Insurance comparison websites

It pays to shop around, so we test the best car insurance price comparison sites

We put eight through their paces to name our favourite

PRODUCT GROUP TEST 17 | 8 | 2016

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EVERY driver needs insurance, making it a pricey but necessary part of car ownership. But when picking your policy, it’s important to balance appropriate cover and price.

While some big operators require you to go direct, many major insurers’ quotes can be compared via specialist websites online. These sites promise to save you hundreds by showing a host of options once you’ve entered your data.

Improvements to these services since our last test mean many now offer driving licence look-up, too, so insurers can check you’re an honest motorist and offer you a cheaper deal. We’ve put eight insurance comparison sites to the test to find out which is easiest to use and offers the most competitive quotes.

How we tested them

WE got quotes for a 40-year-old man from Oxford driving a Ford Focus 1.6-litre diesel to compare prices. It wasn’t all about the cheapest policy, though; we were looking for a site that generated a large number of reasonably priced quotes from known brands.

It was also important for sites to provide cover that we’d asked for in terms of excess and no-claims. Those that allowed us to fill in our details quickly and easily scored points, plus we rated the speed of search and how clear the information was about the insurance policies, including addons like windscreen protection.

Verdict

IN reality, there’s very little to choose between the big names here in terms of annual insurance premiums, but Compare The Market has the edge in our test it for its extremely easy-to-use interface. The others are still worth using to find the best deal for you, though. If you have time, it can be worth putting your details through them all.

1. Compare The Market 2. Gocompare 3. Moneysupermarket

uswitch Website: www.uswitch.com Rating: ★★★

A POPULAR choice for changing phone contracts or energy providers, uswitch is now better than ever for car insurance. The website has a pretty basic design, but the use of short pages helps keep a good pace when filling in your details. More explanation to the fields you’re completing would help, like the top performers have, but the auto-complete car registration tool is a welcome addition. Quotes were some of the cheapest on test, too, and the results page featured a nice filtering tool and the ability to switch to a telematics-based policy quickly.

Love Money Website: www.lovemoney.com/carinsurance Rating: ★★★

THE Love Money colour scheme isn’t the most attractive to look at and a series of drop-down boxes makes it quite hard to navigate. The site is a little slow to respond, but one bonus is the summary panel on the right-hand side that fills in as you go through the quote process. The results were good, though, with competitive prices.

Quotezone Website: www.quotezone.co.uk Rating: ★★★

QUOTEZONE might not be a big name, but it’s excellent on price, delivering the lowest quote of all eight sites. However, the caveat to this is that it’s not the best site to fill in your details. Questions are long-winded and need breaking down. Once you’ve got the results, there was a nice option to compare four policies for the finer details.

Q4 Insure Website: www.q4.co.uk Rating: ★★

WHAT lets Q4 Insure down is the tricky-to-navigate data entry process. The form is long-winded, but a progress bar along the top is a nice touch to show you how far you’ve got. Unfortunately, Q4 Insure also returned some of the highest prices on test and was slow to respond, even failing to find us a premium the first time.