Best dating apps for serious relationships: what the data shows

Updated October 4, 2026 · 14 min read

We found no study that ranks dating apps by relationship outcomes. What exists: Pew's survey of why recent US users date online (44% name a long-term partner as a major reason, 40% casual dating, 19% both), counts of who met a partner online, the intention tags on Hinge, Tinder and Bumble, and where the marriage claims come from.

We did not use any app for this page. We looked at Pew Research Center’s 2023 report, four published studies, the companies’ own announcements and four forum threads. Opinions are labeled.

What does “serious” mean on a dating app?

In the best data we found, serious is a reason people give, not a kind of user. Pew Research Center surveyed 6,034 US adults from July 5 to 17, 2022. It asked current or recent online daters which of several reasons were major ones for them. Those are the 9% of adults who had used a dating site or app in the past year (Pew, 2023, printed pages 7 and 13). Among those recent users, 44% named meeting a long-term partner or spouse, 40% dating casually, 24% casual sex and 22% making new friends (Pew, 2023, printed pages 13 and 24).

The answers overlap. Among the same recent users, 19% named both casual dating and a long-term partner as major reasons, and 6% named both casual sex and a long-term partner (Pew, 2023, printed page 24). For them, a spouse later and casual dates now are not opposites. The middle ground even has a name, situationship, for a relationship that is more than casual and that neither person has defined.

Women named a long-term partner a little more often than men, 48% against 42%, and men named casual sex far more often, 31% against 13%, again among recent users (Pew, 2023, printed pages 13 and 26). Pew notes that not every gap between men and women is statistically significant, and the 18-point gap on casual sex is the one it points out. It also says the reasons do not differ between users under and over 50, and it prints no numbers for that comparison (Pew, 2023, printed page 27).

Our reading: serious and casual are not two populations sorted into different apps. The survey covers dating apps as a group, not one app at a time, and 19% of recent users sit in both camps. We found no basis for any app promising a serious pool.

The intention tags: Hinge, Tinder, Bumble

Hinge and Tinder let you say what you are looking for, and we found no statement that either checks it.

A tag is a statement. We found no statement from Hinge or Tinder that it verifies a tag, and Bumble’s page would not open. None of the three, as far as we found, publishes how often what people select matches how they behave. Tinder’s 40% is the easiest figure to misread. Tinder’s own wording is “40% of Tinder members using its Relationship Goals feature”, so the base is people who chose to set a goal, a self-selected group, not Tinder’s members as a whole (Tinder, 2023).

Bumble appears to offer an intentions badge. Its support page would not open for us, so we give no detail and cannot say how it compares. How the two compare on the rest of their design is in Hinge vs Bumble.

Our view: a tag sorts conversations, not people. Our serious scores are 4 for Hinge, 3 for Bumble and 2 for Tinder, and Hinge’s rests on a different mechanism. Your Turn Limits pauses new likes and matches once eight or more chats are waiting on your reply (Hinge Newsroom, 2024). The score and its reasoning are on our best dating apps guide and the Hinge page, and the score describes design, not results.

How many couples meet online, and what that does not say

About one partnered US adult in ten met their partner on a dating site or app, by Pew’s count. Partnered means married, living with a partner or in a committed relationship. The 10% who met that way equal 7% of all Americans (Pew, 2023, printed page 23). Among partnered adults, the share was 20% at ages 18 to 29, 11% at 30 to 49, 7% at 50 to 64 and 4% at 65 and over. It was 9% among straight adults and 24% among lesbian, gay and bisexual adults (Pew, 2023, printed page 23). The older groups get more room in our guide to the best dating app for over 50.

A second count asks how couples who got together in a given year met. Rosenfeld, Thomas and Hausen used the 2017 round of the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey, with 2,997 respondents. They found that 39% of heterosexual couples who met in 2017 met online, up from about 22% in 2009 (Rosenfeld et al., 2019). Online in that paper is one broad category that includes meeting through social networking sites. So the 39% means met online, not met on a dating app. Of the couples who met online, 89.5% had been strangers before (Rosenfeld et al., 2019). The survey was funded by National Science Foundation grants and funds at Stanford, and the paper declares no conflict of interest.

The paper’s line on quality is short: “Once couples are in a relationship, how they met does not determine relationship quality or longevity.” It rests on earlier follow-up research with the same survey. That research also found that heterosexual couples who met online “transition to marriage faster” (Rosenfeld et al., 2019).

