Both Eharmony and Christian Mingle are some of the oldest dating sites in existence, being founded in 2000 and 2001, respectively.

These older dating sites work differently than newer competitors that appeared in the mobile space such as Badoo or Tinder.

For instance, they are much more relationship focused than newer dating apps and generally match people based on a compatibility score obtained through personality tests when signing up.

Both apps tend to have fewer users because they are much more focused on longer relationships, and require a bit more effort and involvement on the user’s side when creating their profile.

Another reason why both eHarmony and Christian Mingle are more serious is how they introduce you to new matches and people.

When you join, you will have a relatively large pool of people to match with.  After this however, users are presented with new matches gradually.

This encourages users to be more thoughtful and involved in how people interact with each other, since matches with high compatibility scores are rare and hard to find, making them more precious.

Newer dating apps present you with potential matches like a flood, and you have to make sense of it by swiping left or right on people. There is never a shortage of people, and the apps often feel like a people catalogue.

That being said, how do eHarmony and Christian Mingle compare to one another?

eHarmony vs. Christian Mingle: Overview

eHarmony vs. Christian Mingle: Account setup

Personality tests

eHarmony creates a complex personality profile and score of yours. When joining eHarmony, you have to go through a fairly lengthy personality test that can take 20-30 minutes.

It asks basically everything about who you are as a person, like how you react during an argument, or even what kind of geometric shapes you prefer.

This personality test is divided into 5 sections, and creates a complex profile of who you are as a person.

eHarmony personality score:

Christian Mingle builds a much simpler personality profile. Most of the questions are based on what church you are part in, weekly attendance, personal habits such as smoking or drinking, and also interests.

After completing your sign-up process, Christian Mingle will manually review and approve your profile and photos before your account becomes “live”. The approval process is quite fast shouldn’t last more than a few hours.

Overall: eHarmony has a much longer signup process, however you get a complete personality assessment that matches you with more compatible partners. Christian Mingle is much simpler to sign up, but compatibility results might not be as accurate.

eHarmony vs Christian Mingle: How many users

Both eHarmony and Christian Mingle are more “niche” dating sites, but eHarmony is designed for a much wider audience and has invested a lot in promoting itself as a dating platform.

As a result, eHarmony has a userbase that is more than twice as big as Christian Mingles (29 millions vs. 12 million).

You will notice this big difference in user count while on the apps. In certain locations Christian Mingle really can feel rather empty, with users few and far between.

That being said, both eHarmony and Christian Mingle are a slow burn when compared to the “fast dating” experience of Tinder or the like. It can take weeks or months to find the right person to build something with.

eHarmony vs Christian Mingle: Finding matches & match quality

eHarmony will immediately show you a list of nearby compatible people, right after you have joined.

The compatibility score you have with each user is shown in the top left corner.

Clicking on a person’s image will take you to their profiles. These profiles can be very information rich, depending on how much the person completed it.

When visiting a person’s profile, you can go to the “Compatibility score” section where it shows you an in-depth comparison of you and the other person’s personalities, based on 4 major aspects: personality, behavior, habits and communication.

After exhausting the initial dating pool, eHarmony’s algorithm will periodically provide you with new potential matches based on your compatibility score.

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Christian Mingle also shows you a larger list of people after sign-up. However, there are far fewer users in this initial phase than on eHarmony.

If on eHarmony you could find a few hundred people over the course of a week or so, on Christian Mingle you would struggle to have more than a hundred.

The actual profiles are also much less detailed than on eHarmony, and contain comparatively little information.

Christian Mingle match score is not detailed. It’s basically just a raw number that you have to take as it is, without any further explanations. eHarmony does a much better job at explaining the compatibility score since it’s broken down based on communication styles, habits, lifestyle etc.

Just like with eHarmony, Christian Mingle will periodically introduce you to new potential matches over time. However, it’s a very slow trickle. Sometimes it introduces only 2-3 new people per week.

