"Free" does a lot of work in genealogy marketing. It can mean free forever, free for fourteen days, free to build a tree but not to see a single record, or free until you hit two hundred people. All four get advertised the same way. Here is what each of the main free options actually gives you, and where the money starts.
FamilySearch is free because it is a nonprofit.
FamilySearch is run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and costs nothing, with no premium tier waiting behind it. You get a shared collaborative tree, an enormous record collection, and AI full-text search across billions of scanned images, which is the strongest free search anywhere. Two things to understand before you commit. The tree is one shared tree, so another user can edit your ancestors, and that cuts both ways: someone may fix an error you missed, or overwrite a conclusion you sourced carefully. And some record images are viewable only in a Family History Centre or an affiliate library rather than at home, because of agreements with the archives that hold the originals. We went through what its search can and cannot do in our review of FamilySearch's AI.
WikiTree has no paid tier at all.
WikiTree is volunteer-run and free with no premium membership to upgrade to, which makes it the cleanest "free" on this list. Like FamilySearch it is one shared tree rather than your private copy, and it leans harder on sourcing: contributors sign an honour code and profiles are expected to cite evidence. The constraints are social rather than commercial. Community conventions govern how profiles are written, privacy levels control what shows for living people, and merging duplicates is a discussion with other members rather than a button you press. If you like that, it is a better-documented tree than most. If you want to work alone, it will feel slow.
Gramps is free software in the licence sense.
Gramps is open source, runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and asks for nothing ever. It is also the most demanding program here. Its source and citation model is stricter than the web trees, tying each piece of evidence to specific people, events and families, which is exactly what stops a bad assumption spreading through a tree. That rigour is the reason experienced researchers recommend it and the reason beginners bounce off it. Nothing is guessed for you, no hints arrive, and the interface was designed by people who wanted control rather than onboarding. Budget a weekend to learn it and it will outlast every subscription you might otherwise buy.
Two desktop programs give away a real edition.
RootsMagic Essentials and Ancestral Quest Basics are both free downloads, and neither is a countdown timer. Essentials is the more generous of the two: unlimited people, families, events, notes and media, full GEDCOM support, FamilySearch Family Tree integration, hints from FamilySearch and MyHeritage, and printable reports, charts and books. What it withholds is the advanced end, including TreeShare with Ancestry and the fuller charting and publishing tools. Because the file format is the same, an Essentials database opens in the paid version if you ever upgrade, so nothing is stranded. We looked at the paid program in full in our RootsMagic review.
Where the paywall actually sits.
The large commercial sites use "free" differently, and it is worth reading it precisely. Ancestry lets you build a tree at no cost; searching its record collection needs a subscription, which starts around $25 a month and rises with international access. MyHeritage has a genuine free tier capped at 250 people in a tree, with records, DNA features and photo tools behind its plans. Findmypast and Storied are subscription-first, with a free account that holds a tree and little else. None of that is dishonest, but the pattern is consistent: the tree is the free part and the records are the product. Our Ancestry alternatives comparison lays the prices side by side.
What we give away, stated plainly.
AncestorIQ is free to build a tree in, with no card and no person limit, and the AI research and video generation are the paid part. That is the same shape as everyone else's offer and we would rather name it than imply otherwise. Separately, our browser tools are free with no account at all: a GEDCOM viewer and validator that open and check a .ged file without uploading it anywhere, a relationship calculator, and a nickname finder for the moments when Polly turns out to be Mary.
A sensible free starting stack.
If you are beginning now and want to spend nothing: search records on FamilySearch, keep your own copy of the tree in RootsMagic Essentials or Gramps so you are not dependent on a shared tree you do not control, and use WikiTree if you want your documented conclusions read by other researchers. That combination costs nothing, and the only thing it lacks against a paid stack is the record collections behind Ancestry and Findmypast, which you can buy for a single month when you have a specific question rather than subscribing all year. When you do hit a wall, our guide to genealogy brick walls covers what to try before spending money.
