If you’re trying to find people and using phone directories or other documents aren’t helping, you can run a free people search online to track them down.
However, you need the right tools to find someone’s phone number, physical and email address, see their relatives, or read any records including work or criminal documents if any.
Some people finder websites are free to use when looking up people or digging up information on yourself, people you know, or even strangers. You get all sorts of data on people including their online usernames and other basic information, but that’s as far as the free sites can offer based on data in public records.
Other sites like Whitepages, which is a paid people search site, aggregates digital versions of publicly available information on a person.
Whitepages offers relatively good background check services, free information before its paywall, and extensive criminal record information. Plus, there’s no customer funnel so you get to sign up directly to use the site.
However, Whitepages isn’t always accurate in its data as some may be missing, incorrect, old, or associated with the wrong person. Moreover, you may find duplicate profiles for an individual or no profile at all.
Whitepages also has poor people finding experience, has hidden costs, and its complex payment options aren’t very clear.
Best Whitepages Alternatives (Free Included)
Whether you’re searching for an old classmate, potential love interest, online seller, or buyer’s information, here are some of the best Whitepages alternatives you can use to get more information about individuals.
1. TruePeopleSearch
TruePeopleSearch is a people-finder website that’s 100 percent free and allows you to find people by their names, phone numbers, or addresses.
Unlike Whitepages, TruePeopleSearch offers a better and more detailed search experience and results.
The site also offers reverse phone lookup and address lookup services so you can simply enter a person’s name, phone number, or address and receive results. The free results include the person’s current or past phone numbers, addresses, relatives, business ownerships, roommates, friends, and more.
Some of the free detailed results you can get include the person’s wireless or landline phone number, previous towns where the person lived before, their ages, relatives, associated names, and possible associates.
You also get to use the site’s age filter to narrow down results and search from billions of public records all for free.
TruePeopleSearch is easy to use and you get the results very fast. However, the site contains ads, which if you click on them will send you to paid services.
Yes, you can do a free reverse phone lookup. Just enter the phone number of the person and get your search results back very fast.
TruePeopleSearch doesn’t log your searches or even save your search history. You also don’t need to create an account or register to use the service.
If you want to pay to get more information about the person you’re searching for, you can get a link on each person’s page that will redirect you to a separate site where you can purchase the full report.
While TruePeopleSearch has lots of free results and three options to search for people, the sponsored links on the site don’t blend in with real information. However, TruePeopleSearch is completely free unlike Whitepages, which is free for basic information but you have to pay to get detailed results.
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2. TruthFinder
TruthFinder does a good job at finding people with a more thorough search than Whitepages.
The site searches for any court records, misdemeanors, traffic offenses, bankruptcies, felonies, phone numbers, online profiles, relatives, arrest records, sexual offenses, mugshots, weapons permits, and more.
Once it does the background checks, the service then searches for the person’s email addresses, job information, death and government watchlist records, education history, dating profiles, social media images, online interests, registered domains, and blog posts among others.
However, with TruthFinder, you can’t see more details for free other than the person’s full name. You’ll need to pay up to view more information like the person’s full names, age, location, where they live now or where they lived in the past, their email provider, and the last four digits of at least one of their registered phone numbers.
Once you pay, you get the results instantly but you can order one month of unlimited reports or if you want to save money, you can pay for two months at once.
Among the features that make TruthFinder powerful is Dark Web monitoring. This personalized cyber risk intelligence tool helps you monitor email addresses, social security numbers, driver’s licenses, medical identification numbers, social network accounts, credit or debit card details, and more.
The service delves into the Dark Web and searches through thousands of data points using multiple surveillance methods for quality data protection. You can monitor social media feeds, web servers, file transmissions, bulletin boards, chat rooms, forums, and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks plus more.
Once an identity turns up on the Dark Web, TruthFinder will send you an instant notification and you can control the information you want the site to monitor on your behalf.
TruthFinder also offers a free people lookup tool, which you can use by browsing its people directory pages, but the paid membership gives you the advantage of going beyond basic information.
The site also offers personal information through its background checks, jobs and education information, assets, and more.
TruthFinder doesn’t need much information to work and you get basic information for free. However, the service requires you to pay to get full, detailed results and takes about 15 minutes to finish the whole search.
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3. BeenVerified
BeenVerified comes with seven products that help you do more than just a people search. You can get background reports, email addresses, contact information, phone numbers, criminal records, physical addresses, and much more.
