If you live in the same city as your flower recipient, you may already have a reliable florist you know to order from. But if not, or if you’re shopping for someone who lives somewhere you aren’t familiar with, then an online flower delivery service is a great tool to easily find and send a bouquet you like without even picking up the phone. Still, many of the popular online flower services use local florists to fulfill orders: In theory, you can cut out the middleman (and maybe save a little money) by ordering your own flowers from the florist directly, using a quick Google search for what’s available in the area.

After combing the internet for flower delivery services, reading dozens of reviews, and polling Wirecutter staffers on the services they use, we identified 14 of the most popular online services. We were especially interested in the following criteria:

Beautiful flowers: Because beauty is a matter of taste, we looked for services that offered a large selection of interesting, stylish arrangements. We also tested some bouquets from brands that felt more traditional and classic. When the flowers arrived, we looked for appropriately sized, full blooms. We docked points from bouquets that had wilting flowers, crushed or damaged blooms, or too much filler.

Easy ordering process: We especially appreciated services with clean, modern websites that were easy to navigate. Some sites let us filter for price, occasion, or even color to make selecting the right bouquet easier; others were overwhelming, with flashing pop-ups and incomprehensible menu options.

Rapid arrival: Though you can plan flower deliveries for some occasions well in advance—Valentine’s Day, birthdays, and so forth—many people also need flowers they can send with little notice (for births, injuries and illness, or the rare but inevitable times you piss off loved ones and need a grand gesture stat). With that in mind, we prioritized services that deliver most days of the week and can fulfill same-day or next-day shipments.

Good packaging: We preferred flowers that arrived well packaged, without broken vases or crushed blooms. Some services included vases, whereas others, such as UrbanStems, sent the flowers in gift boxes. Either way, we gave bonus points if the packaging enhanced the flowers it contained.

Extras: Flowers make a great gesture on their own, but sometimes more is more: We paid attention to whether services also offered add-ons such as chocolates, candles, or balloons for an additional fee, and, moreover, whether those add-ons seemed tacky or sweet.

In our original 2020 testing, we narrowed the field to services we felt offered the best combination of our criteria: Benchmark Bouquets, The Bouqs Company, Farmgirl Flowers, FTD, 1-800-Flowers.com, Teleflora, and UrbanStems. We ordered a bouquet from each contender, assessing the website, delivery times, packaging, and style. We also noted how fresh the flowers were on arrival and watched how they aged over time. We added the included flower food to the vase and placed each bouquet in bright, indirect light. In addition, we assessed how true the arrangements were to their online photos. After determining our favorites, we then tested them further by ordering bouquets for staffers in Los Angeles, New York City, Minneapolis, and Rochester, New York, and we had them assess those bouquets using the same criteria.

In late 2022, we decided to take a second look at how these flower delivery services performed after the shipping climate changed during the pandemic. As such, staffers on both coasts—one in Los Angeles and one in Portland, Maine—retested a range of bouquets. We reordered from our then top pick, UrbanStems, our budget pick, Costco, and our also-great pick, Teleflora. We retested a few additional companies who had favorable but spotty performances in the past to see if they had upped their game.

Choosing the right delivery service was the biggest factor in receiving a fresh bouquet, but we also found that the quality of the individual arrangements we ordered tended to vary based on location and season. Although we tested our picks in multiple cities, the process of cutting, arranging, and transporting affects every bouquet differently. Your experience may be different from ours.

Every aspect of The Bouqs Company experience was a pleasure, but what cinched our recommendation was the fresh, eye-popping array of lush blooms that lasted longer than any other bouquet we received. The Sugar Rush bouquet we ordered included ten densely layered roses with nary a frayed petal, a handful of widespread orange gerbera daisies, and delicately ruffled carnations. Rather than relying on wispy or nondescript filler like baby’s breath, stock, or leatherleaf fern, The Bouqs Company arrangement was finished with long-lasting, textural stems like green hypericum berries, yellow craspedia baubles, and just a few glossy leaves.

There’s also the matter of aesthetics, which of course is subjective. We found many other sites, even good ones, opted for arrangements centered around widely available staples like daylilies, sunflowers, and alstroemeria. Of course, nothing is inherently wrong with any of those flowers. But all of the offerings from The Bouqs Company—with the exception of same-day options, which we’ll get to below—are edited with a careful, pleasing eye. Looking beyond the Sugar Rush bouquet, other best-selling arrangements feature tulips and antique carnations or spray roses and ranunculus. And even when more-ubiquitous flowers are used, they’re selected in rare colors or grouped in unexpected pairings, offering a considered and expensive-feeling appeal.

