Talk:Comparison of genealogy software

CHOICE - Test: Family tree software (Online 11/06)
114.76.100.121 (talk) 04:26, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Results for 11 family tree programs priced up to $187

Genealogy Reviews

 * Genealogy Reviews - in depth. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.76.100.121 (talk) 12:33, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

"Non-traditional" families
Could there be a criterion listing the programs' support for what for want of a better word I'll call non-traditional family structures, such as adoption, non-married couples, and same-sex marriages? - 70.29.143.214 (talk) 09:39, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

RootsMagic entry declared advertising
My name is Bruce Buzbee, president of RootsMagic, Inc. Our genealogy program RootsMagic is one of the best selling genealogy programs on the market, yet every time I try to create a page or add information to this comparison page, someone comes along and kills it.

I completely understand the requirements, yet our product information (which is no different than the pages or information on any of the other products listed) continues to be un-done as advertising.

The latest occurrence our updates to the comparison were undone, even though all we did was list the facts for the software exactly the way it was done for every other program. Can someone please explain why ours is considered advertising, while the others aren't. And before someone says it is because we don't have a page on Wikipedia, please keep in mind that the exact same thing happens every time we try to create a page, even though we have based the content on our page on the other products which also have pages.

Rootsmagic (talk) 03:20, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Because you shouldn't be adding content to Wikipedia about your own products. Please see WP:COI and WP:SPAM. AlistairMcMillan (talk) 15:41, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

More Genealogy Software wanted for comparison
Why are there so few programs listed? 211.28.209.102 (talk) 00:19, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The list was cut back to those that had articles available on wiki. Keith D (talk) 14:16, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Saw your comment and noticed geditcom did not have a wiki article so I removed it ✅ Jim Madson
 * 211.28.209.102, What other genealogy programs that are notable, do you believe should be listed? Jim Madson  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.76.69.147 (talk) 05:51, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I am not the original poster. However, I was looking around for information on Broderbund genealogy software when I came to the wiki. Apparently they used to make Family Tree Maker before selling it to Ancestry.com, but now they make another piece of software called Lineage Family Tree (LFT). However, considering the fact that I can find very little information on the net about LFT outside of Broderbund sources, I'm not necessarily sure that they're big enough to be listed here. Davidfischer (talk) 16:21, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

I would like to see more detail. I have been doing genealogy for 30+ years. The program I have won't allow me to show marriages for a couple that married, divorced, and remarried. When I want migration the program won't allow me to show this from the descendant view, I can only map a person and their ancestors. The program won't allow me to see a snap shop of relatives at a given year which is extremely useful when trying to place the witnesses who could be at a quaker wedding (a lits of 12 or greater), looking at a family photograph, or a given census year which might happen to have an uncle or niece listed or early census data where relationships aren't stated. Spell checking only works on the all the entries. I can't spell check just a note or an individuals entry and when I can't remember how to spell a word that word I have to resort to the internet. This used to list version of GENCOM supported. This is very important because you can't take a large family tree and reenter the data. I realize this part is difficult because programs may have data which won't convert. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.149.172.165 (talk) 14:05, 10 February 2022 (UTC)


 * I think that both this page and the one on web-based genealogy could be re-worked because neither one of them defines what 'Genealogy Software' is. It may be obvious to a developer, or to someone that is busy updating some database, but there are many niche products out there that are used for genealogy and that are unlikely to get mentioned in these lists -- partly because they simply don't fit the labels imposed by the tables. I raised this on my blog recently at Genealogy Software.TonyP (talk) 14:31, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Genealogy Features vs. General Features
I think a table should be added that identifies general features that the genealogy software could have. Examples of general features are: search and replace text, spell check, find records, backup and restore, import and export, customize. I'm sure there are others people can think of. Does anyone else concur? Leeirons (talk) 18:11, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Both the tables miss an explanation of the features (column headings in the table). E.g. a SOURCE SURETY or CONFLICTING EVIDENCE feature needs explanation. Is this something bad, something good (is the feature relevant?), and if availalble to which extend does the feature improve the software? Zawuzln (talk) 14:48, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Greater Resolution for Features Table
The features in the Features table do not provide much differentiation between the software packages. There seems to be an overemphasis on charts, reports, and views. As a result, programs such a GenealogyJ appear to be very similar in features to programs such as Family Tree Maker and Legacy Family Tree. Features such as "standard source templates," "relationship calculator," and "source citation detailing" would provide better resolution to the differences between software packages. Any other opinions on this? Leeirons (talk) 19:47, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Free To Use vs. Free Software
Not quite sure what the difference is. Perhaps the columns should be Standard Edition and Deluxe Edition and the choices should be Purchase, Free, and None. Any other opinions. Leeirons (talk) 20:47, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Free To Use means it is distributed at no cost. Free Software means that the license gives the licensee (who receives the license, think user) certain freedoms (to copy, modify, distribute, and use without restriction).
 * BTW, I changed the entry for Family Tree Builder as it was listed as Free Software with a Proprietary license, but its Wikipaedia entry identifies it as Freeware and I didn't see anything in their website which contradicts that (no mention of the license type).
 * Jergas (talk) 05:44, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Suggested updates on the Genealogy Software Template and this page
Please see Template_talk:Genealogy_software for a discussion of changes affecting this page also.

Will also look into cleaning up the page to make more useful, as has been commented on in Dick Eastman's Newsletter comment area after he pointed out this page today. Specifically, features common to all tools can simply be listed in text above the charts. Or individual items like chart or report types, can be listed in the box under a single column for each piece of software. A visual, separate column is not so necessary especially if text can be used to show deeper meaning or differences. Will take this into consideration when reviewing the overall changes to the Genealogy Software page itself. At minimum, this page should reference back to that overview page to start with.