The site helps you find anyone by searching using any information you have about the person including their name, email, address, or phone number.
You can pay for the service and query more than 50 websites through username searches to find the person online. A one-month membership gets you faster searches and unlimited reports, but you can save some money by paying for the service three months upfront.
Paid reports include information like maps that show the person’s past or current location, when data was last verified as accurate, asset details, built-in social media feeds, and loan records.
BeenVerified allows you to access billions of records from leading sources and protects your privacy. You can reconnect with loved ones, find old friends, classmates, or family members.
The site also lets you reconnect with clients and customers and improve their data or generate leads. Plus, you can monitor your public records and online reputation.
If you’re a buyer or seller, you can look up used vehicles or online sellers or buyers before transacting. Moreover, BeenVerified also helps you build trust in people that you meet in-person or online.
While BeenVerified offers several ways to search people and gathers information from multiple sources, you still have to pay for detailed results, which take several minutes to populate.
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4. ZabaSearch
ZabaSearch is another free people search finder site that offers reverse phone lookups and advanced people searches by scouring public information and records, phone directories, and court records.
You can search a person by name or phone number and see results like their full names, contact information, address, and age. If you want more detailed information, you can follow the links on the search results page to get deeper reports from Intelius.
The reverse phone number lookup lets you enter any number, known or unknown, and get information from US public records, where possible, that match the search like name, address, or age.
ZabaSearch is free to search so you don’t need to register or add your credit card information. Just enter a number and find out who is calling you for free. You can also upgrade to a paid plan and get background reports that have more information on a person.
The full background reports usually contain marriage and divorce records, arrest and criminal records, social media profiles, and more. You can also use the Whitepages link to try the free search by a person’s name or reverse phone lookup using a number.
ZabaSearch gives you near-instant results and some information for free, but it’s not as up-to-date as similar sites and contains lots of ads.
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5. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a popular professional networking website that you can use to search for people and the networks they’re involved in. This is different from the general information you get with Whitepages because LinkedIn is laser-focused on professional and work-related searches.
You can sign up to create your own profile for free and add your own business or work profile to it and then pick up some details about how others are connected to your workplace or business.
The people search site works similar to a social media platform, except it’s more formal in nature. You can search for a person’s name and see where they work if they’re on the platform, who they work with, where they worked previously, who they report to currently or previously, and any recommendations to their name.
It’s a good platform for recruiters or hiring firms to go to when searching for information about a potential hire or for headhunting purposes. You can filter searches further by jobs, groups, countries, and more.
With LinkedIn, you can search for people you may know by importing their contacts and inviting them to connect. You can also look through the People You May Know section, viewing the Alumni page, and using the Search bar to see familiar faces.
While Whitepages serves up information based on data from public directories, LinkedIn only shows what the person has allowed you to see depending on their privacy settings.
You may not be able to see everything like the person’s contact information or other details because of privacy settings. Plus, if you search for someone and check out their full profile, they’ll receive a notification that you viewed their profile unless you set your viewing to private.
You can find people beyond your own connections and use the Premium LinkedIn membership to access more features.
LinkedIn also offers more than Whitepages in terms of information that’s relevant to professionals, which is available in the published posts section and SlideShare decks from thought leaders in the search results.
The platform is easy to use and gives you direct results, but the results aren’t as detailed because they’re limited to professional or work details. Plus, depending on your settings, the person you’re looking for may see that you’ve viewed their profile unlike Whitepages, which doesn’t disclose to the subject that you’re looking them up.
6. PeekYou
With Whitepages, you search for people online through various records, not just their email or phone number. PeekYou takes a different approach by searching through various social networking communities.
The people search finder lets you discover people relevant or most important to your life. However, the site only displays public web content while respecting requests for privacy.
The site collects and combines content that’s spread out across news sources, social sites, blog platforms, and homepages to present you with comprehensive online identities.
PeekYou offers a new perspective to people searching by placing the person at the center of the web.
For each public weblink, the platform checks to find out who made it, whom it’s about and goes through a billion-plus links to give you the relevant results.
The technology analyzes content and finds the actual people behind it while creating comprehensive online identity records through a combination of scattered digital footprints.
In addition, you can learn more about what the person does on the web by offering lots of information using only a username. You can also search using their real and phone number, though.
PeekYou has multiple search options, free but basic results, and useful search refining tools. However, its useful results are fewer than those of similar sites and it’s full of ads.
