Family Tree Spreadsheet vs Ancestry Software: Which One Should You Actually Use?

This gets framed as a money question — free spreadsheet versus paid subscription — and that framing gets the decision wrong.

The two tools are not competing to do the same job badly. They are good at genuinely different things, and the reason so many long-term researchers run both is not indecision. It is that one of them finds records and the other one manages research, and those are separate activities.

Here is the honest split.

What Subscription Platforms Do That a Spreadsheet Cannot

Be clear-eyed about this, because the spreadsheet evangelism online tends to skip it.

Indexed record search. Millions of digitised, transcribed, searchable records — censuses, parish registers, immigration manifests, military records — sitting behind one search box. No spreadsheet gets you this. Nothing you build gets you this.

Record hints. The platform notices that a person in your tree probably matches a record in its index and tells you. For a new researcher this is genuinely transformative; it is the difference between knowing where to look and not knowing that a place to look exists.

GEDCOM exchange. The standard genealogy file format. It is how you send a tree to a cousin, hand your research to the next generation, or move between platforms. A spreadsheet is not a GEDCOM, and converting between them loses things in both directions.

Other people’s trees. Sometimes a gift. Sometimes a well-shared error that four hundred people have now copied. But it is a lead source that does not exist in a private file.

DNA matching infrastructure. The actual matching — comparing your sample against a database — happens at the testing company. No spreadsheet replaces that. What a spreadsheet does with the output is a different question, and a much more interesting one.

What a Spreadsheet Does That the Platforms Do Not

Now the other side, which is less obvious and more underrated.

It records what you searched and found nothing in. This is the big one. A negative result is real research output — knowing that the 1868 register does not contain your great-grandmother is worth money, because it stops you paying to look again in eighteen months when you have forgotten. Subscription platforms are built to surface what they found. They are structurally uninterested in what you failed to find.

It counts what is unsourced. A platform will happily let you build a beautiful hundred-person tree in which forty people rest on nothing but a family story and another person’s copied tree. It will not stand there and tell you the number. A spreadsheet will, in a cell, every time you open it.

It tracks confidence explicitly. Proven, Probable, Possible, Disproven — attached to individual records rather than to people. This distinction is what stops a maybe from hardening into a fact through nothing but repetition. And crucially, it flags when you are still leaning on something you already disproved, which happens more than anyone admits.

It knows what to do next. Unassigned DNA matches, ancestors with no source, overdue research tasks, empty pedigree slots, living relatives past the age where an interview can wait. Ranked, in one place, every time you sit down. A website shows you what it has; a research file shows you what you owe.

It costs nothing per year and works offline. Your family’s data — including living relatives’ birth dates, maiden names and birthplaces, which are precisely the information used to answer security questions — stays on your own machine.

You can change it. Track something the platform has no field for — heirloom locations, which cousin has the family bible, what the subscriptions actually cost you annually — and you add a column. Total structural freedom is a real advantage once your research has a shape of its own.

Side by Side

The Cost Nobody Adds Up

Worth doing once, on paper.

A genealogy hobby rarely costs one subscription. A realistic mid-sized setup might carry a main records subscription, a second one taken out for a specific record set and never cancelled, a DNA site upgrade, occasional certificate fees and archive copies, and travel.

Take a hypothetical example: $917 a year in recurring cost. (Assumption: an illustrative combination of two subscriptions, a DNA upgrade and routine record fees — not a survey figure. Your own number will differ.)

That is not an argument against paying it. Records are the actual product of the entire hobby and they are worth money. It is an argument for knowing the number, and for a renewal date column that warns you before the second subscription you forgot about bills again for a record set you finished with fourteen months ago.

Almost nobody has this figure. It takes ten minutes to build and it is one of the more startling things a research file will tell you.

The Setup Most Long-Term Researchers End Up With

Not a compromise — a division of labour:

The platform is the search engine. Go there to find records, follow hints, and check other trees for leads.

The spreadsheet is the system of record. Every finding lands there with its citation and its confidence rating. Every failed search lands there too. The task list lives there. The DNA matches get attached to real ancestors there.

The practical test of whether you have this right: if your subscription lapsed tomorrow, would you still know what you know, and what you were about to do next?

If the answer is no, the research lives on the website — and the website is optimised for finding, not for remembering.

When You Genuinely Only Need One

Platform only is the right call if you are early, casually curious, mostly want the hints, and have no interest in methodology. There is nothing wrong with this. Most people who try genealogy do a few weekends of it and stop, and building a research system first would be the wrong order.

Spreadsheet only is the right call if you are working from physical records and family papers rather than indexed databases, if your lines are in places the big platforms index poorly, if the data is sensitive enough that you want it off the internet entirely, or if you have already got a decade of research sprawled across four documents and the problem is organisation rather than discovery.

That last case is the most common one, and it is not really a versus question at all. The tree exists. It is just in four places, and none of them can tell you what to do on Saturday.

The column layout, the ID system and the ahnentafel numbering that make the spreadsheet half of this work: how to build a family tree spreadsheet that still calculates at five generations.

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Family Tree, Genealogy Research & Ancestry Record Organizer — $13.99

Built for exactly the role described above — the system of record that sits alongside whatever you search with. 16 linked tabs and 15,700 working formulas, with a fictional sample family already loaded: 30 people, 26 sources, 12 DNA matches, 23 census rows, a tree reaching 1836.

The tabs that do the work a subscription site does not: a Research Log that records the searches that found nothing, so you stop paying twice for the same dead end. Sources rating every record Proven, Probable, Possible or Disproven, and flagging anything still being relied on after you disproved it. DNA Matches with a Next Action column that never lets a close match sit unattached to a named ancestor. Research Costs with days-to-renewal, an annual run rate and a warning before anything bills.

Plus Individuals with a completeness score and six row checks, a five-generation Pedigree with 31 ahnentafel-numbered slots that redraws when you change the root person, Census Grid comparing an enumerator’s recorded age against the birth year you hold, Timeline, Interviews ranked by age, Heirlooms, and a Dashboard running 24 checks against your own entries.

Every historical date is stored twice — as written and as a plain year — so an 1836 birth calculates exactly like last year’s.

Works in Excel and Google Sheets. No macros, no add-ons, no subscription. Works offline, so your family’s data stays on your own machine — and the file is yours permanently.

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