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  <title>Which family tree app should you choose? Geneanet, MyHeritage, Filae, Parenthèse</title>
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        "datePublished": "2026-09-14",
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          { "@type": "Question", "name": "Is MyHeritage free?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Partly. Registration is free and gives you a Basic family site, with a tree limited to 250 people. Searching the archives is free, but viewing some documents requires a Data subscription. The paid plans (Premium, PremiumPlus, Data, Complete, Omni) are billed yearly. Premium, the cheapest, is listed at €99 per year on the French pricing page (€65 for the first year) and raises the tree limit to 2,500 people. PremiumPlus makes it unlimited." } },
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      <span class="eyebrow">Guide</span>
      <h1>Which family tree app should you choose?</h1>
      <p class="lead">The question hides two different needs. Finding ancestors in the archives, or gathering what your family still knows about itself before it gets lost. The right tools aren't the same.</p>

      <h2>Start by naming what you need</h2>
      <p><strong>You're looking for ancestors.</strong> Civil records, censuses, parish registers, matches with other genealogists. You need a tool connected to archives, with millions of trees already entered. That's what Geneanet, Filae, MyHeritage and FamilySearch do.</p>
      <p><strong>You want to keep your family's memories.</strong> The photos in shoeboxes, a grandmother's voice telling a story, wedding videos, the stories only one uncle knows. You need a space the whole family can open without fighting with software, and add to without a complicated password. That's what Parenthèse does.</p>
      <p>Many families need both, in that order. First the living memory, because it disappears fast, then the research, which can wait.</p>

      <h2>The tools, one by one</h2>

      <h3>Geneanet</h3>
      <p>The French reference for research. A free online tree, digitized archives, a huge community that has already entered millions of ancestors. If your grandfather was born in France before 1900, someone has probably already found his parents on Geneanet. The interface is dense, designed for searching, not for browsing as a family on a Sunday. The tree and access to the collaborative collections are free, and the Premium subscription is mostly for searching faster (advanced search, indexed archive transcriptions, automatic hints).</p>

      <h3>Filae</h3>
      <p>A specialist in French civil records indexed by name. The service is paid and its strength is searching for records. The tree itself is a research aid, not an album.</p>

      <h3>MyHeritage</h3>
      <p>An Israeli company with a strong presence worldwide, known for its DNA tests and its automatic matches between trees. Freemium model. The free tree stops at 250 people, and a yearly subscription is needed to go beyond that or to view some of the archive documents. Lots of sales emails.</p>

      <h3>FamilySearch</h3>
      <p>Free, funded by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A single shared worldwide tree that anyone can edit. Excellent for research, disconcerting when a stranger corrects your great-grandmother.</p>

      <h3>Heredis and desktop software</h3>
      <p>For people who want to keep everything on their computer and produce books and reports. Powerful, but the tree lives on a single machine, and sharing it with the family takes exports.</p>

      <h3>Canva and printable templates</h3>
      <p>A drawn tree, nice on the wall, frozen the day you print it. Perfect as a gift, no use for keeping a memory alive that keeps growing.</p>

      <h3>Parenthèse</h3>
      <p>A tree where each person carries their photos, videos, voice and stories. You share it with a link, and the family views it without creating an account. With a contribution password, they suggest additions and corrections that you approve, or that go through directly if you choose. No archives, no ancestor search. Parenthèse starts where the others stop, with living people and what they know.</p>

      <h2>At a glance</h2>
      <table>
        <thead><tr><th>Tool</th><th>Made for</th><th>Photos, videos, voice</th><th>Sharing with family</th></tr></thead>
        <tbody>
          <tr><td>Geneanet</td><td>Research&shy;ing ancestors</td><td>Photos on profiles</td><td>Public or private tree, account required to contribute</td></tr>
          <tr><td>Filae</td><td>French civil records</td><td>Limited</td><td>Researcher-oriented</td></tr>
          <tr><td>MyHeritage</td><td>Research and DNA</td><td>Photos, automatic enhance&shy;ment</td><td>Invitations, subscription to go further</td></tr>
          <tr><td>FamilySearch</td><td>Research, free</td><td>Photos and stories</td><td>Worldwide tree, editable by anyone</td></tr>
          <tr><td>Heredis</td><td>Working on your computer</td><td>Yes, locally</td><td>By export</td></tr>
          <tr><td>Printable templates</td><td>Decorating, gifting</td><td>One photo per box</td><td>An object, not a space</td></tr>
          <tr><td>Parenthèse</td><td>Keeping and sharing living memory</td><td>Photos, videos, audio, stories, drawings</td><td>A link, viewing without an account, approved contri&shy;butions</td></tr>
        </tbody>
      </table>

      <div class="note">
        <p><strong>A criterion nobody looks at.</strong> Who will open the tree in ten years? Software installed on a computer that won't exist anymore, a canceled subscription, or a link the whole family already knows. Choose the tool your children will be able to open.</p>
      </div>

      <h2>Frequently asked questions</h2>
      <div class="faq">
        <details>
          <summary>What is the best family tree app?</summary>
          <p>There isn't just one. To find ancestors in the archives, Geneanet, Filae or FamilySearch. To gather and share the photos, videos and memories of a living family, Parenthèse. Many families use both.</p>
        </details>
        <details>
          <summary>Where can I make a family tree for free?</summary>
          <p>Geneanet and FamilySearch offer a free, research-oriented tree. Parenthèse is free, and will stay free. The tree can be viewed without an account, with a simple link.</p>
        </details>
        <details>
          <summary>Is Geneanet free?</summary>
          <p>Yes, for the tree. Free registration lets you host a tree with no size limit, back it up, browse other members' trees and the collaborative collections (graves, transcriptions, registers, postcards), with 1 GB for private photos and documents. The Premium subscription, from €4.13 per month, adds advanced search (spouse, parents, spelling variants, nearby places), indexed archive transcriptions, the Genealogy Library, automatic hints and alerts, and 10 GB of storage.</p>
        </details>
        <details>
          <summary>Is MyHeritage free?</summary>
          <p>Partly. Registration is free and gives you a Basic family site, with a tree limited to 250 people. Searching the archives is free, but viewing some documents requires a Data subscription. The paid plans (Premium, PremiumPlus, Data, Complete, Omni) are billed yearly. Premium, the cheapest, is listed at €99 per year on the French pricing page (€65 for the first year) and raises the tree limit to 2,500 people. PremiumPlus makes it unlimited.</p>
        </details>
        <details>
          <summary>Do I need desktop software?</summary>
          <p>No. Software like Heredis is still useful for people researching their ancestors who want to keep everything on their computer. An online tree can be shared with the family without installing anything, on a phone as well as a computer.</p>
        </details>
        <details>
          <summary>Can I move from one to another?</summary>
          <p>Yes, with the GEDCOM format, which all these tools read and write. Parenthèse imports and exports GEDCOM, so you can start from a Geneanet tree and add the living memory to it, or the other way around.</p>
        </details>
      </div>

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        <h2>Start with what disappears first</h2>
        <p>An account, a family name, and you invite your family with a link.</p>
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