7. PeopleFinders
PeopleFinders helps you search for people quickly and hassle-free. The people search engine gives you a few details for free such as age, aliases, family members, and sometimes you may get some of the digits of the person’s phone number.
The site is lightning fast when searching and delivering results from public records databases. You can go further with public records, background checks, and reverse phone searches to discover white pages listings for anyone.
PeopleFinders’ records include criminal histories, contact information, relatives, criminal histories, and property records among other details. If you want more information, you can pay a few dollars to get the full search report, or opt for a more comprehensive background report.
The reverse phone number directories are a secure and safe way to find people quickly. You can get information from more than 43 billion records in the US People Search and Public records.
PeopleFinders is well established compared to Whitepages and has served people seeking accurate data for more than 30 years with access to over 6,000 data sources.
Whether you’re looking for relatives for genealogy purposes, want to reconnect with friends or people from your past, or just want to verify a contact, PeopleFinders can help you with that.
Specifically, the site performs in-depth online background checks, and its search report offers much more detail than Whitepages because PeopleFinders goes beyond public records to check even more data sources.
An advanced tool is included so you can search age range besides just finding people by name, phone number, or physical address.
While PeopleFinders has relatively inexpensive reports and explains what the report found or didn’t find before you pay, you still pay to get deeper information, and emailing the report will cost you more.
8. Pipl
Pipl is another people finder search engine that’s designed for business users, compared to Whitepages, which is for general use.
The site helps you find phone numbers and email addresses and delivers a huge number of results affordably.
Pipl is not only comprehensive and powerful, but you get to search by any parameter including name, email, phone number, or username, and get results that include the person’s professional and personal details.
Unlike Whitepages, which offers a free option, Pipl retired its free option in June 2019, meaning you need to pay to access its services and reports with detailed information about your search.
Membership fees aren’t cheap though because Pipl is built for business users. However, its unique identity resolution engine connects volumes of social identity, personal, and professional data to give investigators and analysts an unmatched global index of more than three billion trusted profiles.
Pipl’s comprehensive data API is available for fraud and investigation support or automated identity verification. The API has developer-friendly client libraries and code samples making it easy to add real-time identity information to your apps.
9. Instant Checkmate
Instant Checkmate is a search service that allows you to perform online people searches from public records and background checks instantly. You can search anyone in America and access their arrest or criminal records, addresses, related court documents, known aliases, and real age.
The site is dedicated to customer privacy by offering secure 128-bit encrypted connections with Norton protection so that the person you’re looking for doesn’t know you uncovered their details.
You get to enjoy unlimited searches so you can learn about anyone you’re looking for. The results from Instant Checkmate’s searches are drawn from specialized sources so that you get valuable information under one roof.
Like Whitepages, whose service is free but offers limited information on its free reports, Instant Checkmate also requires you to sign up as a member to access unlimited reports.
One of the unique features that makes Instant Checkmate different from Whitepages is the email search, which lets you search for people using their emails and uncover real names, location history, phone numbers, and more.
Plus, Instant Checkmate also offers an Android and iOS app, which you won’t find with Whitepages.
10. Facebook
While Facebook is a social media platform, it’s still a great way to find people online. You can connect with people you know or knew before, family, friends, friends of friends, or complete strangers.
With more than 2 billion people on the platform, Facebook is the largest social network, so it makes sense to use it as a people finder or search tool.
You can look for people by their usernames, real names, school, university, business, or location.
Unlike Whitepages, which relies on public data records, Facebook aggregates the person’s information directly from their profile, and now that it’s connected to WhatsApp, you may get even more information.
While Facebook reveals personal details and has unique filtering options, you can’t rely on the information as many Facebook users set their profiles to private and you may get too many results to narrow down quickly.
Wrapping Up
People search tools and sites offer a quick grab of the information you can easily access about a person online. However, there’s no magic bullet for such tools, meaning you won’t get everything you’re looking for from one simple search query.
Any of these Whitepages alternatives can get you the information you’re looking for, but remember, if the information is truly in the public domain, you too can find it without having to pay to do it. Be patient, use all the tools you can get, and only pay after you’ve exhausted all your resources.
Tom loves to write on technology, e-commerce & internet marketing.
Tom has been a full-time internet marketer for two decades now, earning millions of dollars while living life on his own terms. Along the way, he’s also coached thousands of other people to success.