KF.SocialThe useful question is not which app has the most users. It is whether the app produces a meeting, or whether it produces a match and leaves the meeting to you. That is the line this page sorts on.
The two kinds of app
Matching apps show you people and let you message them. Bumble For Friends works this way. The upside is choice and no cost. The downside is well known to anyone who has tried it: a match is not a plan, and most chats quietly stop before anyone suggests a date.
Booked-event apps put a time, a place and a small group in front of you and let you take a seat. Timeleft, Strangrs, 222 and KF.Social work this way. You give up choosing who you meet. What you get back is that the meeting actually happens.
Meetup sits between the two: the events are real and scheduled, but you choose them and nobody is expecting you.
The apps
Bumble For Friends
The best known, and free to download from the UK App Store. You swipe, you match, you chat. Worth saying plainly: it is the right answer for a lot of readers, because it costs nothing and works wherever you are, which is more than we can say. Two honest caveats. It is a chat-first product, so the meeting is entirely on you. And the UK build has not shipped an update since September 2025, which is a long time for an app that is being actively developed elsewhere.
Meetup
Interest-first rather than people-first, and the closest thing to a genuine catalogue of things happening near you. You browse without an account and join groups free. Individual events are set by their organisers and some charge, so it is not uniformly free once you are actually going to things. Its strength is that you pick the room, which is also its weakness: nobody at a Meetup is expecting you specifically, so turning up is on you every time.
Timeleft
A weekly dinner with a small group of strangers, matched on age, personality and language. It runs in 48 countries and more than 160 cities, which is far more reach than anyone else here, London included. If you move around, or you do not live in a capital, it is the one on this list most likely to exist where you are.
Strangrs
A table of six in London, matched by algorithm, in areas like Shoreditch, Soho and Covent Garden. You can book a single dinner without any membership, and food and drink are paid at the restaurant. Its prices are quoted in euros rather than pounds, so what you are charged depends on your card. On price alone it undercuts us.
222
A curated night built from a personality questionnaire, and unusual in that a smaller dinner is followed by a larger second venue where several groups come together. It lists seventeen active markets and London is one of them, and it is free to download from the UK App Store. Its centre of gravity is American, so the London calendar is smaller than the New York or Los Angeles one.
KF.Social
A table of six in London, matched on age and shared interests, at a restaurant we choose and book. You pay a 15 pound matching fee for the seat, and your food and drink at the restaurant. The table needs at least four people to run; if it does not get there, we cancel it and the fee goes back to your card automatically. The morning after, the table becomes a private group that keeps working.
Where we are the wrong answer
We only run dinners in London. If you are in Manchester, Berlin or anywhere else, this list has better options for you than us, and Timeleft and Meetup are the obvious two. We also charge for the seat, where Bumble For Friends and joining Meetup cost nothing. If your problem is that you have nobody to do things with on a Saturday rather than one evening this week, a recurring interest group will serve you better than a dinner will.
How to choose
If you want it to cost nothing, start with Bumble For Friends or Meetup. If you want a meeting to actually happen this week and you are not in a capital city, Timeleft has the reach. If you are in London and want the cheapest matched dinner, Strangrs is cheaper than we are. If you are in London and want the evening handled end to end, with a group that keeps talking afterwards, that is what we built. See the tables running this week.