8 BEST People Search Engines Sites to Find People Online
Barbara Thompson
People Search Engines are used to identify, discover, and perform background checks on someone using publicly available data. The best search engines allow you to provide just basic details and find highly relevant people for the given search parameters.
Most people’s search engines lack accuracy and don’t have a large enough database to provide valuable results. Some might have insufficient privacy and safety features to protect you. That’s why you must rely on the best search engines for people to search. The best tools use robust searching algorithms, an extensive, frequently updated database, and a variety of parameters for greater search results accuracy.
We’ve curated a list of the eight best people search engines for your needs. Our review evaluated all the engines based on their search capabilities, pricing, database size, and device support.
Best People Search Sites: Top Picks!
| People Search Engine | Searching Parameter | Pricing | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelius | Name, Phone, Address | Yes, 6 Days at $0.95 | Learn More |
| Spokeo | Name, Email, Phone, Address | $0.95 for Full Report | Learn More |
| Social Catfish | Name, Email, Phone, Username, Address, and Image | $6.87 for 3 Days Trial | Learn More |
| Instant Checkmate | Name, City, Location | $3.99 one-time | Learn More |
| USSearch | Name, Phone Number, Address | Yes, 5 Days at $1.99 | Learn More |
1) Intelius
Best for compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act
Intelius is a USA-based firm that has been managing and maintaining databases of public records since 2005. You can perform searches using parameters like mobile number, address, and name. Its search results can contain various information such as legal name, mobile number, past and present residence, date of birth, relatives, and aliases.
Intelius also has an address lockup feature in this people search engine with a location finder to find details, past residents, census info, history, and crime stats. All the data is extracted through criminal records, tax liens, public utility, and real estate records.
Features:
- Multiple Use Cases: It is designed for various use cases such as checking criminal records, reconnecting with lost friends, identifying someone calling you, and looking for potential relationships.
- Personal Data: You can use it to discover individuals without violating their personal space, as it relies on publicly available data and records.
- Privacy: All searches are privacy-friendly and cannot be used for gaining personal data or misusing susceptible data. The data cannot be used to determine someone’s credit, insurance, housing, or employment eligibility.
- Proprietary Engine: It uses a proprietary data extraction engine to maximize performance and improve search results, ensuring a better experience.
- Rights: You can opt-out, delete, or correct the details that may appear in their search results.
- Additional Services: Intelius provides various other services as well. These include reverse phone lookups, criminal records, background checks, People Directory, and Phone Directory.
- Reverse Phone Search: Phone number searching capabilities can be utilized for identifying unknown numbers, researching online dates, updating call lists, avoiding robocalls, getting contact details, social profiles, and more.
- Background Checks: You can perform in-depth background checks of an individual by finding property details, searching for numbers, getting history and criminal records, and performing fact-checking.
- Customer Support: Responsive customer support is available via contact form, postal, email, and call. They have in-depth self-help articles and a knowledge base to help you quickly get started with its usage to solve common issues.
- Records: Native tools to help you perform deep searches into criminal records and traffic rule violations of various individuals.
- Reports: Easily downloadable detailed reports with proper data and offline access support for all search results.
- Identity Theft: It provides you with additional tools to prevent identity theft. Even after that, if you suffer from Identity theft, you get compensated up to $1 Million through their Identity Theft Insurance Coverage.
Pros
Cons
How do you search people using Intelius?
Step 1) Create an account and purchase a suitable plan on Intelius
Step 2) Visit the People Search page and fill in your query.
Step 3) Adjust filters and parameters as needed.
Step 4) Intelius will now perform a search and provide you with results.
Pricing:
Some of the main plans for Intelius are:
| Name | Price | Results |
|---|---|---|
| Reverse Phone Lookup Trial | $0.95 (for 6 Days) | Name, Photos, address, history, relatives |
| People Search | $24.86 per month | Email, address, educational history, assets, criminal records |
| Address Lookup Trial | $0.95 (for 7 Days) | Residents, neighbors, residence, demographics, and more. |
Addons:
- View and download Report files as PDFs: $3.99 one-time fee
- Intelius Identity Protect for monitoring your presence online: $9.95 per month
Free Trial: 5 Days for $1.99
2) Spokeo
Best for getting access to a database of more than 12 Billion records
Since 2006, Spokeo has been a data aggregator and people search engine. Its 12 billion+ records in the database are used to identify individuals and provide relevant information about them accurately. Overall, their continuously updated database has over 6 billion consumers, 130 million properties, 600 million legal records, and 120+ social networks, making it an ideal people search engine for personal and business use cases.
