Google's first question about Family Tree Maker is still whether it is discontinued, and the written record on page one does nothing to settle it. The most-linked review there is titled "Family Tree Maker 2017 (Software MacKiev) Review 2026". Its own page data says it went up in May 2020 and was last touched on 4 December 2020, and it reviews an edition two releases behind the one on sale. The cautionary piece a few results below it, Family History Daily's warning to FTM users, dates from 2016. Two editions have shipped since anybody reviewed this program at length. So here is a look at the one you would actually be buying.
Ancestry did kill it, in 2015, and then sold the brand instead.
The confusion is fair, because the death was real. In December 2015 Ancestry announced it was retiring Family Tree Maker and stopped selling it on the 31st of that month. Then it reversed, in about eight weeks: the announcement was dated 8 December 2015, and on 2 February 2016 Ancestry said Software MacKiev, which had been building the Mac edition for more than six years, would take over as publisher for both Mac and Windows (both dates per Wikipedia). Users kept Ancestry hints, Ancestry search, and the ability to save a tree on Ancestry.
MacKiev is a small publisher out of Boston, and it has shipped three editions since: FTM 2017, FTM 2019 and FTM 2024. The program is older than almost anyone's research. Kenneth Lafferty Hess wrote version 1.0 at Banner Blue Software in 1989, and it passed through Broderbund, The Learning Company, Mattel, Genealogy.com and A&E before Ancestry ever owned it (the full chain is on Wikipedia). Anyone still telling you it is dead is quoting a ten-year-old blog post.
The edition on sale is FTM 2024, and it arrived in May 2025.
That is worth saying plainly, because the name misleads. Pre-orders opened at RootsTech in February 2024. The finished software did not ship until May 2025, on 10 May 2025 by MacKiev's own count, and the current release is version 25.0.2. Fifteen months between taking pre-orders and delivering is the most useful single fact about how this company moves.
One purchase covers both platforms. MacKiev's US store lists the download at $80, a DVD bundle at $90 and a 16 GB USB edition at $100, the physical ones plus $5.95 shipping, with a $20 Family Pack upgrade that stretches one licence across three computers in your home. Requirements are macOS Big Sur 11 or later, Tahoe 26 included, and Windows 10 64-bit or later. There is no subscription on the software itself.
If you already own an older edition, do not pay that. The upgrade is $39.95 for the download, half the new price, with the DVD at $49.95 and the USB at $59.95. That page is public and needs no account, but MacKiev does not link it from the store, only from one line in the FTM 2024 FAQ. A separate page for existing owners still offers to tell you whether you "may be eligible" if you join a mailing list. Ignore that one.
Syncing with Ancestry is free, which is not what we expected to find.
We went in believing the headline feature was gated behind an Ancestry subscription. It is not. MacKiev's own product page runs the heading "Sync With an Online Ancestry Tree for FREE", and its support centre is blunt about the money: you do not have to keep paying for Family Tree Maker, and you can "choose to use Family Tree Maker with your Ancestry subscription to get the most use out of the program". Choose, not require.
Careful how far you take that, because we nearly overshot it ourselves. Free covers the sync and the FamilySearch side, where MacKiev puts its hints against more than six billion records and uses the word free itself. What it never says anywhere we could find is whether the little green Ancestry hints keep arriving without an Ancestry plan, and reading the record behind one is a separate bill regardless. Do not buy this expecting Ancestry's collections to come with it. What you can rely on is narrower and better than the marketing: it keeps a local, offline, exportable copy of a tree that otherwise lives inside somebody else's subscription. If that is why you are looking, our guide to exporting a tree from Ancestry covers the free route before the paid one.
Two caveats on the sync. Only FTM 2017, 2019 and 2024 can do it: on 17 July 2017 Ancestry retired the connection for FTM 2014.1 and earlier, so an old disc in a drawer will not sync no matter what the box says. And you need an Ancestry tree to sync with, which means an account there even if you never pay for one.
The list of what does not sync is the part to read before paying.
FamilySync moves people, facts and most images. A lot else stays behind, and MacKiev publishes the list, which we respect more than the marketing. Going up to Ancestry: research notes, fact notes, media notes, relationship notes and citation notes, tasks, saved charts and reports and books, colour coding, GPS coordinates, short place names, audio, video, web page archives, source citations not linked to a fact, citation ratings, and the whole Turn Back Time change log. Documents only make the trip if they are a PDF, Word file, .txt or .rtf and come in under 15 MB, and photos have their own 15 MB ceiling above which they get resized or dropped. Coming back down from Ancestry: DNA results, stories, albums, photo tags and comments.
Read that twice if your research lives in the notes field. Plenty of good researchers reason there, and half their thinking will not travel. A tree that calls itself synced while silently dropping your reasoning is worse than no sync, because you will trust it.
TreeVault is a subscription with its first year folded into the box.
FTM 2024 includes a year of TreeVault cloud services. After that it is $1.99 a month or $18 a year for the data-only plan, and $3.99 a month or $24 a year if you want your media backed up too. It carries the Emergency Tree restore service, the FTM Connect mobile viewer (iOS 15 and up, Android 7 and up), Relative Hint sticky notes that relatives leave on your tree, a next-of-kin continuity service and a historical weather database.
The price is fine. What to notice is which features sit inside it: the phone app and the cloud backup, the two things most people assume come with an $80 purchase, are the ones that stop in year two if you let it lapse.
The complaints are real, and they are about support more than features.
Forum threads and the comment sections under those stale reviews run heavily negative, and the recurring theme is not a missing feature. It is sync failures, upgrade friction and slow support. We are reporting that as sentiment rather than as fact, because that is what it is: individual accounts we have not reproduced. Against it, the 25.0.2 release notes read like a company doing the work, with fixes for Ancestry notes syncing, sync stability, installing on macOS 26 and a long tail of report and source formatting bugs.
Both things are probably true. It is actively maintained by a small team, the cadence is slow, and when it breaks you wait.
Who should buy it, and who should not.
Buy FTM 2024 if your tree is already on Ancestry, you want a real copy on your own disk, and you would rather own software than rent it. At $80 new or $39.95 as an upgrade, that is a fair trade. One correction, though, and it cost us our own first draft: FTM is not the only desktop program that syncs with an Ancestry tree. RootsMagic's TreeShare moves people, events, notes, sources and photos both ways too, and lets you start on either side. FamilySync is the only thing that syncs an FTM file, but two-way Ancestry sync on its own is not the reason to pick this one.
Skip it if your tree is not on Ancestry. Take the sync away and you are paying $80 for a competent, unexciting desktop database, and RootsMagic costs $39.95 and has a free trial, so you can find out whether desktop suits you before spending anything. Skip it too if your research lives in notes and tasks, since those are precisely what does not cross. And skip it if you want family on phones adding to one tree, because the mobile app is a viewer.
Before you buy anything, look at what you actually have. Our free GEDCOM viewer opens your file in a browser and tells you in about a minute how big your tree really is and how much of it is sourced. That is a better basis for an $80 decision than any review, this one included.
