5 BEST
5 Best Background Check 2026
Jan 2026
TruthFinder
+ From $28.33/month
+ People searches, social media searches, reverse phone lookup
BeenVerified
+ From $26.89/month
+ People searches, social media searches, vehicle lookup
PeopleFinders
+ From $24.95/month
+ People searches, reverse phone and email lookup, public record searches
PeopleLooker
+ From $22.86/month
+ Social media searches, business searches, unclaimed money searches
Review for each item and
More details
- Price : 28.05/month
- Reports offered: People search, background search
- Cancelation policy: Cancel any time
TruthFinder is a highly popular background check service for people searches. It’s a great tool for anyone who wants to reconnect with friends, family, or colleagues, as it offers multiple ways to search and provides detailed information. Depending on your membership level, you can search by name, address, phone number, or email address.
Similar to other services we’ve looked at, TruthFinder’s full background check report includes contact details, address history, social media usernames, academic records, information on associates, dating profiles, personal assets, criminal history, business information, and licenses.
With a monthly membership, you get unlimited background searches. However, some features, like unlimited phone and email searches, printable PDF reports, report monitoring, and dark web searches, come at an additional cost.
Why we chose TruthFinder: TruthFinder provides dark web monitoring services that search the hidden parts of the internet to check if your personal information is being sold. The Dark Web Price Index 2022 shows that over 9,000 vendors are actively selling personal information on the deep web, including around 4.5 million credit cards, which are sold for $120 each.
Our experience: We really appreciated the “timeline” feature, which presents key report details in chronological order. The “report quality score” was also helpful, as it gave us an idea of how accurate the information in our report was. For instance, our test report included a few email addresses, phone numbers, and photos that didn’t actually belong to the person we were searching for.
BeenVerified
- Price : $22.86/month
- Reports offered: People search, background search, criminal records
- Cancelation policy: Cancel any time
BeenVerified’s web search is very thorough and provides results quickly, usually within minutes. It searches through billions of records from public data sources and the deep web, uncovering a lot of useful information such as address history, phone numbers, and education background.
Most background search services require you to enter specific search terms like a name, phone number, or address. However, BeenVerified also offers a social media search option that covers over 120 social media platforms. This means that even if you only have a person’s username, you can still run a background check.
This feature is particularly useful for people who conduct business transactions on social media and want to avoid scams. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the number of scams is increasing. In 2021, over 95,000 people reported losing nearly $770 million to social media fraud, compared to $258 million in 2020.
Why we chose BeenVerified: BeenVerified provides access to public record information at a reasonable price, with seven different search options included in a single monthly subscription. They also offer a satisfaction guarantee, promising one-on-one support or a refund if users are not satisfied with their search results.
Our experience: We appreciate that BeenVerified allows users to monitor updates on reports they’ve already run. However, although the service generally provides accurate results, our report included a few addresses, emails, and educational institutions that didn’t actually belong to the person we were searching for.
- Price : From $25.11/month
- Reports offered: People search, background search, criminal records
- Cancelation policy: $7.95 to cancel
Intelius offers a range of search term options and pricing plans, making it a great choice if you know exactly what information you need. Unlike many other background check providers that charge a flat monthly fee for all services, Intelius lets users pick a monthly plan tailored to their specific search needs.
For instance, if you want to look up details about homes in your neighborhood, you can choose Intelius’s unlimited reverse address lookup plan. This allows you to find property history, ownership info, property tax details, property value, and contact information.
On the other hand, if you’re interested in conducting background checks, you can opt for the unlimited people search plan. For the cost of this plan, you get access to criminal history, social media profiles, address history, photos, relatives and associates, lawsuits and civil judgments, traffic violations, and financial history.
These search options, including criminal records, public records, and people search, are all available directly from the site’s homepage. However, because the pricing varies depending on the type of search, figuring out the cost for a specific service can be a bit confusing.
Why we chose Intelius: Intelius frequently updates its search engine to make sure it always provides fast, confidential, and detailed results. It’s one of the most comprehensive background check services out there, with access to over 20 billion public records.
Our experience: We were really impressed with the variety of unlimited search options and different pricing plans that Intelius offers. However, during the pre-billing process, we ran into several “special offers” that made it tricky to figure out the exact monthly cost for each service. For example, the unlimited address search plan was first listed at $29 per month, but then it was reduced to a special price of $4.99 during checkout.
- Price : From $24.95/Month
- Reports offered: Business, criminal, property records
- Cancelation policy: Case-by-case basis
PeopleFinders, launched in 1999, is one of the oldest and most well-established online background check services. It has access to over 120 billion public records from more than 6,000 data sources. You can search by names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses.
The platform also provides tools to help users narrow down search results, especially when dealing with common names.
PeopleFinders’ search results include contact information, criminal history, details on liens and judgments, property and assets, education history, work references, and marriage records. However, it does not include social media history.
Why we chose PeopleFinders: We’re really impressed with how long the company has been in the background check industry and its amazing access to records. It makes it super easy to reconnect with people you’ve lost touch with.
Our experience: We found PeopleFinders’ search engine really user-friendly, whether on the website or the smartphone app. It let us run an advanced search and narrow down the results by the subject’s age range and middle name. Plus, it delivered the results in less than two minutes.
- Price : From $14.62/month
- Reports offered: People search, Reverse phone search, Reverse email search
- Cancelation policy: Cancel any time
PeopleLooker offers a lot of different ways to search. You can look up someone by their name, phone number, email address, property details, social media username, or even a business name. They also have an option to search for unclaimed money.
Their search tool looks through millions of public records to find details like criminal records, contact info, traffic violations, assets, relatives, financial data, education history, and social media profiles.
PeopleLooker also has a handy feature that alerts you if there are any updates to the reports you’ve already run. And their mobile app is really useful—it has all the same search options as the desktop site, plus an extra dark web search.
Why we chose PeopleLooker: PeopleLooker’s distinctive search features, such as the unclaimed money search and business name search, set it apart from other similar services.
Our experience: Our experience with PeopleLooker’s mobile app was really good. It’s actually more user-friendly than the desktop version. Both have nice and simple designs, but the app does a better job of showing all the different search options you can use, which is one of the best things about this service. On the desktop site, we had a bit of trouble finding where to do a social media search.