The Bouqs Company’s website is more modern, accurate, and customizable than any other service we tested. For starters, it offers a dropdown menu for delivery speed—no rush, next day, or same day—a remarkable and significant point of difference from any of our other top contenders. Even more notable, though, is that The Bouqs Company ships to all 50 states, and all of those delivery speeds were actually available in the varied locations we checked, which is rare in national flower delivery companies. Costco, for instance, partners with Instacart to highlight a same-day delivery option, but it wasn’t consistently available (or at all) for some addresses.

The Bouqs Company also had helpful and intuitive filtering at every step of the process, which allows shoppers to view options by price, flower, occasion, or color combinations at multiple stages. Vases aren’t included in the base price, but you can add one of three simple, tasteful options, including a Mason jar, for $10 to $15.

Most of the arrangements from The Bouqs Company are available in a range of three sizes; the smallest and most-affordable selections start around $50 before shipping fees are added. We ordered the Deluxe size of the Sugar Rush, a midsize arrangement that the website indicated was the most popular. The resulting 24-stem selection arrived in a single box, snugly split into two generous bouquets. Each individual bundle was so breathtakingly impressive, though, that we actually thought a mistake had been made in shipping and that we’d gotten two bouquets instead of one.

The incredible longevity of the flowers was notable. After a full seven days of enjoying them, we stopped tracking, removing a passed stem here and there to keep things fresh for even longer.

The bouquet we received looked almost exactly like the pictures on the website, if not even more vibrant and opulently sized in person. True, some of the shopper bouquets under the #bouqlove carousel on the Sugar Rush landing page are courtesy of clearly marked #bouqspartners, but a look at the un-curated hashtag on Instagram features more of the same, so we trust that most shoppers had similarly great deliveries. Arrangements are big, colorful, and long-lasting and loaded with lovely, unique blooms, not common grocery-store stems.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

While offering same-day delivery options is a plus, the descriptions for those bouquets were more vague: “blooms in pink, red, and hot pink” for instance, rather than a specific dossier of floral names. That’s by design and very common on competitors’ sites for most arrangements. Ultimately, though, we welcomed the transparency. The Bouqs Company’s same-day options are fulfilled and arranged by local florists, so they can’t vouch for the variety of available buds and blooms. And if you are looking for a nearly immediate but more predictable array, the next-day options feature The Bouqs Company’s standard arrangements and guaranteed composition.

Another fact to consider is that the initial prices you see on The Bouqs Company arrangements don’t represent the final total. Shipping runs anywhere from $15 to $25, which is significant but also fairly standard among services we tested. A few factors can mitigate that price: By creating a login, you can knock $15 off the delivery fee. Also, considering the luxurious size of our arrangement, the smaller 12-stem Original size for $54 would spark just as much joy.

The Costco floral offerings aren’t as stylish as others we tried, but they’re fresh, pretty, and since delivery is free, about 30% cheaper than most. This service came recommended to us by several Wirecutter staffers who’ve sent them to their own loved ones. The page that lists the available arrangements is about as stylish as the rest of Costco’s website (which is to say, not at all), but it’s easy enough to navigate: From the main Floral page you can click on categories such as Roses, Bouquets, Vase Arrangements, Occasions, and so forth. And from there you can filter for price, color, flower type, and delivery preference.

The bouquet and vase arrangements Costco offers aren’t as modern as those offered by Teleflora and The Bouqs Company, but they are pretty in a traditional way. And most of them cost far less than what’s offered at those other services. If you’re a Costco member, you can avoid the 5% nonmember surcharge, and shipping is included so the only extra fee before checkout is the tax.

Costco ships its flowers via different carriers, depending on location, and it does not offer weekend delivery Saturday through Monday. Opening the cardboard box revealed the glass vase and bouquet secured in plastic wrap and zip ties, plus instructions on trimming the stems, plant food, and watering—perhaps not the festive experience of unwrapping a present (à la our top pick), but still satisfying. When we ordered Costco flowers to both coasts in late 2022, two different orders were canceled with no explanation, although the quality of the blooms we ultimately received was up to standard. We didn’t notice any chatter on social media about similar experiences, so we suspect it was a one-off, but we’ll keep an eye on this issue.

We ordered the Get Well Wishes and the Sunset Bliss floral arrangements, each of which cost about $50 and included vases. The 5% nonmember surcharge and the tax added about $7 to the order. The Get Well Wishes bouquet itself was beautiful but looked nearly nothing like its photo on the site. Where that photo has orange roses, yellow lilies, and purple daisies, the bouquet we received had light pink roses, yellow daisies, small purple flowers, orange lilies, tiny yellow sprigs, and green leafy filler. The bouquet lasted about five days before wilting.

