Online vs Desktop Family Tree Software: An Honest Comparison
Online genealogy platforms and desktop programs trade off privacy, cost, speed and print quality in very different ways. Here is how to choose, with real export paths for each.
"Online versus desktop" sounds like one question, but it is really two. The first is whether your tree lives on a company's servers or on your own disk. The second is what the software is for: finding new ancestors, or showing the family you already know to the rest of the family. Programs that are good at one are frequently bad at the other, and the complaints people have about their tree software almost always come from picking on the wrong axis.
What online genealogy platforms are for
Ancestry, MyHeritage and FamilySearch are research machines. Their value is the records: censuses, passenger lists, military files, parish registers, billions of indexed names. Attach your tree and the platform starts suggesting matches, some of which are genuinely the ancestor you had been hunting for years. FamilySearch adds a shared world tree that anyone can edit, which means a cousin in another country may have already documented your great-great-grandmother. Ancestry and MyHeritage layer DNA matching on top, and distant-cousin collaboration is a real research method, not a marketing line.
If your project is pushing a lineage back through the 1800s and beyond, none of the alternatives below come close. Use these platforms for that.
The costs are equally real. Ancestry's useful features sit behind a subscription that renews annually, and the free tier restricts record access and some tools. MyHeritage's free tier has historically limited tree size and features to encourage upgrades. FamilySearch is free but requires an account, and your contributions join a communal tree that other people can change.
There is also the privacy model, which deserves more thought than it usually gets. Building a tree on a platform means uploading names, dates, relationships and often photos to a company whose business is family data. Most platforms keep living people private by default, but the dead are public, and you are trusting the company's current policy along with every future one.
What desktop software is for
Gramps, RootsMagic and Family Tree Maker are databases that happen to draw charts. They handle very large files without complaint, they model sources and citations properly, and they work on a plane. A serious hobbyist with 5,000 people and 1,200 sourced facts is not doing that in a web form.
Gramps is free and open source, and it stores your work in an open format on your own disk. RootsMagic and Family Tree Maker are paid, either as a one-time license or a paid upgrade cycle, and both sync with Ancestry trees, which is the main reason people pick them. The costs are a license, an installer, a real learning curve, and the fact that your tree now lives on one computer unless you set up your own backups.
Photo handling is the classic weak point. Desktop programs treat an image as an attachment to a person record: a thumbnail on a form. You can attach a beautiful portrait of your grandmother and never really see it. Family Tree Maker's charting is better than most and still thinks in text boxes.
The four trade-offs that actually decide it
Where the data lives
Desktop: your disk, your backup, your responsibility. Research platform: their servers, their terms of service, their continued existence. Browser-local tools are a third thing entirely, closer to desktop than to a platform: the page loads once and after that the photos and the tree data sit in your own browser's storage with no server-side copy. I covered what to check before trusting any of these in the free family tree maker checklist, and the storage question is the first item on it.
What happens when the company goes away
Desktop wins, mostly by default. The file is already on your machine. The exit from a platform is GEDCOM, and it is worth knowing what GEDCOM is before you need it: an old text standard for moving names and family links between programs, and it handles photos poorly, so a proper exit means a GEDCOM plus a separate bulk download of your media. Ancestry and MyHeritage both let you export a GEDCOM of trees you own. FamilySearch does not offer a full GEDCOM export of the shared world tree; you can download your own memories and attachments, but the tree itself stays put. That single fact changes how some researchers use it.
Speed at scale
A 200-person tree is small by desktop standards and Gramps will not notice it. In a browser, 200 people is exactly where naive rendering starts to stutter, because every card, line and photo is being laid out on screen. Browser tools that redraw the whole canvas on every change get painful here; ones with a real layout engine do not. If your tree is heading for four digits, test the tool with a big sample before committing hours to it.
Printing
This is where research platforms are weakest, oddly. Their charts are built for on-screen browsing, and the downloadable versions are often screen-resolution images that go soft the moment you enlarge them. Desktop charting tools print properly. A photo tree you intend to frame needs a genuine high-resolution export, at roughly 300 pixels per inch of final print size, and it is worth confirming that number before you design anything. The details are in how to print your family tree.
The cost picture over three years
Nobody chooses genealogy software on price alone, but the shape of the cost matters. A research subscription renews annually, so three years of it is a multiple of any desktop license, and the desktop license itself may need one paid upgrade in that window. Gramps costs nothing and never asks for a card. Browser-local tools with no server also cost nothing to run, which is why they can skip accounts entirely.
What you are buying differs. A subscription buys record access, which is a consumable: you research hard for a couple of years, then the marginal value drops sharply. A desktop license buys a permanent tool. A free browser tool buys you a finished picture this weekend.
Which one fits your project
| Your goal | Best fit |
|---|---|
| Find new ancestors in records | Ancestry, MyHeritage or FamilySearch |
| Manage thousands of sourced people | Gramps, RootsMagic or Family Tree Maker |
| A photo tree your family will actually look at | Browser-based photo tree |
| A poster for the reunion wall | Browser-based photo tree, printed large |
Plenty of families run two of these at once, and that is not indecision. The research platform is the archive; the photo tree is the version people put on a wall. If you are starting from photographs rather than records, the practical path is in how to make a family tree with photos.
Photo Family Tree sits in that browser-local category. It has no record hints and no DNA databases, so it cannot help you research, and it is the wrong tool for a thousand-person sourced file. What it does is build a photo-first tree automatically, keep every photo on your own device, and export a print-ready PNG. You can open / and have a three-generation tree finished in an afternoon, and if you would rather start from a designed layout, the templates at /templates are a reasonable place to look first.