Our bookmaker reviews are detailed, comprehensive, and expertly conducted, ensuring that we provide valuable insight and guidance to help you select the best and most trusted online betting sites to sign up for.
We follow strict criteria to ensure that our reviews are objective, thorough and fair, and we spend a lot of time experiencing the sites for ourselves before making recommendations. Here, we explain how our reviews of betting sites work and why you can trust us to provide you with valuable insight into leading sportsbooks to sign up for right now.
We take every betting site review that we conduct seriously. Our writers are online betting experts with a lot of experience in the industry. In other words, we know exactly what to look for in an elite sportsbook. To ensure that we only ever provide objective, unbiased bookmaker reviews that you can trust, here is the process that we follow before making our recommendations:
There are hundreds of online betting sites out there, many licensed, others not. As such, it’s difficult to know where to begin when looking into where to sign up. We do a lot of this hard work for you. We begin by researching the online sportsbook industry, to identify online betting sites that provide exceptional sportsbook features, offers, and odds. This process enables us to draw up a shortlist of betting sites to review.
One of the first things that we do when we identify a betting site to be reviewed is create an account. This enables us to fully test the site and access the broad range of features and services offered. Some betting sites reviewed online clearly don’t take this step and offer little useful information to readers. You can rest assured that all of our writers have created accounts at the bookmakers that we recommend and write from firsthand experience.
We then get straight into our bookmaker reviews. We spend lots of time navigating the site, searching for key features and exploring the site’s functionality on mobile devices and PCs. We consider how well the site is laid out and how easy it is to find the markets and promotions that we’re looking for. We also read through the terms and conditions published on the site to make sure that the product stands up to our later tests.
In our experience, we have found that contacting customer support via live chat, email, or phone is the best way to answer questions that we have about the site in question. This has been a particularly helpful tactic for our research into betting site payment terms when some of the ts and cs are hidden or not easy to find. Naturally, this also enables us to give real-time feedback on how good the betting site’s customer support offering is.
It would be impossible to complete a betting site review without actually placing a bet. To do this, we check which welcome offers we can access and make a real money deposit. We then place a bet and check the quality of odds offered against some of the site’s competitors. As part of this experience, we also get to test out the welcome offer and other ongoing promotions to see if they are issued in line with the site’s terms and conditions. Only when we have completed these steps do we feel confident to write about the quality of a betting site, and we use the criteria introduced below to make our recommendations.
Our experts consider nine key areas of a betting site when conducting bookmaker reviews to ensure that we can provide objective, fair, and trustworthy recommendations to our readers. Below, we explain why each of these criteria is important:
| 🤑 Welcome Bonus | One of the most important aspects of any betting site is the quality of the welcome bonus. This might be a deposit match, free bet, or something else entirely, but it needs to offer good value. We read through the terms and conditions and test the bonus to make sure it lives up to the hype. |
| 🖊️ Registration Process | After checking out the bonus, we complete the sign-up process and check how easy it is to create an account. We look at things like whether you can sign up with a social media or Google account and if you need to submit documents to verify your identity. The quicker it is to sign up, the better our rating. |
| ✅ Products & Features | Online sportsbooks have come on leaps and bounds in recent years. To help us identify the very best online betting sites, we look for a raft of impressive features, such as cash out, in-play betting, live streaming, bet builders, and audio commentaries, to find only the very best sites. If a bookmaker is light on features, we look elsewhere. |
| 📱 App/Mobile Compatibility | In this day and age, sportsbooks need to be perfectly optimised for use on mobile devices. After all, lots of sports fans bet when they’re at live matches, so this is a non-negotiable for us. If a sportsbook offers a native app, we download and test it on iOS and Android. If not, we ensure that the site offers full functionality via a mobile browser. |
