Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Tuesday's Tip: Check Out Genealogy Software Reviews

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  Check out the Genealogy Software Reviews at www.GenSoftReviews.com.

The Genealogy Software Reviews website was created in 2008 and is maintained by Louis Kessler.  Over the years, genealogy software users have been adding their comments and ratings to each software program, software utility, auxiliary program, etc.  Here is the home page:


The user can sort the items by latest review (above), by most ratings, by alphabet, by overall rating, etc.  There is a search box in the upper right corner where the user can type in a program name.  Here is the RootsMagic review:


The text describes the program, its creator, and provides links to information about the program.  Note that the rating system has categories for Overall, 2012, 2011, and Earlier.  The user can add their own rating of the program, plus a review field, a Pro field and a Con field.

Here is the Legacy Family Tree review:


Here is the Family Tree Maker since 2008 review:


Which programs have the highest overall rating?  Here is the page (two screens shown) for full-featured programs, assuming at least 10 reviews are available:



The top 5 programs listed surprised me. Family Tree Maker (up to Version 16) is #9, Legacy Family Tree is #10, and RootsMagic is #11.  Family Tree Maker since 2008 is #23 out of 24.

Be sure to read the comments made for each software program, they often highlight the good and bad features of each program.  Because these are user rankings, and in many cases there are very few for a given program,  there is the possibility of bias and false evaluations to make a program look better than it is, or worse.  But the user reports are better than having nothing at all to use to evaluate genealogy software programs.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/11/tuesdays-tip-check-out-genealogy.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

3 comments:

Eileen said...

Thanks of this tip. Looks like a very helpful site.

Celia Lewis said...

Ratings by country would be helpful as well as whether being used for Temple ordinances... And because each person has an individual look on the world, we're all going to find certain programs a better "fit" than others. Interesting site for comparing features, however. Thanks Randy for the helpful post.

Saskey said...

Questionable. Most of the top sites have fewer than 5 reviews. Ahenblatt suddenly has over 25 top-rated reviews in the past couple of weeks. Not sure what is going on with this site, but I have serious reservations about its validity.