Randy Sevni.com (talk) 23:39, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Conflicting evidence
What is the genealogical feature 'conflicting evidence' ...? Is it a 'plausibility check' to find input errors (e.g. person has married before birth date) ...? DiBase (talk) 10:56, 2 November 2014 (UTC)


 * These are two different things - conflicting evidence is the ability to record different information for the same event and to annotate commentary about the difference (eg World War II Service record indicates a person joined in 1939 and had a date of birth of 1920 but the same person's marriage certificate suggests they were born in 1923; commentary would then raise the inference that they likely lied about their age to enlist and whether the inference had been confirmed by other evidence). For software to be considered as supporting conflicting evidence, as a minimum it should allow both versions of the information to be recorded and the record(s) should have a flag field which denotes the status of the conflicting evidence (eg disputed, proved, disproved, unproven). AusTerrapin (talk) 06:28, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Genealogical features - consanguineous marriage in a family tree
I would like to see one more feature added to the Genealogical Features table - whether each program can accurately depict consanguineous marriages (for example, between cousins), and join the partners' ancestral lines into one at the point where they have a common ancestor. -- Green wood  tree  18:28, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually, this applies also to "double in-law" marriages (e.g. two brothers marrying two sisters), as in these cases also, two ancestral lines merge into one. -- Green wood  tree  11:40, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Tools
Are there any tools to easy make genealogical tree like this Copy & Paste Excel-to-Wiki Converter ?--Kaiyr (talk) 10:59, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Language Support for Genealogists
I, as many, started researching my family tree using genealogy software that supported English. However, I quickly found my roots going back to Europe and having problems spelling these names which had characters not supported in ASCII, ANSEL, and ANSI (1980 state of affairs). Genealogists started using extended character sets to input these foreign characters not realising that if their database moved to a different machine that didn't load the same character sets, strange things would happen to the displayed data (from the 1980's to the late 1990's).

Later, although genealogy programs generally didn't support foreign languages, computing started to become more receptive to support of foreign languages and codes such as UNICODE were developed. Several genealogy programs started to announce their ability to support these foreign characters and genealogists were discovering that they could input correct spelling of names and place names in their database with the only proviso that UNICODE be supported and loaded on the system (1990's to 2010).

Today we have hackers/terrorists who want to take over the world by using terminal emulators to connect to controllers on electric power plants and such using these old codes like ASCII, ANSEL and ANSI. Microsoft, decided to remove support for these codes so people could not do this on their platforms (Windows and Windows powered devices). But, horrors, they also removed support for UNICODE! Genealogists have been put in the back seat and hang the need for foreign characters in today's computing (2010 to present).

Why must people who have a legitimate need for these character sets be denied the right of use? Shouldn't the controllers that were developed years ago be re-engineered as secure devices? Why must everyone suffer for the benefit of an easy fix? And if the controllers cannot be easily fixed, why can't a hardware front end be attached to these devices instead of this clunky fix which may not fix anything?

I was hoping for additional support of ligand characters soon but instead have discovered I can no longer read some old databases, have errors in other databases not quite so old and still have no support for foreign languages in my current software.

Comments appreciated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:56A:7048:E00:E8E2:E17A:287C:1C63 (talk) 20:19, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Missing Software ?
The genealogy software Ages! is mentioned under Languages but not listed anywhere. [now deleted]

This page appears to be a list of 22-25 different genealogy programs with their attributes/capabilities running across 4 tables, which are a continuation of each other, in that they all (almost) have the same program names in the first column. HOWEVER, there are 3 programs that only show up in the first table: Ancestromania, Family Tree, and Kith and Kin Pro. Therefore it seems these should be deleted from the first table or added to all the other tables with their appropriate table entries.

Notability? WP:CORP. Should all of these be deleted?
A brief peruse tells me this is a directory of non-notable WP:CORP-failing software. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:39, 1 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Articles for deletion/Agelong Tree
 * Articles for deletion/Ahnenblatt

Notability of comparisons
eg. https://au.pcmag.com/personal-home/28855/the-best-genealogy-software-and-services-for-2015

"Genealogy is an increasingly popular hobby ..." Sources like this commenting on Genealogy software would be good to refer to. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:21, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Software categories
This page has all the hallmarks of being written by a developer, and I would like to suggest a refinement that would cover more cases. In terms of software that maintains a database (or some other stored representation of your family history and associated trees) then, yes, it might be a desktop product (using local resources) or a web-based product (using remote resources). However, if you want to include delivery systems -- that is, products that deliver presentation versions of the history and trees via a different mechanism -- then this page is less relevant. It the difference between looking at the products from the perspective of the genealogists adding and maintaining the information, and looking at how your extended family might be seeing the same information. It is certainly not the case that all interested parties either own a copy of the same desktop product, or subscribe to the same website, or even want to see the information in any maintainable form. Some products do have separate delivery mechanisms (mostly web-based) but there are huge differences in terms of what they deliver (trees, images, biographical details), whether they are interactive, whether they need any add-ins, etc. There are also products that are mainly delivery tools, taking data from elsewhere to format for presentation. I think such a refinement would be useful to genealogists selecting a product, and raise the profile of this difference between database maintenance and presentational delivery. TonyP (talk) 12:51, 9 January 2022 (UTC)


 * A review of product types, product structures, product functionality, and user types was posted at Genealogy Software. Basically, there are many more variations than this page accommodates.TonyP (talk) 14:35, 10 February 2022 (UTC)