True People Search alternatives: TruePeopleSearch, FastPeopleSearch, Spokeo, BeenVerified and IDCrawl compared, plus search by email tested

True People Search, or TruePeopleSearch, is a free people search for the United States. A search by name, phone number, street address or email address returns address histories, phone numbers, relatives and associates from public records, and ads pay for the site. FastPeopleSearch, SearchPeopleFree, ThatsThem and AnyWho work much the same way, while Spokeo and BeenVerified sell fuller reports. None of them is built to show where an email address is used, so we ran our own benchmark of people search by email on eight addresses. On the four public test addresses CheckMate.bio found 565 accounts registered to the address, MailAccess 246, paid Epieos 234, BeenVerified 5 and Spokeo 4.

We build CheckMate.bio, so read our numbers with that in mind.

True People Search alternatives at a glance

How True People Search works

TruePeopleSearch needs no sign-up and has five search tabs: name, phone, address, email and neighbors, all drawing on public records. Its email tab finds out who owns a US email address and returns that person's record; it does not list the websites where the address has an account.

Why True People Search is not working

If the site won't load, or keeps asking you to prove you're human, look at where your connection comes from: another country, a VPN, an office or a cloud network. Scrape.do, which scrapes people-search sites for a living, writes that the whole site is geofenced to the US and that Cloudflare in front of it flags ordinary VPNs and datacenter proxies.

FastPeopleSearch

FastPeopleSearch is free and searches by name, phone number or street address. Unlike TruePeopleSearch, it has no email field. The money comes from Ezoic ads and from partners.

How to remove yourself from people search sites

Removal works one site at a time. Taking your record off one site leaves the others, and the sources they copy from, untouched.

Sites like TruePeopleSearch

Apart from FastPeopleSearch, these sites come up at least twice across four 2026 roundups of TruePeopleSearch alternatives and Semrush's list of its traffic competitors:

• Whitepages: free names, current addresses and some landline numbers, with more in Whitepages Premium.
• ThatsThem: free search by name, address, phone or email.
• SearchPeopleFree: free US search by name, phone, address or email.
• USPhoneBook: free reverse lookup of US phone numbers.
• ZabaSearch: name and phone search marked "Free*", powered by Intelius.
• AnyWho: free search by name, phone, email or address.

Spokeo and BeenVerified are on the lists too; they charge, and get their own sections below.

Spokeo

Spokeo searches by name, email or username, phone and address. Basic results are free: city and state, age, relatives and locations. The offer its checkout has shown is a $0.95 report with a 7-day trial membership that then bills $29.95 a month unless you cancel. Our address-by-address comparison is in Spokeo alternative: CheckMate.bio vs Spokeo.

BeenVerified

BeenVerified searches by name, phone, email, address and username, and a name search returns addresses, phone numbers, relatives and court records. It sells memberships only. The full comparison is in BeenVerified alternative: CheckMate.bio vs BeenVerified.

IDCrawl

IDCrawl is free and needs no sign-up. It searches by name, username, phone and email, and collects social profiles, contact details and public records. More in IDCrawl alternative: CheckMate.bio vs IDCrawl.

People search by email benchmark: how we tested

People search sites answer "who is this person?" from US records. With only someone's email address, from a dating app or a new partner, the question we hear all the time is where that address has accounts, and that is what this test measured. CheckMate.bio, Spokeo, BeenVerified, IDCrawl, MailAccess and Epieos each got the same eight addresses: four well-known public test addresses (test@gmail.com, johndoe@gmail.com, test@example.com and jeevacation@gmail.com) and four real inboxes we have permission to check, shown as Personal inbox A and B and Work address A and B.

A find counts when the tool reports an account for the address itself on a site; one that belongs to someone else is marked wrong and not counted. CheckMate.bio's numbers come from its full report. MailAccess ran as its free command-line version, Epieos on its free and paid plans.

Completeness: how many accounts each tool found

For MailAccess we left out five sites it reports for almost any address, made-up ones included: Canva, Patreon, Duolingo, Google and Vivino (see Errors).

Counting the username matches we checked on our own inboxes, CheckMate.bio found more accounts than the other five tools on all eight addresses. By email alone, the MailAccess website found the most on Personal inbox B in earlier runs: 17 accounts we confirmed, plus 17 we marked wrong. With its checked username matches, CheckMate.bio found 35 there, twice as many.

Across the eight addresses, 390 of CheckMate.bio's finds by email came from no other tool in this test, more than the other five tools found on their own put together (219). Still, no tool found everything: paid Epieos found 119 accounts that no other tool did, and MailAccess 82.

Errors: false matches and finds that belong to someone else

Made-up address test

A made-up address shows whether a tool reports accounts that cannot exist. Ours was a Gmail address that nobody uses, so every account reported for it is a false match.

CheckMate.bio's full report returned nothing, and its username search on the part before the @ found nothing either.

Wrong finds on real addresses

By error rate, CheckMate.bio's finds by email did best: 4 wrong out of 621. The people search sites made a different kind of mistake, returning other people's profiles, and for one inbox Spokeo returned a report on a different person. IDCrawl matches by username, so it shows anyone who uses the same name.

Price: what each search costs

The free CheckMate.bio search shows how many accounts it found in each category and names three; the full report lists them all with their profile details.

Spokeo and BeenVerified sell reports about a person, with addresses, phone numbers and court records, and the per-account figure prices only the part we tested.

Speed

CheckMate.bio's full report checks 2,500+ sites, about 300 by the email address and the rest by the username before the @, then follows the usernames, emails and phones it finds. That takes longer on busy addresses. Its free search usually finishes in about a minute.

