Is Zoosk a good app for meeting women?  How does Zoosk compare to other dating sites?  Is Zoosk worth joining and is it free?

The good news is there are a lot of women on Zoosk.  Zoosk is a solid choice to meet women, but it does have issues.  It's not a perfect dating site; it has positives and negatives.

Keeping reading for my full review of Zoosk including features, the good and bad, as well as how it stacks up with other dating sites.

Zoosk offers you multiple pricing plans for membership:

1.  1-month membership for $29.99.
2.  3-month membership for $59.95 ($19.98 per month).
3.  6-month membership for $74.95 ($12.49 per month).
4.  12-month membership for $149.88 ($12.49 per month).

So yeah, Zoosk isn't free.  You have to pay to meet women on Zoosk which isn't a bad thing.  Look at it this way; on a paid dating site you know the women are serious about finding someone because they're spending money as well.

Each of these membership plans allows you to send unlimited messages, including responses, and use all of Zoosk's features.

The monthly cost of Zoosk is similar to sites such as Match.com, Jdate, and Eharmony.  Of course, dating sites like OkCupid and Tinder are free, but free isn't necessarily the best option.

Of course, Zoosk has added features that cost more money.  To access these, you can purchase coins.  Below is the pricing structure for coins on Zoosk

What do you get with Zoosk coins?  Here are some of the features:

• Promoting yourself to other members with Boost
  You can use Zoosk coins to purchase Boosts.  Boosts highlights you in the search results, messages inbox, and Carousel of other people.  A "boost" is a way to get more views from women and hopefully more matches.
  
  
• Unlocking matches in Carousel
  You can use Zoosk coins to unlock a woman's profile in the Carousel feature.
  
  
• Buying virtual gifts for other members
  You can send women a virtual gift which Zoosk points out is "a great way to stand out and show that you’re really interested in someone."  Basically, you are sending images of hearts, flowers, teddy bears, and kisses to name a few.
  
  
• Getting delivery confirmations on messages
  You can spend coins to buy a delivery confirmation for your message.  After sending your message, you’ll get a notification letting you know when it's opened.

The coin cost of these features varies.  For example, a boost may cost 150 coins for each use.  Are coins worth it?  No.

I can't emphasize this enough; Stay away from using coins!  You don't need to use these to meet women on Zoosk.  You're welcome.

To get more money from you, Zoosk offers "premium" upgrades for your membership to further enhance your experience on their site.  Descriptions of the upgrades are detailed below.

• Premium Messaging - Allows you to chat with women if if they aren't a subscriber. According to Zoosk, "up to seven times more people can respond to your messages."
  
  
• Hide & Seek - allows you to control the attention your  receive with three levels of visibility:
  1. Hide - Hide your profile so only women you message can see you.
  2. Seek - Be fully visible and let women know when you view them.
  3. Sneak - Be fully visible and check out women without letting them know when you view them.

You can set up a dating profile on Zoosk quickly.  There are essentially 5 things you should do to get up and running on Zoosk:

1.  Sign up on Zoosk using your email address, Facebook account, or Google account.
2.  Create your username.
3.  Fill out the Basics section.
4.  Fill out your self-summary or, "story."
5.  Load your photos to your Zoosk profile.

There are no questionnaires or behavioral questions like Eharmony and OkCupid.  Creating a profile on Zoosk takes minutes, and you can always just put something up and come back and refine it later.

Below are screenshots showing you the steps to create your dating profile on Zoosk.

A great profile is critical to meet women online.  Here are a few tips to help you with your Zoosk dating profile:

1.  How To Take Good Dating Profile Photos For Men
2.  10 Things Men Should Never Write On Their Dating Profile
3.  How To Create A Good Dating Site Username
4.  10 Online Dating Profile Headline Tips for Men

Zoosk has several features to help you meet women on their app.  Below is a screenshot of the features from the Zoosk app with an overview of each one below.

Search - Allows you to see women's profiles based on your search parameters.  For example, you can change the age range, distance, height, ethnicity, religion, etc. for women you want to meet.

Carousel - A feature where you view photos and age one-at-a-time, based on who Zoosk’s Behavioral Matchmaking engine thinks you’ll be mutually attracted to.  It learns as you click to show more relevant results.

The concept of the "carousel" feature is similar to Tinder; you're presented a profile and given three options; "like," "dislike," or "maybe" before moving to the next profile.

