Looking for a new apartment or rental used to mean combing neighborhoods looking for for rent signs and sifting through newspaper classifieds. Now you can take your search on the go, or do it on your laptop or tablet. Here are five of the best apartment search tools to help you find the perfect pad.

Earlier in the week we asked you for your favorite apartment hunting apps, services, or tools. You responded in kind, and offered up your own suggestions, and voted for some of the ones we started things off with. Here are the ones you liked the best, in no particular order:

Whether you're looking for a better place to live, or you're just curious what rent… Read more Read more

For many apartment hunters, Padmapper is the first stop in the journey to find a new home. Not only does Padmapper source data primarily from Craigslist, it packages it—and data from other services—into an attractive format. We're bundling them together here because honestly, even though Craigslist has their own tool now, PadMapper is, and always was, just better. You can view all of the listings on Craigslist and those other services on your computer, take them with you on the go thanks to Padmapper's mobile apps, filter to match your preferences, and save leads for later. The whole service is a top-down Google Map, and you can quickly jump between a location's Street View, WalkScore, and photos without leaving the site.

Those of you who nominated and supported Padmapper (including me) noted that the service is essential for today's busy apartment hunters, and the fact that you can set up alerts for new listings and that the data is updated in real-time is essential to snagging something good before someone else scoops it up. Plus, since Padmapper gets data from big management companies as well as individual landlords looking to list spare bedrooms, you can use it to find just about whatever you could possibly want. It even works in places where Craigslist may not be the primary driver for apartment data. Read more in the nomination thread here .

Hotpads may look a little dated on the front, but its data is up to date and fresh and the map search is snappy and well featured. It pulls listing information from sites like Craigslist and other major listing services with commercial properties to represent, so you get a good mix of what's really available in an area in a speedy and smooth interface. The site also has helpful guides to help renters make sure they're choosing the right apartment for them, street views for every listing, and specific maps to help you find low-income housing or foreclosures. If you're looking to buy a home, it can help you out there as well. When you find candidate apartments, you can save them as favorites to check up on them later.

Hotpads appeared late in the nominations round, but it was a strong contender the last time we ran this poll. Those of you who nominated it praised the service for its ease of use, and for being a solid alternative to just using Craigslist or something like Padmapper for your apartment search. You also pointed out that the service lets you contact properties and landlords right through the search map, and highlights information like rental prices, photos, and more information as soon as you click on a property. The right-sidebar has a ton of information in it, and you can trust verified listings to be accurate. Read more in the nominations thread here .

Lovely started out as another Craigslist-sourced, top-down map-based apartment search tool, but the team behind it has done an amazing job adding features that separate it from the pack. It has all of the features that you expect from an apartment search site though—you can enter your zip code to see what's available on a map you can navigate. Click any of the listing clusters to zoom down and see specific groups in specific neighborhoods, and watch for the red number markers to show you listings that have been posted in the past few hours. You can filter of course, based on things like bedrooms, price, and pet friendliness. What makes Lovely really special though is that when you click on a listing, you can see a full-page view of all of its information and photos, and you can apply for the rental right there without leaving the page. Lovely will reach out to the landlord and pass along all of your application information right away, so you get a jump on others in a competitive market. We don't recommend applying for an apartment cold or sight-unseen, but it's great that Lovely handles the middle-work for you. If your landlord or rental community supports it, you can even use Lovely to pay your rent once your application is accepted.

Those of you who nominated Lovely praised its wealth of listings, which include sources like Craigslist and major apartment communities (as well as a few others not represented elsewhere), and the convenience of being able to apply for properties right there without filling out a bunch of paperwork or making multiple trips back to see the landlord. You can also create alerts for searches too, so you're always aware of new posts in your desired neighborhood. You can read more in the nominations thread here .

Trulia is most well known for its real estate listings and its calculations of property values for homes, but it's also a great tool to find a rental that you may not have considered using. It's especially useful if you're looking for tools that let you sort your listings by list and price as well as by photos and by map, or if you're looking to rent a whole house and not just an apartment or a room. Trulia's data is its own, so you can expect to find information you won't get anywhere else, and its filtering tools are just as strong as any other service's. You can sort your listings by location, price range, bedrooms and bathrooms, property type (condo, house, managed community, etc), even by specific amenities (air conditioning, washer/dryer, etc), square footage, and more. Trulia also has options to let you set your maximum commute time to work and only show you places that fall inside that, choose your preferred neighborhoods and zip codes, and more. Even if you use another tool primarily, it's worth adding to your list.

Those of you who nominated Trulia noted that renters may not all know about it, but it's a great tool nonetheless, and has led to some lesser-known but still great leads. You also noted that the ability to limit by neighborhood is especially nice, and great if you're rental hunting in a large city with multiple neighborhoods and areas that vastly differ from street to street. Read more about it in the nominations thread .

WalkScore may not be your first destination when you go looking for rentals, but its data is often included in some of the other sites mentioned in the roundup. If you're looking to move to a community that's at least somewhat walkable—as in, you don't need a car to get everywhere. it's a great place to include in your search. A location's walkscore is defined by the number of amenities the community has in walking distance, like grocery stores, parks, mass transit options, other shopping, restaurants and nightlife, schools, and so on. WalkScore also lists apartments for rent in any location, and its filters include the usual price and number of bedrooms—but it jumps off from there to community specific information. For example, you can set your search to filter by commute time, specific community amenities you just have to have, like schools, grocery stores, subway or bus stops, even coffee shops.

Those of you who praised WalkScore noted that the site itself sorts by WalkScore up front, so if a walkable community with lots of available amenities and great location is what you want, it should be up there on your list of sites to check. Plus, it aggregates listings from other sites and then frames it up with its own data about the surrounding communities. One of you noted that you use WalkScore to find great neighborhoods, then take your search to the community itself. Read more in the nominations thread here .

Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to put them to a vote to determine the Lifehacker community favorite:

This week's honorable mentions go out to the venerable Apartments. a massive service that didn't get the nominations for the top five, but is invaluable if you're looking for managed communities, pricing for rentals that try to obfuscate their rent prices or availability on their website, and so on. It's also a great way to launch your search and see what's available in an area before you go looking specifically at other aggregators.

Also worth mentioning is GreatSchools. a great tool for taking the measure of a neighborhood based on the quality of the schools in the community—which one of you noted doesn't have to be because you have children. A neighborhood with great schools is likely to be a great neighborhood to live in, regardless.

We should also give the nod to some analog methods that did well in the nominations round! First, your local newspaper. which at least one of you pointed out that if a landlord is willing to pay to advertise their place in the paper, they're usually not afraid of what they have to show, unlike a lot of sketchy ads on Craigslist. Simlarly, we have to call out hitting the pavement in your preferred neighborhood. Some of you mentioned that websites and services are great, but sometimes actually going to your target neighborhood to check it out and scope for new rentals and signs can get the job done just as quickly and easily—perhaps moreso. So even if you take your search digital, there may be something to be said for those old analog methods yet.