Overall: eHarmony offers a much bigger and diverse dating pool compared to Christian Mingle. User profiles on eHarmony have a lot more information than on Christian Mingle. eHarmony’s compatibility score is very in-depth and detailed, helping you better understand the other person.

eHarmony vs. Christian Mingle: Messaging & viewing profiles

Both eHarmony and Christian Mingle require a paid subscription to send direct messages to other users. In both cases however, you can reply to direct messages from other users.

In eHarmony’s case, profile photos are blurred for free users. This means you cannot see a person’s photos in full detail without a paid subscription.

eHarmony lets free users communicate through a “Guided Conversation” features. This means you can send a person you like a Smile or an Icebreaker.

If the other person replies back to your smiles and icebreakers, you will eventually transition to direct messaging. However, you still won’t be able to view their unblurred profile photos.

According to eHarmony, this “Guided Communication” has a higher success rate in creating conversations and leading to dates. The slow burn approach prevents users from sending the “wrong” first message, or risk having the conversation burn up too quickly.

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Christian Mingle free users cannot send direct messages, however they can reply to a direct message from a paid user.

There is however a feature that allows 2 free users to chat with one another. That one is called LookBook, and works similar to Tinder if you “like” or “dislike” a person. However, unlike Tinder, users on CM will be notified if you liked them.

This increases your chance of matching with someone since they will analyze your profile much more in-depth.

Important Note: Photos on Christian Mingle are not blurred to free users, we just blurred the photos before posting this comparison to protect user privacy.

eHarmony vs Christian Mingle: What type of people are there? Hookups, Relationships, etc?

Both eHarmony and Christian Mingle are very relationship focused.

Part of the reason is that both apps require users to be paying subscribers to truly use the apps to their full extent.

With free apps like Tinder or Badoo, users can create accounts “for fun”. On those apps, there is 0 cost to ignore messages, ghost conversations, flake out on dates or lie if they want hookups instead of a relationship.

Because eHarmony and Christian Mingle have a more “pay-to-play” approach, it discourages unserious users and mostly keeps the ones who have “skin in the game” as it were.

eHarmony in particular is great at encouraging meaningful interaction, since free users can’t even see profile photos and have to go through a lengthy “Guided Conversation” channel to establish contact.

This extra effort and time filters out the flaky people and leaves only the serious men and women who are willing to invest to get a more meaningful interaction.

The same logic applies to paid users, since they’re basically putting their money where their mouth is by investing themselves in the platform financially.

Christian Mingle is also oriented towards more serious relationships. However, its LookBook feature will sometimes feel like it casualizes the experience and makes it too similar to apps like Tinder or Badoo.

In terms of only Christian users, Christian Mingle generally outnumbers eHarmony in that regard.

eHarmony is a generalist site with users of all faiths, however you can filter your matches based on desired religion.

eHarmony vs Christian Mingle: User Interface

Both eHarmony and Christian Mingle have clean and simple user interface.

Both dating services have read receipts and show time since the person has last logged in. Both of them have apps for all major platforms such as Android, iOS and browser apps.

eHarmony however has a few more interesting features such as video calling, and extensive filters based on interests, ethnicity, religion, geographic location, how often a person should smoke or drink etc.

eHarmony vs. Christian Mingle: Price

eHarmony has higher prices than Christian Mingle. With eHarmony you are locked into a minimum 6 months subscription.

As mentioned previously, both eHarmony and Christian Mingle generally work on a “pay-to-play” model, so purchasing a subscription at some point is almost necessary to get the most out of them.

Overall, eHarmony is considerably more expensive than Christian Mingle.

But it’s not just the price, with eHarmony you have to either pay upfront the entire sum for the shortest 6-month subscription, or choose the multiple installments payment option and cancel after 1 installment payment.

That being said, eHarmony does run frequent -50% discounts on its plans.

Overall, signing up to eHarmony is more inflexible compared to Christian Mingle, where you can pay just for 1 month and see how it goes from there.

eHarmony vs Christian Mingle: Conclusion

Overall, eHarmony is the better choice for online dating, including for Christians, since it has a much bigger userbase, ability to filter matches based on religion, and a very thorough matchmaking algorithm based on a complex personality test.

Fortunately, both apps have free versions so you can always create an account and test them out for free.

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