REVIEW | PublicRecords
REVIEW | PublicRecords🔒 Confidential•★★★★★ Rated 4.8/5•32 Billion+ Records
Our #2 pick for top public records sites in 2026.
Our top-ranked sites are reviewed on the basis of our own views, knowledge, and expert opinions. We are able to provide this free resource thanks to referral fees we receive from companies reviewed here. This may influence scores and ordering but does not influence review content. The owner of this site is an employee of The Control Group Media Company, LLC, which provides management services to Instant Checkmate, TruthFinder, and Intelius.
Founded in March 2015, TruthFinder is a relative newcomer to the online background check industry. Don't mistake youth for a sign of low quality though — the service takes the typical background check experience and levels it up with a clean interface, solid customer support, and comprehensive records.
To test TruthFinder, I tried to locate an old friend from high school. Starting out, I wasn't able to find much about him online. I tracked down his Facebook account, but it hadn't been updated in several years. Here's a handy tip to keep in mind: write down everything you know before you begin — full name, gender, birthdate, and last known location. The more you have, the easier it is to narrow down results, especially for common names.
When I first landed on the site I was greeted with a straightforward interface asking me to input the name and location of the person I was trying to locate. Simple enough. I wasn't sure what city he was currently living in so I left that field blank since it's optional.
After entering the name and state, my search was under way. The search takes a couple of minutes, but based on the amount of data TruthFinder is pulling together, that's understandable. When it finished, it turned up a few dozen results. Once on the results page, you can narrow down with additional info, which finally brought me to the right report.
The report itself was rich in data — basic info like name, aliases, and birth date up top, plus deeper details like work history. When I double-checked it for accuracy, it was spot on.
The contact information was a mixed bag. It listed a phone number I know my friend hadn't used in a long time and was missing his current number, but it also listed a range of possible email addresses with "Valid Since" dates next to each one — a helpful indicator of how current they are.
The locations section was extremely comprehensive, stretching all the way back to his childhood home. I could see where he is living now and a few spots he'd lived in recent years. Clicking "View Location Report" on any address gives you deeper info including neighbors, demographics, and current residents.
This is where it gets interesting. I knew the person I searched was generally law-abiding, or so I thought. When I scrolled down to the criminal & traffic records section, I was genuinely surprised — my friend had been arrested in another state on drug charges. And not just any drug charges: a felony.
TruthFinder laid out all of the information in a clear format — the conviction, the plea, everything. I blacked out identifying info in my screenshots, but it's all there.
The social profiles section was also useful. It had the Facebook profile I already knew about, plus a Twitter account, a Foursquare account, LinkedIn, and even social networks and forums I hadn't heard of before.
If all you have is an email address, you can still potentially find someone via TruthFinder's email search. It's a useful tool when you're working with limited information.
Curious about who your neighbors are? The address lookup feature can give you a bunch of info about a particular address, including current and past residents.
For an additional one-time fee, you can download as many reports in PDF format as you want. The PDFs are well-designed and lay out the information in a way that's easy to read and share.
Background check reports aren't static — new information is added all of the time. TruthFinder lets you opt in to monitoring on any report so you get notified whenever new data is added, at no extra cost.
TruthFinder's pricing fluctuates, but a monthly membership typically runs around $27.78/month. A quarterly plan works out to around $23.02/month. For either plan, you get unlimited access to as many reports as you like.
TruthFinder offers customer support by email, chat, and phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The fact that it's available around the clock is comforting, even if you never need it.
TruthFinder does a great job combining a clean interface, comprehensive data, and useful optional features. The price is a fraction of what it would cost to hire a private investigator, and unlimited reports mean you never have to think twice about running a search.
The criminal & traffic records in particular stood out — TruthFinder surfaced a felony arrest that I genuinely didn't know about. For that reason alone, it earns its spot as our #2 pick.
Want the most comprehensive reports? Our #1 pick, Instant Checkmate, edges out TruthFinder on data depth and includes premium data and report monitoring in the base subscription.
Try Our #1 Pick Instead →