Spokeo also provides enterprise-grade plans for companies to perform lead generation and customer acquisition. Enterprise plans may give real estate value data, healthcare estimates, debt info, and e-commerce patterns.
Features:
- Search Results: The search results may contain various details including, but not limited to, address, legal name, family, location, and age.
- Search Parameters: Allows you to perform an in-depth search using someone’s mobile number, email, name, and residential address.
- Reports: You can search, generate, and download reports for contact information, personal details, wealth data, location history, family and associations, social media accounts, and criminal records.
- Data Clarity: Various steps are taken to maintain data clarity and ensure relevant, actionable, and timely insights are provided to aid businesses’ decision-making.
- Email Lookup: It allows you to perform email research to find the original owner of any email address in no time. The search is performed across social media, public records, online directories, shopping sites, and dating apps.
- Phone Data: You can perform a reverse phone search to see the owner of the phone and learn about the nature of the number (landline, personal, business), records, and comments from other users.
- Updates: Spokeo keeps updating, modifying, and improving the data, which results in more accurate and detailed searches. It sends you updates via email with any changes or new results that may come for your searches.
- Address Records: You can find details of owners and residents of an address in public records, property records, social media, crime records, and online databases.
- Customer Support: Customer Support is available for all users through phone, email, and live chat.
- Security: SSL and modern safety standards secure all your financial details and personal account information.
- Control Data: You can control your data on Spokeo. If you find any of your data present on their site, you can optout and ensure greater protection for yourself.
- Data Collection: Spokeo relies exclusively on publically available data from social profiles, government records, and public data points to build its database.
- Safety: Its people search features ensure you can quickly identify callers and email senders and never get scammed easily.
- Business Plans: It provides flexible pricing options, expansive, diverse search, and dedicated priority support. You can also use its special advanced search filters to finetune results.
- Technology: It utilizes an advanced proprietary deep web technology to perform scans, curate results, and provide valuable information and insights into search results
Pros
Cons
How do you do a people search using Spokeo?
Step 1) Sign up for Spokeo and purchase a plan that suits your needs.
Step 2) Visit Spokeo and select your preferred search parameter from Name, Email, Phone, or Address. (Leave empty if unsure)
Step 3) It performs a search across 100+ networks and provides you with results with in-depth information. Download the reports for future reference.
Pricing:
The membership plans for Spokeo are as follows:
| Plan Name | Duration | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Month Membership | 90 Days | $14.95 per month |
| 1 Month Membership | 30 Days | $19.95 per month |
3) Social Catfish
Best for enjoying the most comprehensive range of search parameters
Social Catfish is one of the best people search sites, with robust tools for performing searches and a variety of parameters to choose from. It maintains complete compliance with common privacy requests like CCPA and NV, along with support for Global Privacy Control.
Social Catfish utilizes proprietary technologies to create databases, scan data, and curate highly relevant results for your search parameters. It also helps you match and verify the identity of millions of online profiles and websites with uploaded photos. If your personal information or data is being misused for catfishing, it can help you take necessary legal actions and recover your private assets.
Features:
- Search Parameters: It allows you to perform searches based on Name, Email, Phone number, social media usernames, addresses, region, nationality, and photos.
- Find Information: You can use its robust search functions to find additional information, such as jobs, aliases, addresses, and criminal records.
- Reverse Email Search: The reverse email search allows you to locate the owner of the email address along with various other information to estimate their identity accurately.
- Reverse Image Lookup: Advanced AI-driven technologies allow you to upload someone’s image and find similar people and existing web pages with this image.
- Phone Number Search: Mobile number search reveals the owner’s true identity, approximate location, type of number (personal or business), and various other forms of data to distinguish genuine users from spammers.
- Sites Scanned: The robust algorithm scans through images on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Match, Tinder, Reddit, and LinkedIn.
