Most genealogy software now bills you monthly for access to records. RootsMagic does the opposite: you pay $39.95, the program is yours, and your tree lives in a file on your own disk. It has been sold that way since 2002 by a small Utah company, and version 11 arrived in 2026 with a rewritten interface and a native Apple Silicon build. If you have been searching for it as "root magic", that is the same program.
It is a database, not a records subscription.
This is the distinction that decides whether RootsMagic is for you. Ancestry and MyHeritage sell you a search box over their own record collections. RootsMagic sells you the container: an offline database that holds people, families, events, sources, notes, photos, audio, and video, and produces reports from them. It has no records of its own. What it has instead is hints, pulled from FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and Findmypast, so the search still happens on those sites and the results come home to your file. You can also publish your tree back out to FamilySearch and Ancestry. The subscriptions those hints depend on are still yours to buy separately.
The free edition is not a trial.
RootsMagic Essentials is free with no time limit, which makes it unusual. Most free genealogy offers are fourteen-day trials or capped at a few hundred people. Essentials takes unlimited people, families, events, notes, and media, reads and writes GEDCOM, integrates with FamilySearch Family Tree, shows WebHints from FamilySearch and MyHeritage, and prints reports, charts and books. What it holds back is the advanced end: TreeShare with Ancestry, the fuller charting and publishing options, and some of the research tooling. For a beginner who wants a real database rather than a web account, that is a genuinely usable free product, and you can move the same file into the paid version later. Our roundup of free genealogy software puts it next to the other honest free options.
Version 11 fixed the thing people complained about.
RootsMagic 8 rebuilt the program from scratch in 2021 and the reception was rough: reviewers and long-time users found the new interface slower and harder to read than version 7. Version 11 is the answer to that. View buttons are labelled instead of relying on icons, per-screen menus show only relevant commands, and a Life Summary panel with one-click badges puts events, family, notes, sources and media a click away. Sources, Tasks and Notes now have their own tabs with filters and inline editing, so you can fix twenty citations without opening twenty windows. A new "Proposed" proof status lets you record that you think a link is right but have not proved it, which is the state most research actually lives in. You can keep more than one person's edit screen open at once, and use the rest of the program while they are open. On an M-series Mac it now runs as a native Apple Silicon build with no Rosetta translation.
The AI feature is a prompt builder, not an assistant.
Version 11 advertises AI, and it is worth being precise about what that means, because it is not what the word usually implies now. RootsMagic does not call a model. It builds prompts: you make a template such as "write a narrative biography", it fills in a person's details from your database, and you paste the result into ChatGPT or whatever you use. The work happens outside the program, and so does the checking. That is a smaller feature than Goldie May's assistant, which reads your tree and runs searches itself, and much smaller than a system that researches for you. It also means nothing in your file is sent anywhere unless you paste it, which some researchers will prefer to the alternative. What it is not is a shortcut past the part where you verify what the model wrote, and a general chatbot handed a list of names will invent records that look plausible, which is the failure mode we covered in why ChatGPT can't do genealogy.
What else is in the box.
DNA match tracking sits alongside the tree, so matches, notes and predicted relationships live with the people they belong to rather than in a separate spreadsheet. There are duplicate detection and merge tools, which matter more than they sound: a tree assembled from several sources always has the same person in it twice. Over a hundred reports and charts, book and website publishing, and the ability to run the whole program from a USB stick so the same database opens on another machine. It works with no internet connection, which is the practical argument for desktop software that people forget until an archive visit or a flight.
The honest scorecard.
Strengths: one payment, no subscription, and your data in a file you control, on both Windows 10 or 11 and macOS 12 through 26. The free edition is real. Source handling and duplicate merging are better than most web trees allow. Weaknesses: it holds no records, so its usefulness scales with the subscriptions you already pay for elsewhere. It is a desktop program, so there is no phone app and no collaborative shared tree. The interface, even after version 11, asks more of you than a web app does. And the AI is a copy-paste helper, so if you were hoping software would go and find the missing parent, this is not the tool that does that.
Who should buy it.
Buy RootsMagic if you already subscribe to a records site, you want your tree in your own hands rather than on someone's platform, and you would rather pay once than monthly. Start with Essentials, put two hundred people in, and see whether the shape of it suits you before spending anything. Skip it if you want the searching done for you, or if you need family members on phones adding to the same tree. For the wider field, our comparison of the best genealogy software puts RootsMagic next to Family Tree Maker, Gramps and the record platforms. If your tree is already in RootsMagic and you want to move or open it elsewhere, it exports standard GEDCOM, and our free GEDCOM viewer will open that file in a browser without installing anything.