The vase that came with the Sunset Bliss arrangement was enormous and laughably out of scale, and you can’t swap it out for another size. Of course, that didn’t affect the quality of the flowers, and popping them into an existing vase solves the issue for pickier recipients. The red vase that came with the Get Well Wishes bouquet was decent-quality glass. The included “Get Well Soon” balloon was apple-size and sat atop a plastic stick that was shoved into the bouquet—it was silly-looking but cheery, and we appreciated the option to include it.

Teleflora uses local florists to fulfill flower orders, but unlike BloomNation (one of the other services we tested that works exclusively with local shops), it does not allow you to select the supplying florist when ordering, and the photos of the arrangements are supplied by Teleflora, not the individual florist. Still, thanks to that model, Teleflora is able to deliver arrangements the same day you order them, by hand—something not many companies can accomplish.

Teleflora’s site isn’t as streamlined or sophisticated as The Bouqs Company’s, but it was still easy to navigate: You can search by occasion, color, or flower type. Many of the arrangements are very pretty, though their names may make you laugh while ordering (some favorites of ours include: the Hey Gorgeous bouquet of 24 lavender roses and the My Little Chickadee arrangement, which comes in a yellow, chick-theme vase).

We ordered the standard-size Blush Rush bouquet for about $50 from Teleflora’s Just Because section and the standard-size Citrus Kissed bouquet for about $65, and both arrangements were just as beautiful as those pictured on the site. Still, Teleflora had upfront pricing that was somewhat misleading: A $65 bouquet ended up costing about $86 after adding taxes and fees. Every rose, lily, and carnation was blemish free and fully blooming, and the eucalyptus and lemon leaf fillers offered beautiful contrast and additional scent. In our first round of testing, they came hand-delivered from a representative of the local florist that had fulfilled the order, who made us sign a receipt. (Since the Brooklyn apartment we sent the bouquet to has been subject to a fair amount of package theft recently, we were appreciative of this face-to-face handoff.) The glass vase that the bouquet came in was pretty enough that we kept it for future flowers.

In the days leading up to Valentine’s Day 2021, one staffer had a one-off experience in which an order missed the delivery date with no notification from Teleflora. He did receive prompt customer service and a full refund, and the flowers showed up a day later. Ultimately, this isn’t a knock on Teleflora, but it’s something to keep in mind on any flower-focused holiday.

In 2022, the Citrus Kissed bouquet that our Portland, Maine–based staffer received came via the best and fanciest florist in town, and it looked downright expensive, swapping baby’s breath for drapey fronds and adding in pert tulips and chrysanthemums. It was a vote of confidence in favor of the network of trusted, upscale vendors Teleflora uses in less-familiar cities. This service also allows you to send flowers to a Canadian address, something we didn’t see often during our research. Teleflora offers the option of including a 180-character message, and it came typed on a small, cute card inserted on a plastic, fork-like spoke. Perhaps because they arrived by hand, arranged in their vase rather than packaged for shipping, the flowers looked vibrant for a full week. They kept their amazing smell, too. Since Teleflora uses local florists, your experience may vary depending on the shop that puts your bouquet together, but our experiences were nothing but positive. We’ll keep an eye on feedback in various cities as we continue to conduct additional tests.

A beautiful bouquet of flowers that starts to wither and wilt after only a few days of enjoyment is one of the most disappointing things. For tips on how to save yours from such a tragic fate, we consulted Nicole Cavender, director of The Huntington Botanical Gardens in Los Angeles.

Trim the stems: When you first receive the bouquet, trim all the stems at least 0.5 inch and repeat the trim every two or three days. Doing so “exposes fresh tissue that takes up the water much more efficiently,” said Cavender. Cutting the stems at a diagonal angle creates even more surface area for absorption.

Change the water: To avoid bacterial growth, Cavender said, you should change the bouquet’s water every two or three days—you can do this when you pull the flowers out for their trim—using lukewarm water. (Not only does bacteria clog stems and prevent them from adequately absorbing water, but it can also make the whole bouquet smell bad.)

Remember that location is everything: Cut flowers last longer at cool temperatures, so keep them away from direct sunlight and heat. Cavender also warned that you should keep flowers away from ripening fruit, as it “can potentially release ethylene gas which can decrease the longevity of the flowers.”

Feed them: Many bouquets come with flower-food packets, which help their longevity and blooming process (most of these packets include a carbohydrate and a bactericide). If your bouquet doesn’t have a packet, you can make your own with this recipe from Cavender: Mix 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon bleach, and 2 teaspoons lemon or lime juice into a quart of water. Add it to your vase, and voilà! Freshly fed flowers.

