Almost 800 Genealogy Programs. You’ve Tried How Many? - Sun, 27 Apr 2014

How many have you even heard of?

Over at GenSoftReviews, where I maintain a website allowing users to rate and review their genealogy software, I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the genealogy programs that is approaching 800.

In the last month alone, I’ve found, or people have told me about 14 16 new programs that do all sorts of things, including: Branches for iPad, CatroGenea, GEDexplorer, Soundex Calculator, DKIndex, Origins, Leaves, Last-Memories.com, Jworld, JewAge, DP Genealogy Records, G-List, Genway, and Khandan Info, Rodovoderevo and Wallcharts. You can’t tell what all of them do just from their name. You have to at least go their website, and then maybe try them out.

Of the nearly 800 programs, almost half run on Windows, 75 run on Macs, 70 on Unix, over a hundred on your SmartPhone or Pad, and there are almost 300 online programs.

Almost 300 are full featured programs. These are the ones you can use to record your genealogy data, print reports, import and export your data. The rest are utility programs that generally read your data and do something useful with it, or auxiliary programs that are useful to genealogists, but do not interface directly with your data.

Okay, you’re probably happy with the program you use now … or maybe you’re not. But have you tried many others? How many? One, two, a half dozen?

Do you use any online programs? There are almost 300 of them.

Are you worried about cost? Over half the programs are free to use, and many of the others have free trials.

I love finding out about new programs. They introduce new concepts, and different ideas about how to do the same thing. There’s no one best way to do genealogy. Everyone is different. Even if you’ve been using the same program for 15 years, maybe there is one out there that will be a better fit for you.

I’m saddened that the average genealogist probably has not even heard of more than a couple of dozen different programs. There are so many genealogy software vendors out there that are trying to add something new and useful to your toolkit. They all deserve at least a look.