Setup: MailAccess and Maigret

Everything above runs in a browser. MailAccess, which is MIT-licensed, can also run on your own computer with Python 3.10 or newer, and a search is then one command.

Maigret often comes up next to these tools. It has three caveats:

1. It searches usernames only, so the profiles it finds belong to whoever registered the name.
2. It reports many false matches, as it did for our made-up username.
3. You install and run it yourself, on Python 3.10 or newer.

Other lookup services on one inbox

We also ran Personal inbox A through other paid email and username lookup services. CheckMate.bio found more than any of them: 23 accounts by email, none wrong, and 12 through username matches we checked, with 2 more wrong. One of them, cheaterscanner.com, took 20 to 30 minutes to answer; we wrote that test up in Is CheaterScanner legit?.

Benchmark conclusions

In this benchmark CheckMate.bio found more accounts than MailAccess, Epieos, BeenVerified, Spokeo and IDCrawl: 565 by email on the four public test addresses, against 246 for MailAccess, 234 for paid Epieos, 5 for BeenVerified and 4 for Spokeo. Its finds by email were also wrong least often, under 1% against 1.1% to 78%, and it reported no accounts for the made-up address, unlike MailAccess and Maigret. Per account found it cost less than paid Epieos, Spokeo and BeenVerified: $0.0035 to $0.007, with no account or subscription. Its full report took 1 min 48 s on the median address, faster than MailAccess, and it runs in a browser with nothing to install, while the free MailAccess and Maigret need Python 3.10 or newer on your own computer.

MailAccess run on your own computer and IDCrawl cost nothing. By speed, IDCrawl (about 10 seconds per username search), Epieos (3 to 36 seconds) and Spokeo (20 to 25 seconds) were the fastest. IDCrawl listed no profiles for the made-up username.

Which people finder to use

• To look up someone in the US by name, phone or address, start with the free TruePeopleSearch, FastPeopleSearch or SearchPeopleFree.
• For a full US background report, Spokeo and BeenVerified sell memberships; check what the trial turns into first, and see what a background check covers.
• To see where an email address is registered, CheckMate.bio found the most in our test and charges per report.
• To search phone numbers as well as email addresses, Epieos takes both.
• For a free tool, MailAccess run on your own computer found the most in our test.
• If you know a username, Maigret checks hundreds of sites by default, with the caveats above.
• For phone numbers and photos, our reverse lookup guide matches each kind of search to a tool.

For an address that matters, run two tools: paid Epieos and MailAccess each turned up accounts the others missed.

Questions people ask

Is True People Search free?

Yes. TruePeopleSearch has no accounts and no paid tier on its own site, and ads pay for it; its footer links to paid APIs that partner sites sell. FastPeopleSearch is free too, but its "View Full Background Report" button sends you to partner sites.

How does TruePeopleSearch work?

It searches US public records by name, phone number, street address, email address or neighbors. A result can show address history, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, associates and property information. It covers adults living in the US and has no way to correct a wrong record.

Why is TruePeopleSearch not working?

Usually it is where you connect from. Companies that scrape and test the site report that it blocks visitors outside the US and that Cloudflare flags VPNs and datacenter connections, which shows up as a blank page or endless CAPTCHAs. A scraping company describes FastPeopleSearch the same way.

Can you search people by email on TruePeopleSearch?

Yes, for US addresses: its email search looks for the person who owns the address in public records. It does not show which websites the address has accounts on; for that, an email lookup such as CheckMate.bio checks the address against 2,500+ sites.

What sites are like TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch?

The sites named most often as alternatives are Whitepages, ThatsThem, SearchPeopleFree, USPhoneBook, ZabaSearch and AnyWho, all free to search, plus Spokeo and BeenVerified, which charge for full reports. IDCrawl is another free option; its email search is sponsored by Spokeo.

What is the best people search by email?

In our benchmark of eight addresses, CheckMate.bio found the most accounts registered to an address: 565 on four public test addresses, against 246 for MailAccess, 234 for the paid Epieos plan, 5 for BeenVerified and 4 for Spokeo. It charges $0.99 per full report, with no subscription.

Is there a free people search by email?

Yes. TruePeopleSearch, ThatsThem, SearchPeopleFree and AnyWho search by email for free and return the owner's public record, for people in the US. CheckMate.bio's free search, 3 a week, shows how many accounts an address has in each category and names three of them, and MailAccess is free if you run it yourself.

What the results actually mean

CheckMate.bio groups findings into categories ('Social Media', 'Gaming', 'Dating', 'Finance', 'Business' and more) and attaches a confidence score to every match. A score of 80% or higher means the email is almost certainly linked to that service. A score between 50% and 80% is a likely match. Anything below 50% lands in the 'Possible matches' section and should be treated as a weak signal, not a verdict.

• Categories show the kind of accounts that exist: the shape of someone's online footprint.
• Per-service fields (usernames, display names, bio text, last active dates) help you confirm whether the match is really the person you care about.
• Confidence scores help you separate solid matches from noise. Treat low-confidence hits as leads to investigate, not as proof.

A note on ethics

CheckMate.bio indexes public and breach-derived data. It does not grant access to private messages or full passwords (passwords from breach records are always masked), or to anything you wouldn't be able to find with enough patience and the right search queries. Use it for the same reasons you'd Google someone: safety, due diligence, re-connecting with people, or simply knowing what a public profile says about you. Be honest about your reasons, and respect the answer you get.