the dot-com boom and could attribute its early success to two factors:

• Large user base: Match was (and continues to be) a large social network dedicated to dating. It gave users access to a large pool of dating prospects, thus setting the template for the online dating platforms that would follow.
• Diverse, women-oriented user base: As explained in a 2019 piece published in The Atlantic, Match took off by marketing toward women and diverse demographics, including LGBTQ+ communities.2

Currently, Match is one of several online dating platforms owned by Match Group, whose portfolio includes competitors Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, Meetic, and Plenty of Fish.

eHarmony arrived on the scene five years after Match, in 2000. The principal brand differentiator with eHarmony was (and is) its emphasis on long-term relationships. While many Match users might've been seeking fleeting fun, eHarmony stood apart by courting users focused on finding "the one."

Neither eHarmony nor Match was the first dating site to hit the nascent World Wide Web — that distinction goes to Kiss.com in 1994 — but they were the only ones among the first-generation platforms to last. Today, they continue to be two of the most well-known and widely used online dating services in the world.

How eHarmony works

eHarmony has a comprehensive startup process. You begin by completing an 80-question compatibility quiz that covers ground normally unexplored by other dating sites — for example:

• Why you're single
• How you like to dress
• Whether you're a morning person or a night person
• Whether you sleep with the window open
• What you think about marriage
• Hypothetical situations (e.g., "You're alone at a party. What do you do?")
• Preference tests (e.g., which arrangement of shapes appeals to you most?)

The quiz takes 10-20 minutes to complete. eHarmony may reject your registration if your answers don’t align with the company’s standards, like if you’re married or your quiz responses suggest dishonesty. It’s a vetting process that helps ensure sincere dating intentions.

If you aren’t rejected, eHarmony uses your quiz responses to cultivate a pool of potentially compatible partners. Your dating prospects are limited to this cultivated pool.

From there, your user experience depends on whether you stick with the free version of the platform (Basic membership) or upgrade to one of the three paid sub-tiers (Premium Light, Plus, or Unlimited).

A Basic membership just lets you browse your pool, explore profiles, and send Likes. To facilitate actual dating, you need a Premium membership. For an in-depth examination of eHarmony’s Premium membership, see “eHarmony vs. Match key features” later in this review.

How Match works

Match's startup process is simpler and usually faster than eHarmony's. After specifying your location, gender, and desired age range for matches, you provide a few personal details — DOB, name, email address, and body type — before answering a series of straightforward questions about you and your dating preferences:

• Have you ever been married?
• Do you have/want kids?
• What's your highest education level?
• Do you smoke/drink?
• What's your ethnicity?
• What's your religion?
• What are your interests?
• Would you date someone with kids?
• Does your ideal partner want kids?
• What type of partner are you looking for?

Then you add topics to your profile (e.g., "My go-to party joke"), specify your core values (e.g., loyalty, integrity, friendship), and upload a photo. All of it goes toward the Match profile that other daters can see. Some parts you can skip and return to later; others, namely the photo upload, are required to complete registration.

Like eHarmony, Match doles out platform features based on the user's membership tier. With free membership, you can get curated matches, view profiles, and send one Intro per day. (On Match, an Intro is an attention-grabbing message to someone you're interested in). What you can't do is read the messages people send you, even though Match advertises that you can. Also, you're limited to viewing 50 profiles per day among your recommended matches.

As with eHarmony, the free version is really just an opportunity to stand on the sidelines and decide whether to play the game. To participate in the platform’s dating scene, you must upgrade to a Premium membership. Again, we cover the finer points of Match Premium membership in “eHarmony vs. Match key features.”

Brand controversies

eHarmony and Match have taken a few hits to their reputations over the years. Below, we discuss the controversies most relevant to helping you choose one platform over the other.

Aside from what we've described here, eHarmony and Match have had problems with how they’ve marketed their services to trap users in hard-to-cancel subscriptions. For Match, at least, the problems are ongoing and a major point of contention for its users. We discuss the subscription-trapping issue in the next section.

