SourceForge has Gramps at 4.8 out of 5 across 46 ratings. A thread in its own subreddit, titled "Why is Gramps not commonly used?", has been collecting answers for two years. In a Facebook genealogy group, someone puts it from the other side: the reviews look good, but they would really like to hear from somebody who has actually run it. That gap has been sitting there for years. It is not a disagreement about quality. It is a disagreement about what the program is.
It is a research database with a family tree on the front.
Everything else follows from this. Gramps stores your research the way a relational database stores anything. People, events, places, sources and citations are separate records that you connect to each other. A birth is its own record, with its own date and place, linked to the person who was born and to the citations that support it. Someone on the project's own forum put it better than any review has: "Gramps is primarily a relational db, not something for drawing a 'family tree'." Another regular there says the workflow "is not for non-IT people".
That explains the split ratings. If you arrived to type in names and see a chart by bedtime, the first evening is an obstacle course, and the complaints about it are fair rather than lazy. One user describes getting stuck before the beginning: you create an empty tree, then you have to load that empty tree, and neither step announces itself. If you arrived because a subscription site kept flattening the careful distinction between two sources that disagree with each other, that same structure is why you stay. The most useful line anyone has written about this program is on its own forum, where a member argued that Gramps should "position itself as the LAST genealogy software you'll use".
Free means the licence, and the licence is the whole business model.
There is no paid tier, no trial clock and no upgrade page, because there is no company. Don Allingham released the first version on 21 April 2001 under the GPL, a stable release followed in 2004, and volunteers have carried it since. The project describes itself as "created, developed and governed by genealogists". The current release is 6.0.8, dated 9 April 2026, and the repository was still taking commits this week. Nothing you enter is held back for a later payment, and no acquisition can turn your file read-only, which is more than most of the paid desktop programs in this field can say.
Two paid products share the name, and neither comes from the project.
Search for it and you may meet a reseller before you meet the project. On eBay, a Maryland seller lists "Gramps Family Tree Maker | Genealogy Software Family History Ancestry Research" at $16.99 on a posted USB stick: brand listed as Unbranded, licence category Lifetime, three sold, returns not accepted. That title has borrowed the name of a rival product which has nothing to do with it. Separately, the Gramps download page carries a line the project should not have needed to write: "The Gramps app on Apple's App Store is in no way affiliated with the Gramps project."
The two cases are different and worth separating. The eBay listing is the real program on a posted USB stick, and the GPL expressly permits charging to distribute the software, so selling it is not piracy. Worth being plain about what you would be buying: a free download, from a seller who does not take returns, at a price the project will never ask you for. The App Store app is a different matter. It is a separate iOS genealogy program from a Dutch company at $99.99 which happens to share the name, and that disclaimer is the project telling you so. Get the real thing from the project.
Your data is open and it still does not fit through GEDCOM.
Open source gets read as a guarantee that your file travels. This is where that assumption comes apart. Gramps reads and writes GEDCOM 5.5.1 fluently, and it tells you not to trust it for archiving. Its own download page says to "never depend on such a rudimentary format for archiving your research" because "GEDCOM cannot store all the intricacies found in Gramps data", and points you at the Gramps XML format for backups instead.
That is an unusually honest thing for a project to publish about its own export, and it is the most practical fact in this review. Your file is yours and nobody can lock it. The richest part of it, the citation structure that was the reason to use Gramps in the first place, is the part most likely to thin out on the way to another program. Before you commit in either direction, run what you have now through our GEDCOM viewer and see what actually survives the trip. Our guide to opening a GEDCOM file covers what the format does and does not carry.
It holds no records, and the September beta is the first real answer to that.
No census images. No parish registers, no newspaper archive, no hints arriving overnight. Gramps organises research you did somewhere else, which makes a head-to-head against Ancestry close to meaningless, and it is why the free roundups pair it with a records source rather than offering it in place of one.
That is changing, carefully. Version 6.1.0-beta2, published on 13 September 2026, opened public beta testing of a FamilySearch integration built into the program, with bulk import and record comparison. The release notes lead with the word experimental and tell you to test on a copy of your tree rather than the real one. Good advice, and we would repeat it rather than soften it. Treat this as a direction and not as a feature you can lean on this month. Our best genealogy software comparison has where it sits today against the paid desktop programs.
Getting it online means running a server, or paying someone to run one.
Gramps Web exists and it is good, but it is a separate program under a separate licence, and the assumed way to use it is to host it yourself with Docker. If that sentence landed badly, the practical answer is Grampshub, run by David Straub, who is one of the main contributors to Gramps Web. It charges four to ten euros a month depending on how many people are in your tree, with a fourteen-day trial. That is not the project charging for its software. It is one person charging to run a server, which is the ordinary shape of open-source hosting, and worth separating from the eBay listing above.
Who should actually use it.
If you already cite your sources properly and you have been irritated by a program flattening them, this is the strongest free option there is, and finding out costs you a weekend. Mac users should know there are native builds for both Intel and Apple Silicon at the current release, so the free option is not the compromised one on that platform, and we mapped the rest of the field in our look at genealogy software for Mac. If you started this month and want a chart by Sunday, begin somewhere gentler and come back later. The forum said it better than we can: "Start wherever you want. Gramps will be there when you're ready." Our roundup of free genealogy software covers the gentler places to begin.
Ask whether Gramps is good and you will get an argument. Ask what it is and the argument mostly dissolves. It is a research database wearing a family tree on the front, and the people who rate it highest are the ones who went looking for a research database. You can work out which of those two you are before you download anything, which is more than most software in this field lets you do.