| 💳 Payment Processing | It wasn’t so long ago that the only way to add funds to an online betting site was via a debit card. Today, you can transact with 10+ payment methods for betting online at most sites, including debit cards, e-wallets, prepaid cards, and even crypto. We take a close look at the terms attached to payment processing and check that there are no fees or delays attached to withdrawals. |
| 💸 VIP & Loyalty Rewards | In addition to the welcome bonus, we check that the sportsbook provides ongoing promotions and bonuses to existing customers. These are often rich and varied, and include things like cashback promos and special offers tied to high-profile events. We also consider whether there’s a VIP program and how to climb up the ladder if you’re a high roller. |
| 🖥️ Customer Service | The quality of a site’s customer service plays a big part in our bookmaker reviews. We always reach out to the customer support team directly to see how well they deal with various issues, and we like to see multiple forms of communication offered – ideally phone, email, social media, and live chat. If a sportsbook doesn’t take customer support seriously, it’s a big red flag. |
| 🔒 Licence & Security | Another crucial aspect of any betting site review is where the sportsbook is licensed. Though there are lots of gambling regulatory bodies, we like to see sites that are regulated by tier one bodies like the UK Gambling Commission and the Malta Gaming Authority. This ensures accountability and protects your interests when you gamble online. |
| 💻 Usability, Look & Feel | Finally, we give an overview of how easy a site is to navigate, how it looks and how it feels. The last thing you want is to spend time on a betting site that is disjointed and difficult to find your way around, so we only recommend platforms that are well-designed and expertly put together. |
| 🥇Best All Rounder | bet365 |
| 📺Best for Live Streaming | Unibet |
| 🤑Best for Promotions | Betway |
Three of the best betting sites in the business are bet365, Unibet, and Betway, which you can learn more about in our dedicated review of each site. These platforms score highly across all of our criteria and provide excellent online betting options for sports fans in multiple jurisdictions. Overall, they’re three of the best and an excellent starting point for your online betting journey.
Before diving into some of our reviews, you might be wondering why you can trust us. Well, here’s what you can expect from every review that we write:
You can trust us to deliver expert bookmaker reviews that dive deep into the key aspects and features of online sportsbooks. We spend lots of time on betting sites and know what to look for in a premium betting platform so that making your final decision is as hassle-free as possible.
We highly rate bet365, Unibet, and Betway as three of the best betting sites currently available, and you can read more about each site in the dedicated reviews we have published for each, taking into account the factors we consider important in any sportsbooks. We hope that you find value in our detailed online bookmaker reviews and feel free to share them with friends. You can then get started at your chosen sportsbook safe in the knowledge that you’re betting at a licenced and trusted platform.
Unibet, Betway, and bet365 are among the best online sports betting sites. They’re licensed, trusted, and secure, and they all offer good value promotions, great odds, and a wide selection of sporting markets for you to bet on.
Provided that the betting site is licensed and regulated by a relevant gambling authority, you can be sure that it is safe to bet at. We only ever recommend licenced and regulated sites in our comprehensive bookmaker reviews.
We recommend bet365 as the most trusted betting site as it has strong licensing credentials in multiple jurisdictions, particularly in the United Kingdom, where it is licensed by the UK Gambling Commission. Sites with UKGC licences are held to the strictest standards and are usually among the safest betting platforms available.
The easiest way to check if a betting site is legit is to look for its licence. You can usually find this information within the footer of the site itself. Failing that, go directly to the regulator and check their registry to see if the site in question is licenced in your country before creating an account.
When we rank the best betting sites, we take into account several aspects of the betting experience, which may range from offers, mobility and user experience to payment options and customer service, amongst others. We highlight how each sportsbook meets user needs, and also identify key areas of improvement.
Players must be 21 years of age or older or reach the minimum age for gambling in their respective state and located in jurisdictions where online gambling is legal. Please play responsibly. Bet with your head, not over it. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, and wants help, call or visit: (a) the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey at 1-800-Gambler or www.800gambler.org; or (b) Gamblers Anonymous at 855-2-CALL-GA or www.gamblersanonymous.org.
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