You can't look at the woman's profile nor see more photos; you can only see the woman's photo and her age - you don't know her location, and you can't message her.

Online Now - Women who are online right now.

Messages - Shows your inbox.

Connections - If you and a woman both show an interest in each other, she will show up in your "Connections."

Views - Shows women who have looked at your dating profile with the most recent woman displayed first.

SmartPick - This feature evaluates compatibility between female Zoosk members and you. SmartPick learns from your "❤" and "X" votes to make better match recommendations in the future to you.

Insights - Zoosk will analyze your dating preferences and display demographics, compatibility characteristics, traits you prefer, your activity level on Zoosk, and much more. 

The messaging feature on Zoosk is similar to other dating sites and is very basic.  To start a conversation you can "like" a woman's profile and send a message.  Zoosk will present you generic icebreakers, but I highly recommend staying away from these and creating messages yourself.

I find the app messaging system more user-friendly than the desktop version.  I don't like the desktop messaging at all.  

For a more detailed overview for starting conversations with women on Zoosk, visit my blog post How To Start Conversations With Women On Zoosk (Including Examples).

An annoyance of Zoosk is that there are fake profiles that are like vampires; they come out in the evening.  They will initiate conversations by liking you and appear in your search feed as well.  They are easy to spot as they usually have one photo with a phone number on it.

Below is something which happened all to often for me, in the evenings I received a lot of messages from "women" which were fake profiles.  Below you can see four messages where the main photo had a phone number on it (as above).  

There are four fake profiles, and you can see that two of them use the same photos as the other profiles.  

One thing I've noticed is that Zoosk has issues in the message feed. Take the example below showing a woman's response to a message on the Zoosk app.  You can see it has funny characters.  

It's annoying as hell.  I imagine a dating site that has millions of users and charges a fee wouldn't have this issue.  I don't see this issue on the desktop version; only the app.

From my experience, I think Match.com is a better overall dating site than Zoosk.  That doesn't mean Zoosk is terrible nor does it mean Match is perfect (far from it).  It's just I find Match has more women, a better desktop site and app, plus better features.

I find Zoosk to be a better than the sites which are free; POF and OkCupid for example.  You can certainly meet women on the free sites, but you get what you pay for; meaning women may not be as invested on a free dating site as opposed to when they spend money.

I've had a better experience on Zoosk than Eharmony as well.  Eharmony only gives you so many women to choose from per day and costs more (unless you can find a discount).  Also, Eharmony suffers from the same problem as Zoosk; the desktop version is not as good as the app.

Lastly, there are women on Zoosk who want serious relationships and those who want something casual, so you can certainly find females looking for relationships.  Also, since Zoosk is a paid site you can rest easy knowing the women on it are serious about finding a man.

Canceling your membership on Zoosk is simple.  Go to your "Account Settings" and click on the "Subscription" button and you can turn off the auto-renewal feature.  Yep, it's that easy.

Zoosk is a good, not great, dating site.  The critical question for any dating site is there women on it?  And yes, Zoosk has plenty of female members.  Since Zoosk is a paid site, you know the female members are serious about meeting someone.

The Zoosk app is good and superior to its desktop version.  I rarely used the website and stuck to the app because messaging women was easier.

It's easy to get your profile up and running, and I was able to start conversations with plenty of attractive women on the site.  There are several features on Zoosk (carousel and insight for example), but I stuck to the "search," "who viewed me," and "online now" features, and that's all you need to meet women on any dating site.

I'm not a fan of Zoosk's money-grubbing ways of coins and boosts.  I wish Zoosk had a feature to turn this off because it's always front and center.  Another annoyance is ads that appear in your message feed and on this site.  There's no reason for ads to appear on a dating site that I pay to be a member of.  These don't ruin the experience of Zoosk and are more of an annoyance.

Zoosk is a solid dating site worth exploring.  I'd recommend signing up for free then seeing if there are women on it in your area.  If there are female members in your area, Zoosk is a solid option.  I think Match.com is a better dating site and I'd recommend Zoosk over POF, OkCupid or Eharmony at this point.

One thing, Zoosk needs a better way to get rid of annoying fake profiles.  Most come out at night.  It's not as bad as POF, but still, if I pay for a site, I expect a better job at eliminating these fakes.