The Good: Family Tree Builder is completely free and provides some fantastic features. It is very functional with a great community to support it. It provides some very powerful automated features which allow you to increase your productivity and to fill out details extremely quickly and rapidly. They can also help you identify any other people who may be researching the same family line as you, and use this to help in your research and to fill in any gaps that you may have.
The Bad: In order to get access to the full feature set, you do have to pay, and the price is very high in comparison to the best genealogical software we have reviewed.
The Verdict: Fantastic for doing preliminary research and for getting quite a lot of information without having to spend any money. The features it provides all the high quality, including the ones that are free. Its limited nature in this respect may not endear it professionals, but it is highly recommendable for casual users.
Family Tree Builder is a piece of family tree software that is completely free. This immediately sets it apart from its counterparts which can obviously vary wildly in price. It is part of myheritage.com, and as such is networked with one of the larger genealogy record sites. This means it is able to provide a service and a wealth of information that is not always available in other programs. With multiple languages, visual building of your ancestral tree, automatic face recognition, and automatic research from the publicly available information from other heritage sites, it provides a very large and powerful service at a very low price of nothing.
Some features of this program are locked, and are only accessible through purchasing the premium version which can be fairly expensive but is a powerful piece of software. Family Tree Builder is fantastic at building of a large and interactive database of people in your family and from your family history with very minimal effort. It can create a very visually pleasing and informative tree of family details and heritage and can do this by providing most of the information automatically. It is completely possible to add individuals on your own, and fill in any missing details, allowing you to create a full family history.
A feature called SmartMatch allows you to match your ancestral tree or other research that you have done on the program with work that other people have done. This allows you to fill in gaps that may be missing from your own work, and to increase the level and expansion of your research and to learn more.
It is required to have an Internet connection to be able to obtain the program as it is only obtainable by downloading it through the Internet. Many of its best features are available free, however to get full use out of Family Tree Builder, it is necessary to get the somewhat expensive premium package.
The very popular Family Tree Builder is a powerful program and it is definitely recommendable, especially as there’s nothing to lose given its free price tag. It contains a rich and powerful database service, and can automatically fill in many of the details that would otherwise have to be put in by hand and by personally researching. A strong online community also allows you to get the most out of program. This program is fantastic for people looking to quickly and easily expand their knowledge of their ancestral tree and perhaps share information with others. Although it is premium priced for the full version, downloading it for free leaves no risk and will allow you to see the quality of software that is.