The third count comes from a wedding company. The Knot’s 2025 Real Weddings Study found that about 27% of couples who married in 2025 met on a dating site or app. Hinge was named most, then Tinder and Bumble (Global Dating Insights, 2025b). The base is nearly 17,000 US couples in a survey run by The Knot, which does not state its sampling. We read the figures in Global Dating Insights’ report, not on The Knot’s site.

The three numbers count different things, so they do not contradict each other. Pew’s base is all partnered adults. Rosenfeld’s is heterosexual couples formed in one year. The Knot’s is couples marrying in one year. Pew and The Knot count dating sites and apps, while Rosenfeld counts everything online. Two research surveys sit against a company survey with no stated sampling.

Pew adds a figure that is easy to misread. Among partnered adults who had ever used a dating site, 52% of those who had ever paid met their current partner online, against 34% of those who never paid (Pew, 2023, printed page 28). Pew calls paying “associated” with meeting a partner that way. Our reading: this does not show that paying works. People already set on finding someone online may be the ones who paid. Anyone who paid and is still single falls outside the partnered base altogether.

Does the app change the outcome? The studies

We found no peer-reviewed study that ranks today’s dating apps by relationship outcome. Three studies come close in different ways, and they do not agree.

The only one that splits results by site is a 2013 paper in PNAS by Cacioppo and colleagues. It surveyed 19,131 Americans who married between 2005 and 2012. Of the couples who met online, 5.96% had broken up, against 7.67% of those who met offline. Marital satisfaction was 5.64 against 5.48 on a 1 to 7 index (Cacioppo et al., 2013). By the site where couples met, the same index read 5.86 for eharmony, 5.70 for Match and 5.29 for Yahoo (Cacioppo et al., 2013).

The paper says who paid: “Harris Interactive was commissioned by eHarmony.com” to run the survey. The first author is “a scientific advisor to eHarmony.com”, and a co-author is “the former Director of eHarmony Laboratories”. Independent statisticians verified the analyses (Cacioppo et al., 2013). The authors write that the effects “are understandably quite small and do not hold for everyone”. They add that the voluntary online sample “may partially limit representativeness”.

The study then went into advertising. Match complained, and in August 2014 the Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division recommended that eharmony discontinue three claims: “#1 Most Marriages”, “#1 Most Enduring Marriages” and “#1 Most Satisfying Marriages”. The NAD found that the study data gave no reasonable basis for them. In the data, eharmony accounted for 25.04% of the online-dating marriages and Match for 24.34%, under one point apart (Truth in Advertising, 2014; MediaPost, 2014). eharmony said it disagreed with most of the analysis and would take the recommendation into consideration (Truth in Advertising, 2014).

A later study points the other way. Sharabi and Dorrance Hall surveyed 923 married US adults at a single point in time, a cross-sectional design. They found marriages that began online “less satisfying and stable” than those that began offline, though “still of high quality, on average” (Sharabi & Dorrance Hall, 2024). The paper appeared online in 2023, and we read it in PsyPost’s summary rather than in full (PsyPost, n.d.). A one-time survey cannot show that meeting online caused the difference.

The third study is about choosing, not marrying. Pronk and Denissen ran three studies with single adults aged 18 to 30, with 315, 158 and 305 participants according to PsyPost’s summary (PsyPost, 2021). Their abstract reports “a decrease of 27% in chance on acceptance from the first to the last partner option”. They call this a rejection mind-set, and for women, matches fell too (Pronk & Denissen, 2020). The tasks were built for the research, and none of them measured a relationship.

Our reading: the only study that splits results by site is more than a decade old and covers dating sites rather than swipe apps. It was paid for by one of the sites it compares. We found nothing since that ranks apps.

Apps and sites that say they are built for it

A few services sell themselves on long-term intent. Here is what stands behind each pitch, without a verdict.

eharmony matches members through a questionnaire and commissioned the 2013 study above.

Match funds Singles in America, a yearly survey run with the Kinsey Institute. The Kinsey Institute’s page says the survey is “funded and conducted by Match”. It covers over 5,000 US singles a year, drawn from opt-in research panels rather than Match’s members, weighted to Census distributions and fielded by Dynata (Kinsey Institute, 2026). The 2025 edition found that 46% of singles feel ready for a long-term relationship (Global Dating Insights, 2025a). The base is singles in general, so the figure says nothing about Match’s own members.