- Verify Results: You can use it to verify if an account you met online is an actual human or some scammer/bot.
- Product Search: While shopping online, you can perform a reverse image search of your product to see if it is available on other websites.
- Catfishing: Simply put, Catfishing is pretending to be someone else with various disguises on social media. SocialCatfish actively identifies and keeps you protected from any such scams.
- Address Search: This allows you to identify property owners, get historical data of the address, check authenticity, generate real estate leads, and be aware of any potential safety issues.
- Customer Support: Their customer support is available through calls, email, and online support docs to assist you with all issues. It provides general knowledge and education about various scams, catfishing, and other malpractices on the internet that you need to be careful about.
- Image Search: Its advanced image searching capabilities can be used for various use cases, including finding products, similar images, and duplicate images for your image.
Pros
Cons
How do you do a people search using Social Catfish?
Step 1) Visit Social Catfish and choose your preferred search parameter from name, email, number, username, address, and image.
Step 2) Provide relevant input for your search parameter and click “Search.”
Step 3) You may be asked additional questions if needed. Answer them. It will search through the records to find relevant results.
Step 4) You will be shown basic results. If you want an in-depth report, click “View Report” to purchase a paid plan and get access to the additional information.
Pricing:
Here are some of the best pricing plans offered by Social Catfish:
| Plan Name | Price | Searching Capability |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited Social Search | $28.94 per month | Searching Names, phone numbers, usernames, email addresses |
| Unlimited Image Search | $6.87 per month | Reverse Image Searching Capabilities |
| Search Specialist | $397 one-time | Search everything and get assisted by a dedicated search specialist. |
Trial: $6.87 for 3 Days Trial
4) Instant Checkmate
Best native Android mobile app
Instant Checkmate is an ideal search engine for searching your data and discovering your online presence. Its Android app is perfect for performing people search, accessing data online, and downloading reports. You can also buy its premium reports, including additional information on property details, voter registrations, tax liens, neighbours, and business associates.
Instant Checkmate lets you quickly discover various things/people around your area. You can find frequent sex offenders, criminals, and celebrities in your proximity. The in-depth database can search criminal records to discover criminals, their crimes, and disposition rates.
Features:
- Searching Parameters: It provides various search parameters, including First Name, Last Name, City, and Region, for performing people searches.
- Background Checks: You can use this people search engine to perform background checks and discover history, criminal records, and other public records.
- Reverse Phone Number Search: You can search any existing mobile number to identify the owner. This helps you identify spammers and scammers.
- Address Lookup: You can use address lookup tools to identify owners, neighbors, property values, census data, and demographics.
- Privacy: Your personal information, search history, and past reports are entirely private. The concerned personnel will not be informed when you perform a people search to discover their profile.
- Reports: The reports include contact info, location history, criminal records, sex offenders, social profiles, business profiles, finance, and assets.
- Do Not Sell: You can request them to remove your data and ensure it is not sold to brokers and lead generators online.
- Rights: Protects your rights and allows you to opt out of various publicly available data points, delete personal data in search results, and correct incorrect information.
- Data Suppression: If you find your data being used by organizations without your permission, Instant Checkmate will help you perform relevant actions to correct that.
- Database: They rely on public data to build their database. This database is frequently updated, improved, and tested for accuracy, ensuring an ideal experience.
- Self-Check: It allows you to perform background checks on yourself to find your publicly visible online activity. You can also check for any instances of your details being used for catfishing.
- Support: They have an informative blog explaining various use cases, how-tos, and general knowledge about scamper tricks and how to avoid them. You can quickly get support with issues relating to searches and reports via mail, call, and postal.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
Some of the key pricing plans of Instant Checkmate are:
| Plan Name | Duration | Price | Benefits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Person Reports – 1 Month | 1 Month | $35.12 per month | Unlimited Person, Location Reports, and Report Monitoring. |
| Person Reports – 3 Month | 3 Month | $28.09 per month (paid for three months) | |
| Phone Reports | 1 Month | $5.99 per month | Unlimited Phone reports |
Addons:
- Downloadable Report Files: $3.99 one-time
- Dark Web Monitoring: $1.99 per month
5) USSearch
Best for searching people in USA
USSearch is one of the best people search sites that utilizes optimized algorithms and efficient servers to perform in-depth searches. It can be performed quickly, and you get the desired results with minimum effort. This also improves customer turnaround times, creating a better customer experience.
