In the online dating world, AdultFriendFinder and Plenty of Fish are the website equivalent of elder statesmen. These OG dating platforms have been hooking people up for literally decades, having both launched over 20 years ago. They predate social media and even the smartphone era. But a good thing never goes out of date. Both sites have stayed relevant, attracting millions of visitors across the globe who all have one thing in common: They're all looking for a connection.
But that's pretty much where the similarities between these sites end. We'd argue that you'll be hard-pressed to find two online dating sites less alike than AFF and Plenty of Fish, in fact. Plenty of Fish is more of a conventional dating site, adopting the smartphone-friendly “yes-or-no” carousel function. AdultFriendFinder, on the other hand, is much spicier — it's basically an X-rated site with a social media platform built in.
But instead of approaching them as either-or alternatives, you can see them as essentially complementary. One offers a personality-focused approach, which is more likely to help you find something more serious and long-term, while the other is sexuality-first. It's built for steamy short-term fun and frolics.
Want to know more? We put these two online dating veterans to the test to find their respective strengths and weaknesses. In other words, keep reading for everything you ever needed to know.
As dating sites have been around forever, both AdultFriendFinder and Plenty of Fish can absolutely deliver the goods for their users, but it’s interesting to see just how different their respective approaches can be — and, if you're intent on using just one, which site will best suit your dating needs.
Site design
The contrast between the two sites is immediately evident from the aesthetic choices. Plenty of Fish uses softer, pastel colors and a clean, minimalist aesthetic to focus your attention on a single part of the website: your user profile, for example, or the profile of a prospective match. AdultFriendFinder, on the other hand, has a crowded site layout, with ads, live streams, and user-generated content all vying for your attention.
The AFF approach gives you the initial feeling that there’s a lot going on, like you just stumbled into a huge swingers party, while the PoF approach is much less intimidating — though also less exciting. There’s another major difference that’s immediately obvious: AFF is very much an “adult” dating site, with nudity enabled by default in your profile settings, meaning a lot of what you will see on the site is indistinguishable from an X-rated tube site. Plenty of Fish, meanwhile, curates its content much more heavily. There are no NSFW live streams or d-pics.
And speaking of that X-rated content: Because AFF allows nudity on its site, it’s ineligible for inclusion on the most popular app stores, so you’re mostly confined to the on-site experience, even on your smartphone, but Plenty of Fish has an app in both the Google Play and Apple App stores, so you can swipe on the go as well.
By the numbers
While both sites are tight-lipped about their user information, independent reporting from Business of Apps suggests that Plenty of Fish has approximately 10 million active users at any one time, compared to AdultFriendFinder’s two million active users, with both sites having a roughly 60-40 male-female skew in their gender ratio, though more recent reporting suggests AFF may be closer to 65-35 today.
In either case, there’s no shortage of people for you to discover and talk to, though the farther you live from an urban hub, the more generous you’ll have to be in your search parameters.
The typical dating profile
Another obvious difference between the two sites is their approach to profile creation. With AFF, you can set up a profile in seconds, with no verification steps and minimal required data entry. Plenty of Fish, on the other hand, asks you a bevy of personal questions, from your level of education and whether or not you own a car to whether your parents are divorced or still together and whether you want kids or not. PoF also requires that you verify the phone number tied to your account using a six-digit verification code, while AFF only requires email verification.
AFF has its share of personal questions as well, but they’re not so much related to your religion or smoking habit as they are to your kinks and sexual preferences. Their popular My Kinks tab allows users to fly their freak flags freely, and then re-incorporates that information into one of their search options, so if, for example, you have a foot fetish, you can search for other people who share your fetish, or they can search you out based on that fetish.
User experience
One thing you’ll quickly realize when using both sites is that PoF is a lot more generous in what they allow non-paying users to do. With AFF, you can basically only engage with other people in public spaces like the chat rooms and discussion forums. In fact, you can’t so much as view someone’s full profile without purchasing a Gold membership.
With PoF, by contrast, you can actually use the site, view user profiles, like user profiles, and even speak to other singles, all without spending a dime. That being said, a Premium or Prestige membership on Plenty of Fish still represents a massive quality-of-life upgrade, giving you unlimited likes, read receipts on messages, an ad-free site experience, and some pretty cool bonus features like the ability to see who has liked your profile or a Rewind button for when you accidentally skip over a profile that caught your eye.
From a purely aesthetic perspective, the PoF site is much cleaner and less distracting, even in the way it serves you ads, while the AFF site makes up for its busy design by offering a much wider variety of potential activities, including live streams, chat forums, blogs, and sexy stories.
Success rates
The major difference between the two sites boils down to the users and what they’re looking for online. In general, Plenty of Fish users seem to be more dedicated daters, aspiring to long-term relationships and meaningful connections, while AdultFriendFinder’s users are much more obviously content with short-term connections, whether that’s a sexy chat or livestream, or an in-person meetup.
In practice, that means that you’ll find AFF a much easier place to start a conversation or find a fling, while PoF users are clearly more selective in who they talk to, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that “success” is easier on one site than another. It also helps that AFF offers more venues for interaction: you can try to message a single person, sure, but you can also search out people who share your hobbies, interests, or kinks and speak to them in a more public context like a forum or a live chat, which removes a lot of the stakes of one-on-one communication.
On the other hand, if you’re after something more long-term and high-stakes, Plenty of Fish users appear to be much more aware of what they want and what they don’t want in a partner. They’re at a stage of life when they’re taking dating seriously, and PoF caters to this crowd, putting critical life information (are you a smoker? do you have kids?) front and center.
In other words, you’ll find the most success by being honest with yourself about what you’re looking for and choosing the appropriate dating site. Can you find love on AFF or a fling on PoF? Most definitely. But it will also be an uphill battle, given how the two sites are set up.
via Zero Tech Blog