Find Free Parking

Free: Detailed, but London only
www.Park-up.com

The longest-running parking site here, Park-up aims to list comprehensive parking options for any area within or bordering the congestion charge zone (see map). It's website is free to search; the site's paid for by forthcoming mobile apps, including one for iPhone.

Where it works, the website search does a sterling job, listing and clearly demarcating car parks, on-street pay & display spaces, motorbike spots and places where you can pay by phone. Perhaps most useful is the way it lists the relevant council's parking restrictions, giving fine costs, and even indicates car crime levels in the area.

If you're travelling into a busy area of the city this is sure to get you the best price, just be prepared and use it before you travel.

Cost: Free
Coverage: London - in and around congestion zone only.
Data source: Professionally researched and kept updated.

Free: Widest coverage
www.freeparkingspace.co.uk

Basic site freeparkingspace (apparently in beta testing) is using people-power to build a database of free and supercheap parking nationwide. As such, coverage is quite patchy, but decent results can be found for bigger towns and cities.

Handily it'll let you search by attractions as well as postcodes, so it's worth a quick check before you drive to a stadium or theme park. In some instances where there's no free parking available it'll tell you the cheapest place to park in the area.

It's completely free to use with no need to login, and there's a form for reporting spots you've found yourself. Yet while this makes things easy, it also causes problems; there's no verification of the information uploaded, and besides, would you really be happy to tell joe public about your secret parking slot? Still, one to watch in future.

Cost: Free
Coverage: Nationwide, patchy
Data source: Public, unchecked

Free: Basic info, London only
www.findfreeparking.co.uk

With it's promising-looking interactive Google Map and iPhone application, findfreeparking looks like it could be very useful, but in terms of what's listed it falls a long way behind Park-up above. Only a few large tracts of London are covered, and price details are vague throughout, thus this is mostly here as a don't!

Cost: Free
Coverage: London only, very basic
Data source: Unknown.

Paid: text for near-tube parking
Free to park SMS service, £1.50/msg.

While we're not fans of expensive SMS services here at MoneySaving towers, this one's worth a mention if only because it's quite clever. It aims to find you free parking spaces near tube stations, so you can stay out of the congestion zone but easily get where you want to. You just text the word parking, plus the name of the tube stop to 80039 (obviously it has to be outside the congestion zone for this to work)

The clever part is that if there's no free spaces listed at the stop you've asked for, it'll check other nearby stations on the same line and hopefully find some there. If no spaces are available within 3 stops either way you'll get a message to that effect, and you won't be charged (though you'll still pay the regular text cost). Full FAQ

The research has been collated professionally, and the system rotates parking recommendations so it doesn't tell everyone to go to the same spaces. It's expensive, but a worthwhile last ditch option.

Cost: £1.50 + normal text cost
Coverage: London only
Data source: Professionally researched and kept updated.

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