Subscription traps

A subscription trap, in the broadest sense, is a business practice that lures people into paying for a subscription only for the users to see they've been deceived. Here, "deceive" can mean a few things that eHarmony and Match have been guilty of:

Expanding on the above, we want to point back to what we touched on earlier: that Match continues to deceive consumers. We’ve mentioned that Match advertises free messaging even though the feature isn’t really available at all membership tiers. In later sections (“eHarmony vs. Match for cost” and “eHarmony vs. Match key features”), we examine how Match also obscures key information that consumers would need to make informed decisions about buying a subscription — not just about features but also about pricing.

We’ve found eHarmony to be a bit more truthful about its Premium memberships. Its pricing information is no less easy to find unless you sign up, and you’ll encounter some oily website copy about messaging capability between users, but eHarmony is mostly honest about the features it advertises.

Principally for two reasons, eHarmony is the better dating platform for people seeking long-term relationships, including ones leading to marriage:

In contrast, a platform like Match is more general. Its sign-up questionnaire doesn’t dig very deep into user psychology, and there’s no screening process to determine who is or isn't suitable for the platform. The result is a user base with myriad relationship goals and a matching algorithm based on qualities that have less bearing on long-term compatibility.

For the same reasons that eHarmony is better for long-term relationships, Match is the superior option for people interested in casual dating. By placing less emphasis on lifelong compatibility and broadly welcoming users regardless of their dating goals, Match doesn't constrain members only to finding "the one"; rather, they can define their own paths in romance — which, for the majority of online daters, means casual, fleeting fun.1

Match also poses a lower barrier to entry compared to eHarmony. Though the basic eligibility requirements are the same — at least 18 years old and unmarried — Match's initial user assessment pertains mostly to self-reported personal qualities, preferences, and interests. There's no risk of rejection because of answer inconsistencies, and the whole sign-up process should take maybe five minutes, as opposed to 10-20 for eHarmony.

Then, when it comes to browsing prospects, you're not restricted to a pre-selected dating pool. You're free to browse outside of your algorithm-selected matches and test out your luck in love however you see fit.

Before we go further, we want to note that neither eHarmony nor Match makes it easy to find pricing information. It’s shut away from view until you sign up as a free user and take the initial steps to upgrade your account. Seeing as users need a premium upgrade to get basic dating functionality from either platform, we think that obscuring the information qualifies as low-level deception.

With that out of the way, we can say that Match is much less expensive than eHarmony. Premium subscriptions start at $19.98 at the Bronze level and go up to $239.98 at the Platinum level. In contrast, eHarmony’s lowest-cost subscription is $383.40, and its costliest option is $909.60.

All that's an oversimplification. The companies' respective pricing structures are complex, not least because each tier is further segmented into three subscription lengths. Let’s look at some tables to visualize.

How much is an eHarmony Premium subscription?

eHarmony has three Premium sub-tiers: Light, Plus, and Unlimited. Each is available in either 6-, 12-, or 24-month terms. You can pay the total cost up front or divide your payment into two, three, or four equal installments. Although payments aren’t monthly, the following table includes monthly cost breakdowns.

How much is a Match Premium subscription?

For most users, Match separates its Premium subscription tiers into Bronze, Silver, and Platinum. Your term options are three, six, and 12 months. By default, you owe the total amount for your subscription at the time of purchase, but there’s a Buy Now Pay Later option that lets you pay in four installments. Again, we’ve included monthly cost breakdowns in the chart below.

There’s a fourth tier called Diamond that’s available only to users in Texas, Oklahoma, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. We'd like to tell you how much a Diamond subscription costs, but that information is nowhere to be found on the Match website, and our attempts to get pricing information through customer support have been fruitless.

You also have the option for a one-month Premium membership, but Match doesn’t make clear whether it’s available at every tier, nor is it entirely forthcoming about how much it costs.

One last thing about Match: You need a Platinum subscription to access any truly practical features. As you’ll see later (“eHarmony vs. Match key features”), Bronze and Silver are hardly better than a free membership.

eHarmony allows Premium members to cancel subscriptions within three days for a refund. It isn’t much, but it should provide you enough time to explore the features and decide whether the platform is to your liking.