This free people search site allows businesses to negotiate custom partnerships and case-by-case business deals to help enterprises better utilize this public data for various purposes, including lead generation, research, and market study. All the reports can be saved on your account for easy retrieval in the future, or they can be downloaded as PDFs and stored on your local devices.
Features:
- Privacy: All search queries, historical data, and reports are completely confidential. The information is never shared publically or with any 3rd party lead generator.
- Database: Their database utilizes social media profiles, online profiles, public photos, criminal records, public records, traffic violation lists, addresses, locations, and other public sources.
- Find Person: This people search engine can be used to locate and find someone on social media or using their mobile number, name, email address, location, and various other details.
- Credibility: You can verify the credibility of an online profile by checking their information on this people’s search engine. Imposters, scammers, sex offenders, and catfishers can be easily discovered using this.
- Find Acquaintances: This tool can find lost family members, potential distant relatives, and various other people associated with your search subject.
- Assets: This people search engine can also help you discover someone’s potential assets, including houses, vehicles, and real estate.
- Criminal or Traffic Records: Easily discover criminal records or legal disputes involving your search subject in the state or county database records.
- Reports: All search results are available as insightful unlimited reports that can be easily accessed and stored.
- Phone Number: Phone number searches may provide you access to data with various cell and landline numbers that may be associated with the person.
- Email Address: Find the owner of any given email address and discover other email IDs that could potentially belong to them.
- Rights: Protects you various rights for using their people search engine, such as Right to Know, Right to Opt Out, Right to Correct, and Right to Delete.
- Suppress: If you find your data or personal information being used by someone without your permission, you can use their services to take necessary counteractions.
- Information Selling: You can easily opt out from selling your personal information to 3rd party agencies and data harvesters for greater privacy.
- Legal: US Search Legal Hound helps simplify and accelerate the legal research process, helping governing authorities discover suspects and witnesses more easily.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
USSearch provides you with the following pricing plans to choose from:
| Plan Name | Duration | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly Unlimited Reports | 1 Month | $59 per month |
| Annual Unlimited Reports | 12 Months | $599 per year |
Free Trial: Lifetime Free Basic Plan
6) Truecaller
Best for searching people based on phone number and name
Truecaller is among the best free people search sites for performing people searches on phone numbers and real-time identification of scammers/bots. Whenever you receive a call, it performs a real-time search through its vast and continuously updated database to find the relevant details before you pick up the call.
Truecaller utilizes robust community-based reporting to help build, modify, manage, maintain, and improve the database of people and businesses with more than 3 billion searchable phone numbers. The large user base of over 350 million people allows them to thoroughly generate, examine, and verify data before changing the database.
Features:
- Search: You can search by phone number, email address, name, or location.
- Search Results: Search results include name, phone number, profile pic, email address, and social media (and WhatsApp) profiles.
- Spam: If a number is reported to be spam, you are shown an appropriate warning highlighting the risk involved.
- Recommendations: Based on your current locations, it helps you find relevant public places, restaurants, and other amenities.
- Recognition: This community-based people search engine can also help you recognize calls from any unsaved businesses easily.
- Blocking: Advanced blocking controls can help you directly block any spammer or a known robocall to provide you greater peace of mind.
- Backup: Effortlessly backup your contacts, messages, and call logs to allow easy transferring of phones.
- Send Contact Request: This allows you to send unlimited contact requests to seek various people’s numbers and contact details.
- Block: Maintain a custom block/unblock list for some specific people and businesses that you intend to avoid.
- Your Data: You can create your account and add your data to make yourself more discoverable to other users on the platform.
- SMS Filtering: Its advanced algorithms automatically identify spam text messengers and senders with bad reputations. These spammers are automatically filtered from your messages.
- Report: You can report any misinformation, incorrect data, or possible spammer to help the community take better actions against them.
- Efficiency: It is designed to maximize efficiency, ensuring quick processing and results for your search query.
- Reports: It published annual reports sharing data about the spammers and robocalls during the previous year and the overall growth in their database.
