Comparison

Where the other places beat us.

For most things you want rid of, one of the sites below is the better answer, and it is not close. This page says which, and why, before it says anything in our own favour. If you want money for something, none of what follows should talk you out of selling it.

Site	Best at	What a private seller pays	How it differs from barterama
Vinted	Clothes, at enormous scale	No selling fee; the fee is charged to the buyer	Money changes hands; you find your own buyer
eBay	Almost anything, and finding a buyer for it	No selling fees for UK private sellers in most categories since 1 October 2024; the fee is charged to the buyer	Money changes hands; auctions and prices are the point
Gumtree	Local volume, bulky things, quick collection	Nothing to list in most categories	Classifieds you search, including a Swap Shop; no matching, and you negotiate everything yourself
Freecycle and Freegle	Giving something away to someone local, today	Nothing	Everything is free; nothing is swapped and nothing is sold
Swapz	Swapping, with far more listings than we have	Nothing to join	You browse and arrange your own swap; no value model and no proposed trades
barterama	Objects one specific person wants and a dealer does not	Nothing, and there is no payment step at all	Two-party swaps proposed to you; value shown as a band, never a price

Vinted

Vinted is the one to beat and we are not beating it. On its own published results it moved €10.8bn of goods in 2025, up 47% on the year before, and it charges sellers nothing — the fee sits on the buyer instead. If what you have is clothing, shoes or accessories in reasonable condition, list it on Vinted. The audience is already there, the postage is solved, and you get money, which is more flexible than any object we could match you with.

Where it does not help: it is fashion-shaped. A drill, a bike frame or a box of board games is not what that audience arrived for.

eBay

eBay reaches more buyers, for more kinds of thing, than anything else on this page, and it gives you the best chance of finding the one person in the country who wants your specific object. Since 1 October 2024, UK private sellers pay no selling fees in most categories (vehicles are the exception), with the fee charged to the buyer instead. It also has the thing we structurally cannot have: a payment sitting between two strangers, which can be held and reversed.

If a swap here goes wrong there is no money to claw back, because there was never any money. That is not a gap in our implementation, it is what “no money moves” costs. It is a real reason to use eBay for anything you would be genuinely upset to lose.

Gumtree

Gumtree carries local volume this site cannot come near, it costs nothing to list in most categories, and it has a Swap Shop section of its own — so people are already swapping there, without us. For anything heavy, awkward or worth collecting in person, it is usually the right first stop.

The difference is the shape of the product, not the size of it. Gumtree is a search: you type, you read, you message, you negotiate. Nothing there knows what you want, so nothing there can tell you that somebody four miles away has it and wants what you are holding. That one job is the only reason this site exists.

Freecycle and Freegle

If your actual goal is for something to be gone by Saturday, these are better than us and better than selling. Everything on them is given away, membership costs nothing, and someone local will usually take it off your doorstep. Freegle is the UK-run one; Freecycle is the older international network. They are not swap sites and do not pretend to be — you post an offer, or a wanted, and nothing comes back the other way.

Use them when you do not want anything in return. Use a swap site when you do.

Swapz

Swapz is a long-standing UK swap site, running since 2004, free to join, and it has far more listings than we do. If your test is “where will I find the most people currently willing to swap something”, it is a fairer answer today than this site is.

It works the way classifieds work: you browse, you find something, you message the owner and you agree the swap between you. Nothing places items on a common scale, nothing tells you whether a swap is lopsided, and nothing proposes a trade you had not thought of. Whether that is a missing feature or a welcome absence depends entirely on whether you trust a value model, which is a fair thing not to.

The one thing this is better at

There is a kind of object that priced marketplaces handle badly: the one that is worth real money to exactly one person in the country, and small change to a dealer. An expansion for a game nobody prints any more. A lens for a body that was discontinued. The right edition of the right book. Listed for sale it either sits for months, or it goes at the dealer's number, which does not repay the trip to the post office.

Nothing here carries a price at all, and no amount is ever shown against an item — the moment things are priced, this stops being a swap and starts being a shop.

What a matcher can do that a search cannot is find the one person, without either of you having to go looking on the right day. Your want keeps working after you have stopped thinking about it, and a trade is only put in front of you when it works in both directions. For that one shape of object, an even swap beats a bad price.

What we do not do

No escrow, and nothing to reverse. There is no money in the system to hold or return. What exists is a record of what was agreed, a trust tier that reflects whether people turn up, and reviews that only exist off the back of a completed swap.

Nothing checks that the photo matches the title. There is no image verification at listing. A listing titled as an expensive camera and photographed as something else is not caught automatically.

The band can be wrong. It is an automated estimate, it is advisory, and where our evidence is thin the site shows a range of bands instead of one, because the width of that range is the honest part. An item we can say nothing about gets no band and is left out of matching rather than guessed at.

It is small, and it is United Kingdom only. Every site above has more listings than this one. A very specific want may take a long time to match, which is why the site forecasts that wait while you are writing the want.