UrbanStems

For several years UrbanStems was our top pick, delivering reliable and consistent blooms for a fair price. We’d had recent great experiences with both The Macchiato and The Catalina bouquets, and we were equally impressed by their quality and beauty. We also gave points for an elegant website, straightforward pricing with no added fees, and accurate delivery times.

But when we went to retest in December 2022, we had a different experience. For no discernible reason, The Macchiato, a lovely collection of muted peach-tone roses, was not available to ship to Los Angeles. All of the ten roses that made it to Portland, Maine had brownish edges or a few flopping petals, and the filler—drooping lavender springs, a few branches of eucalyptus, and large green leaves with an odd white-ish cast—was less than inspired. To be sure the issue wasn’t just with sourcing flowers in a specific bouquet, we ordered The Juliet in early 2023, which arrived on-time to New York, Los Angeles, and Portland. But, for around $90 we got just three slightly rumpled roses and a whole lot of filler—tons more aster and smaller lisianthus than the website picture suggests. That being said, The Juliet was attractive and developed prettily over a few days. UrbanStems has added a $15 to $20 shipping fee since our original review; that fee isn’t unlike the one from our new top pick, The Bouqs Company, but for the price, we were hoping for fresher, more-beautiful flowers, and a more universally reliable service. UrbanStems remains on our radar as a potentially excellent service that we’ll continue to monitor.

Benchmark Bouquets

Benchmark Bouquets was our previous budget pick. The Flowering Fields arrangement we ordered looked beautiful, and the blooms were fresher than those in many others we tested. The bouquet came with three large, perky daisies, plus a good assortment of interesting filler (including fragrant eucalyptus) and a vase, all for about $43.

The reason we no longer feature Benchmark Bouquets as a pick is because for many months, you simply could not buy from it reliably. When we first published this piece, Benchmark Bouquets offered two-day delivery with Amazon Prime and shipped across the country. In 2020 we discovered that most arrangements were no longer available through Amazon Prime, and even when they were, the listed shipping time was several days. Many arrangements were unavailable to send to any address across the country that we input. At the time, a Benchmark Bouquets representative told us the company was experiencing issues with both shipping and stock, so we removed it as our pick. In December 2022, we scored one for about $45 all-in—an exceptional price. The flowers looked exactly like the picture: fresh, garish, and a touch random, perched in a huge, curvaceous vase. We’ll keep an eye on this service to see if they can maintain consistency.

BloomNation

Several companies fulfill their orders using local florists, but as far as we could find, BloomNation is the only one that lets you pick which florist you’d like to use, along with photos supplied by the actual florist creating the arrangement. We ordered the Beyond Brilliance bouquet (about $65 at the time), which looked very similar to its supplied photo (the lilies looked slightly different, as was the color of the wooden vase). The arrangement was basic but very beautiful, featuring fully open blooms that were not crushed or torn. That beauty didn’t last quite as long as with other bouquets we tried, though; within about four days blooms started to wilt and wither at the edges. Additionally, the price for the bouquet was not as clear upfront as others: After a $15 delivery fee (the company’s equivalent of a shipping fee), a $5 service fee, and $7 in taxes, the price ended up being about $92. (The delivery fee has since increased to $20.) Still, if you need a floral arrangement sent quickly, this is one of the few that offers same-day hand delivery, plus a complimentary note of up to 180 characters (and a teddy bear or box of Godiva chocolates for an additional fee).

FTD

The Light of My Life bouquet we received from FTD (which partners with local florists to source flowers) was beautiful, but some of the lilies in our arrangement were slightly damaged. The leatherleaf fern filler also wasn’t as attractive as the filler in the UrbanStems and Benchmark Bouquets arrangements.

1-800-Flowers.com

Everything about our Fun & Flirty bouquet (no longer available) from 1-800-Flowers.com felt dated and boring. The website was a turnoff. And though our arrangement was pretty enough, it wasn’t as interesting as those from any of our picks. Also, it barely resembled the listing online. (To the company’s credit, however, the blooms still looked like new a week after delivery.)

Farmgirl Flowers

For just under $100 (including $25 shipping), Farmgirl Flowers’s Fun Size Burlap Wrapped Bouquet was disappointing—even when we retested them in our 2022 testing. Not only was this nearly double what we paid for some other flowers we tested and preferred, but many of the blooms arrived looking tired and brown. This bouquet was delivered on a Friday, and the flowers barely survived the weekend—we had to throw them out four days later. Our staffers loved the stylish idea of the burlap-wrapped bouquets, but with a pricy shipping fee and uninspired arrangements, we can’t recommend them.