Both companies publish relationship and marriage counts of their own with no method, so we leave those numbers out.

Hinge says it is designed to be deleted, which is a slogan. “The Dating App Designed To Be Deleted” appears in the boilerplate of its Your Turn Limits press release (Hinge Press, 2024). We found no figure from Hinge on how many accounts close because someone found a partner.

Coffee Meets Bagel and The League are often described as slower formats. We have not reviewed either and cite no list for them here. Both are in the not-reviewed table on our best dating apps guide.

We score three apps: Hinge, Tinder and Bumble. Of the services above, only Hinge has a score from us.

Which dating app has the highest success rate for marriage?

None that we could find. We found no dating app that publishes a success rate for marriage with a stated method: who was counted, over what period and against what base.

The one claim of this kind that went through a formal review was found to have no reasonable basis. In 2014 the National Advertising Division recommended that eharmony discontinue its “#1 Most Marriages” claim, which rested on the study eharmony had commissioned (Truth in Advertising, 2014).

The figures that circulate are company or platform surveys. The Knot’s 27% comes from couples who married in 2025 and answered a survey that The Knot ran without stating its sampling (Global Dating Insights, 2025b). Our reading: Hinge coming first there says where those couples met, not how likely a Hinge user is to marry, because the survey does not count users who did not marry. The marriage counts that eharmony and Match publish have no method attached. Pew’s 10% is a population figure for partnered US adults who met on any site or app. It is not broken down by app (Pew, 2023).

What forum posters say

We read four threads on Mumsnet and Gransnet, two UK forums. These are anecdotes. We paraphrase them here without quotes or usernames.

• June 17, 2021, Mumsnet. In a thread asking for positive online dating stories, posters named Match, Tinder, Bumble, Plenty of Fish, Hinge and OkCupid as where they met long-term partners (Mumsnet, 2021).
• September 4, 2023, Mumsnet. A thread asking whether anyone had found success on dating apps turned up successes on several apps. Several posters also said apps feel more casual now than ten years ago (Mumsnet, 2023).
• January 4, 2025, Mumsnet. In a short thread on the best apps, posters preferred Hinge and Bumble, and one had met her partner on Hinge four years earlier (Mumsnet, 2025).
• March 3, 2023, Gransnet. One poster met her husband on EliteSingles at 61, and another met a partner on eharmony (Gransnet, 2023).

Our reading: the major apps named in these threads each turn up with a partner story, Tinder included. Threads that ask for success stories collect success stories, and a tally of anecdotes is not evidence.

How to use any app for a serious relationship

Five habits, each marked with what it rests on.

1. Set the intention tag. It takes a minute and tells a match where you stand before the first message. Basis: our view. The tag filters conversations, not people, since we found no statement from Hinge or Tinder that it verifies the tag.
2. Keep few chats open. Hinge built Your Turn Limits around this. It says its test of the rule “increased responsiveness on the app by 20%”, a company figure with no method (Hinge Press, 2024). Basis: a company claim. Fewer conversations at a time is also the idea behind slow dating, which means meeting fewer people and taking longer over each.
3. Stop swiping before every profile looks like a no. Basis: a lab result, and the advice to stop is ours. In Pronk and Denissen’s studies, the chance of accepting a profile fell by 27% from the first option to the last (Pronk & Denissen, 2020). That was measured in research tasks, not in an app, and not on relationships.
4. Ignore success-rate claims. Basis: what we found. We found no app success rate with a method. The one marriage claim that went through a formal review was found to have no reasonable basis (Truth in Advertising, 2014).
5. Do not pay for a relationship. Basis: Pew, read with its base. The 52% against 34% gap compares payers with non-payers among partnered adults who had ever used a dating site, and Pew calls it an association (Pew, 2023). Pay for a feature you need, not for the odds.

The same caution applies to the rules of thumb people use to decide when to talk about what you are. We found no data behind them, and for the 3-3-3 rule, versions disagree.

How to use this

1. Pew’s 44%, read with its base. It covers recent US online daters, and 19% of them also named casual dating as a major reason (Pew, 2023).
2. The intention tag as an opening statement. Set it, then judge people by what they do.
3. Marriage figures with a method, or none at all. The Knot, eharmony and Match figures are company or platform numbers.
4. One app and a few open chats. Our view, and the idea behind Hinge’s own rule.
5. Our scores for design, not results. Hinge, Tinder and Bumble are scored on the hub, and the scores describe how the apps are built.