Match, too, has a 3-day refund policy, but only if you live in one of these 12 states:

If you live outside of those states, you’re out of luck if you want a refund.

If you stick to the free version of either platform, here's what you can do:

That's why we say you need a Premium subscription before either platform becomes a practical tool for finding a date.

All three of eHarmony's Premium tiers offer the following features:

• Reading and replying to messages
• Viewing unblurred photos
• Receiving regularly updated matches
• Filtering your matches
• Searching matches by distance
• Seeing who has viewed your profile
• Completing a detailed personality profile
• Getting a free review of your profile

The only difference between the tiers, features-wise, is how many matches you can message. Premium Light allows you to message 15 matches per month; Premium Plus, 30 matches; and Premium Unlimited, unlimited matches.

With Match, as we've said, the two lower tiers aren't exactly useful for dating. At the Bronze and Silver levels, you can view an unlimited number of profiles and send unlimited Likes, but neither one lets you read the messages that other users send you. Your correspondence is effectively limited to sending a daily Intro, so you can't really get to know anyone, much less arrange to meet them.

Only at the Platinum level can you chat freely with other users and also send unlimited Intros.

Whatever your subscription level, Match allows you to add certain features to "enhance your site experience" — for example, message-read receipts and private mode — at extra cost. Frankly, we don't see what value the add-ons provide.

All told, eHarmony's features are all useful for increasing your visibility and dating potential. Match's features aren’t, and we bristle at having to purchase the highest subscription tier just for basic messaging capability.

Also, it bears repeating that Match doesn’t honestly convey that you need a Platinum membership to message other users. The way its web copy reads, you’d think the feature was available at the Bronze level.

In our assessment, eHarmony is straightforward and low-fuss. The compatibility quiz takes a while to complete, but our testers quite enjoyed doing it; at times, it encouraged them to think about their relationship values in novel and enlightening ways. Once they finished, they found the Basic membership to be exactly as advertised.

In our opinion, the richness and thoughtfulness of the intake quiz sets the table for what eHarmony intends to provide — a potentially more meaningful, deeper, long-lasting bond with somebody. If you take your time with it and provide answers based on your own self-reflection, then dating outcomes could be very successful.

Our Match experience was more underwhelming. It started well enough with the registration process, which involved answering questions about yourself (e.g., height, build, religious beliefs) and your dating preferences, as well as deciding whether certain qualities in a dating prospect were “must-haves.”

It even got a little fun with the Topics section, which our testers enjoyed as an expressive outlet.

However, elsewhere in the registration process, our testers noted some frustrating limitations. For example, at one point, you’re asked to select your interests — an important area where you can find common ground with a match, things to talk about as you get to know them — but you’re restricted to selecting just eight items across ten categories. Each tester struggled to distill themselves into such a small package, and they felt that having to deselect items to meet the limit meant misrepresenting themselves on the platform. It’s understandable why Match sets a limit at all (to prevent people from selecting as many as they can, to maximize their chances for a match), but eight felt like an awfully low cap.

Then, when it came time to explore our matches, our testers hit a block with the messaging function. Specifically, it was limited to one Intro per day, and messages sent to them couldn’t be read unless they upgraded to a Premium Platinum account. That means even paying customers at the Bronze and Silver subscription levels don’t get access to a function that most would consider fundamental to online dating. The limitations would have been less frustrating had Match explicitly noted them in its advertising, the way eHarmony does. As it stands, new users are led to believe they can freely message other users when, in reality, it’s an unlockable feature available only to some.

In our experience, neither company has demonstrated solid customer support.

With Match, we tried numerous times to get answers from customer support about the platform’s features and the reasons for our accounts being blocked. We waited nearly a week for even a single response, but each attempt came to nothing.

eHarmony was no better. We sent the company a message through its customer support page about the main differences between its Premium tiers, and all we got in return was an automated form message saying that our message had been received. Several days passed with no response.