The popularity of family tree software

February 16, 2021

A week ago I posted a question on social media: “what’s your favourite family tree software?”


I’ve been updating some course notes this week for a course I'm about to teach. The course is on methodology and report writing and there are a few places where we look at what can (and can’t) be achieved with family tree software. Rather than leave things as they were, I decided I would like to use examples from software packages that more students were likely to use, and make sure I included a range. After all, there’s no point me taking screenshots from my own software if hardly anyone else uses it (spoiler alert: they don’t!). My gut feeling was that Family Tree Maker was still the most popular, given its connectivity with Ancestry, but I wanted to see what else scored highly. As so many people were kind enough to contribute their answers, I thought I would share the results.


I used Twitter and Facebook to run a couple of polls. Not a particularly scientific approach I know, but I was just looking to “get a feel” of what people use. Both Twitter and Facebook only enabled me to add a few possible answers to my poll. I then requested people add a comment with other options. What I don’t know is whether (a) anyone voted and then added a comment on the same software or (b) how many people voted on both Twitter and Facebook, but I think this gives us a general feel:


Family History software preferences


There were 400 responses so it is a reasonable set of data. Anything that had a vote of two or less was grouped together as “other”.


As we would expect, Family Tree Maker (FTM) is by far the most popular. There is no distinction between Windows and Mac users here, though FTM and Roots Magic can be used on either.


Roots Magic and Family Historian (Windows only) tied in second place and the most popular Mac-only software was Reunion.


What I did find interesting was the number of comments along the lines of “I use X for this and Y for that and occasionally use Z for this specific task”. I agree, I still haven’t found the “perfect” family tree software to store my own research and I’ve tried out many Windows and Mac programs where I’ve had a “nothing is working, let’s try this one” moment.


Oh, and if you are interested, my main programme is Reunion (I’m a Mac girl) but I dip into FTM from time to time, usually just to sync a tree to Ancestry. Will I be using Reunion screenshots through the course notes? No, of course not, but now I know to throw in some Roots Magic and Family Historian examples.


Would I personally use family tree software for a professional report? No. If you want to know more about how I would structure client reports you can find out more here: Advanced Methods and Reports.

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