- Customer Support: Their responsive customer support is available via phone app, email, and Live Chat.
- Brands: Brands can use Truecaller to target advertisements to users of specific demographics, time of day, and location.
- Businesses: Businesses can verify themselves, create custom nametags for their phone numbers, and get appropriate badges to generate customer confidence.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
The key pricing plans for Truecaller are:
| Plan Name | Cost | Key Features |
|---|---|---|
| Connect | $9.99 per year |
• Caller ID for incoming calls • Spam blocking • Search based on email or phone number |
| Assistant | $29.90 per year | $10.99 per quarter |
• Notifications when someone searches for you • Unlimited Contact Requests |
| Gold | $49.90 per year | $4.99 per quarter |
• Call Screening to save time • Voicemail for unattended calls • Custom greetings to improve the calling experience. |
Free Trial: Lifetime Free Basic Plan
Link: https://truecaller.com/
7) Truthfinder
Best for the most comprehensive range of search parameters
Truthfinder helps identify online accounts misusing your photos/name and other details to demean your identity. Furthermore, their team helps you appropriately protect your best interests.
It checks if your identity, personal details, or photos are being sold on the dark web. This can result in your info being leaked in data breaches. Its intelligent services can help you in the early detection of such leaks, helping you take on-time actions. You can efficiently perform searches based on parameters like First Name, Last Name, and Location.
Features:
- Search Domains: It performs an in-depth search across popular social media platforms, police records, criminal records, civil judgments, and photos to perform people search.
- Reconnect: It helps you find lost friends, relatives, and acquaintances and reestablish relationships with them.
- Checking: You can quickly check and review other people’s profiles before you invite them to dinner, playdates, or sleepovers.
- Dating: It is ideal to perform a background check on your date to ensure you make a safe and reasonable choice, leaving nothing to chance.
- Research: The location-driven people search helps you analyze neighborhoods for investing, buying property, or renting.
- Reverse Phone Lookup: It allows you to perform reverse phone lookup and find details of the owner of a phone number, along with another phone number they may own.
- Catfishing: The robust identity verification tools help you verify identity and ensure that an individual online is honest or a catfisher.
- Seller Identity: When making purchases online, you can research and perform background checks of sellers to better understand their reputation and records.
- Usernames: You can search for usernames to find someone’s accounts across all platforms and discover the history and background of the account owner.
- Public Records: Allows you to perform an in-depth search and discover death/birth records, criminal records, and various other publicly available records for finding the subject.
- Report: The report may include a variety of information, including but not limited to Full name, Aliases, DOB, relatives, employment history, and social media profiles.
- Customer Support: Customer service is available using mail, contact form, and call during weekdays. Online help pages contain guidance and solutions for the most common problems that you may face.
- Personal Information Sharing: If you do not want your information to be shared online with data brokers and marketing agencies, you can opt out by quickly filling out their online form.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
You can choose from the following pricing plans offered by Truthfinder
| Plan Name | Pricing | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Reverse Email Lookup | $29.73 per month | Unlimited Person and Email Reports |
| Reverse Phone Lookup | $4.99 per month | Unlimited Phone Number Reports |
| People Search | $28.05 per month | Unlimited Person and Location Reports |
Addons:
- PDF/Report Monitoring: $3.99 per month
- Dark Web Monitoring: $2.99 per month
8) BeenVerified
Best for phone, people, address, email, and vehicle lookup
BeenVerified is an ideal people search engine for performing Reverse search. You can search based on phone, email, address, name, and vehicle. The reverse phone lookup helps you identify the owner of any unknown phone number. This can be critical in identifying and staying safe from telemarketers, robocallers, and scammers.
BeenVerified also has an advanced email lookup tool that helps you quickly find owners of IDs and get a reasonable understanding of their intentions. It also provides information about other email IDs that might be associated with the account owner.
Features:
- Searching Capabilities: You can use it to perform people searches, reverse email lookups, vehicle searches, and reverse phone number searches.
- Report: The people search report can contain various information, including full name, aliases, approximate age, criminal records, social media profiles, education, and employer info.
- Privacy: All your search parameters, history, reports, and downloads are secure and private. This data is never shared with anyone else.
- Business Contact: It provides additional tools for business contact search and lookup.
