Looking for cheap flights? These are the sites and apps for booking budget travel

Exodus Travels is all about exploration and adventure. If you're interested in exploring countries, cultures, environments, cities, mountain ranges, deserts, coasts, and jungles, this is the site for you.

Exodus Travels works closely with overseas partners and trains group leaders in global destinations and actively seeks out specific projects that make a real practical difference on the ground. 

With Exodus's 45 years of experience of taking people on adventure holidays, you should feel like you're in safe hands. You can choose from 500 itineraries across more than 90 countries, with walking and cycling tours, family breaks, mixed-activity holidays, and seasonal getaways on offer.

You won't find information about individual flight deals on the site, because that's just not how it works. This is the site for adrenaline pumping tours.

Lastminute.com is an all-encompassing option, with packages combining flights with various airlines and hotels for all budgets.

As the name suggests, Lastminute.com is particularly good at flagging up last-minute weekend getaways, across pretty much any European city you can fly to. With thousands of flights and more than 500,000 hotels to consider, you are spoilt for choice. 

The interface is not the most attractive, and it can seem a little bit busy when you're searching for flights. The sheer amount of flights on offer and the flexible payment options make up for this, though.

As a welcome bonus, Lastminute.com is also Eurostar's official provider of holiday packages, not just to Eurostar cities like Paris, Lille, and Brussels, but also other French and Belgian cities that can be reached with connecting trains. So if you fancy a break just across the channel, Lastminute.com could be the best option to find a great deal.

Momondo has a lot going for it, though perhaps its most important feature is its incredible ability to turn up the cheapest fares 95% of the time. It pulls this off by searching nearly every airline, online travel agency (OTA), and travel booking site out there, ultimately pulling information from around 600 different sources. 

Not only is Momondo incredibly comprehensive, it’s also very straightforward to use. Skeptical users have the option of comparing its results to those found on other sites, though it’s unlikely that their results will wind up being better. Momondo itself breaks down results into useful categories like “cheapest,” “quickest,” “best”, and “custom”, allowing you to strike your ideal balance between flight time and misery. The cheapest days to fly are also visually represented in bar graphs at the top of the page, with exact prices viewable by just hovering over a given bar. You can’t book directly through Momondo (and generally, booking through a third-party site is not a good idea anyway), but you’ll be painlessly routed to the airline’s site to continue the payment process. 

The downside to Momondo is it can take its sweet time loading, though perhaps while it’s doing that you can think about all the money you’re sure to save by using it. 

TraveSupermarket is one of the most popular flight search engines in the UK right now. It is owned by the powerful Moneysupermarket group and focuses on flights, hotels, holidays, travel deals, and travel guides.

Travelsupermarket is well known for providing fast and cheap flight results. Results appear fairly quickly and flight details are easy to see. You can even select up to three different departure airports for your flights, and alternate flights are shown in your search results if a cheaper route was detected.

Filtering flights in not that easy, and the site could benefit from those handy sliders that other sites use. You are just presented with a long list of different flights for your route. It's not the biggest problem, but seems like something that could be easily resolved.

Travelsupermarket, like all the sites on this list, is not perfect, but if you want a service with which you can compare the rates for basically everything in one place, it's a strong option.

Cheapflights was one of the first sites to use the flight comparison model we are now so familar with, and currently offers a wide range of impressive features to help you find the best deal.

The Cheapflights search engine is powerful and fast and includes budget carriers as well as established airlines in its results. You can also get airport advice, travel guides, travel news, and travel tips from the site, alongside a nice inspiration generator that suggests travel ideas based on a number of preferences you can select.

The site itself is pretty simple to use and isn't too crowded like some of the others on this list. The deals are listed in a straightforward manner, so that even a real travel site newbie should be able to find the best offers.

There are reports that sometimes consumers have to visit multiple sites until they actually find a deal which they can book. This is frustrating, but is unfortunately part of the process nowadays. Support isn't great, but the wide range of services on Cheapflights keeps travellers coming back.