- Customer Support: You can contact their customer 24/7 using email, phone, or live chat.
- People Search: The robust people search feature allows you to find people by names, social media profiles, phone numbers, relatives, acquaintances, and email addresses.
- Property: It provides insights about the current residential address of the subject, along with current and previous properties, real estate investment, and various assets owned by the individual.
- Address: You can perform a reverse address search to better understand the locality, demographics, and history. It can be used to understand crime rates, neighborhoods, corruption, safety, land value, and other decision-making factors.
- Unclaimed Money: It provides an option to search for unclaimed money for you or your acquaintances that you can retrieve and claim from the relevant authorities.
- Public Record Search: The public record search feature allows you to find better and discover people listed in various traffic/criminal records, state or county courthouses, and other government records.
- Additional Searches: It supports various other forms of searches such as bankruptcy records, county records, email searches, marriage records, property records, Felony records, and phone directories.
- Self Search: You can search yourself and find your data using this tool. This helps identify all the information about you that is currently present online. If you find any unauthorized use of your images, you can take relevant legal action for your privacy.
Pros
Cons
Pricing:
The main subscription plans of BeenVerified include:
| Plan Name | Cost | Reports |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Month Membership | $29.99 per month | 100 reports per month |
| 3 Month Membership | $19.49 per month (paid for three months upfront) | 100 reports per month |
Link: https://www.beenverified.com/people/
Purpose and benefits of people search engines
Some of the critical benefits of the best people finder sites include:
- Finding People: These tools help you quickly identify and locate lost friends, relatives, and family members.
- Investigations: Police and various national authorities use these to find criminals and suspects.
- Background Checks: You can analyze records, perform people’s backgrounds, and track any address’s history to gain hard-to-find information.
- Misuse: These tools are ideal for identifying imposters and catfishers using your information without your permission.
- Spammers and Scammers: They can be used to perform real-time reverse phone lookups to identify spammer and scammer Email IDs or Phone Numbers to keep you protected.
Privacy and Legal Posture of People Search Engines
The top people search sites are designed with legality and privacy laws in mind. They never display susceptible information and rely entirely on publicly available data, ensuring complete legal compliance. All users are given tools to correct, remove, or modify the information displayed in the search results, thus improving privacy.
There are no international laws governing the working of people’s search engines. Various countries and states have their own privacy rules. Some of these privacy protection laws include:
- Right to Know: You can ask for a report of all your personal details and data the search engine holds.
- Right to Opt-Out: Most search engines allow you to opt out of your data being used and sold to 3rd-party agencies for marketing.
- Right to Correct: If you feel any data is incorrect, you can report and correct it quickly.
- Right to Delete: They allow you to delete any details appearing in search results, ensuring complete anonymity.
How to choose the best people search engines.
Some of the critical parameters that must be considered while choosing a people search engine are:
- Database: You must choose a search service with a significant enough demographic relevant to you.
- Search: Choosing a service with a robust search algorithm, the ability to search multiple parameters, and in-depth search results is best.
- Privacy: The best search engines provide features to keep your data protected and help you safeguard your data from misuse.
- Pricing: You should choose tools that meet your budget constraints and offer great value for your money.
FAQs
The Verdict
In this review, we’ve shown you some of the best people search sites for all intents and purposes. Choosing the right one from all these tools can be difficult. That’s why our verdict will help you make the right call for your needs.
- Spokeo is an ideal choice to enjoy the largest and most in-depth database of people.
- Social Catfish is your ideal choice to perform effortless reverse searches and social media lookups.
- If you want great privacy, Intelius is an ideal choice with complete compliance with FCRA.
Best People Search Sites: Top Picks!
| People Search Engine | Searching Parameter | Pricing | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelius | Name, Phone, Address | Yes, 6 Days at $0.95 | Learn More |
| Spokeo | Name, Email, Phone, Address | $0.95 for Full Report | Learn More |
| Social Catfish | Name, Email, Phone, Username, Address, and Image | $6.87 for 3 Days Trial | Learn More |
| Instant Checkmate | Name, City, Location | $3.99 one-time | Learn More |
| USSearch | Name, Phone Number, Address | Yes, 5 Days at $1.99 | Learn More |