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GenSoftReviews Users Choice Awards 2019 - Thu, 2 Jan 2020

I’m pleased to announce the winners of the 11th annual GenSoftReviews Users Choice Awards.

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Users of genealogy software go to GenSoftReviews to rate and review their software and say what they like and don’t like about it. These awards are given to software that has achieved at least a 4.00 out of 5 rating at the end of 2019 from  10 or more reviews which included at least one review during 2019.

GenSoftReviews uses an exponential weighting algorithm so that a review a year old will have 1/2 the weight, 2 years old will have 1/4 weight, etc. This ensures that the most recent reviews will always have the greatest influence.

At the end of 2019, GenSoftReviews had:

  • 1025 programs listed
  • 303 programs with at least 1 user review
  • 60 programs with at least 10 user reviews
  • 42 programs with at least 10 user reviews and 1+ review(s) in 2019.

So 42 programs were eligible for an award this year.

Of those, 20 programs won a Users Choice Award by ending the year with a user rating of at least 4.00 out of 5. The winning programs for 2019 are:

  1. Second Site for TMG - Rated 5.00 out of 5

  2. The Next Generation (TNG) - Rated 4.91 out of 5

  3. Personal Ancestral File (PAF) - Rated 4.87 out of 5

  4. Generations - Rated 4.83 out of 5

  5. Ahnenblatt - Rated 4.80 out of 5

  6. Brother’s Keeper - Rated 4.80 out of 5

  7. webtrees - Rated 4.79 out of 5

  8. Genealogie Online - Rated 4.77 out of 5

  9. GedSite - Rated 4.73 out of 5

  10. Family Book Creator - Rated 4.70 out of 5

  11. Family Historian - Rated 4.62 out of 5

  12. The Master Genealogist (TMG) - Rated 4.51 out of 5

  13. Family Tree Maker - Up To Version 16 - Rated 4.49 out of 5

  14. Famberry - Rated 4.44 out of 5

  15. Ancestral Quest - Rated 4.35 out of 5

  16. Mundia - Rated 4.22 out of 5

  17. Ultimate Family Tree - Rated 4.16 out of 5

  18. MyHeritage - Rated 4.14 out of 5

  19. Reunion - Rated 4.12 out of 5

  20. iFamily for Mac - Rated 4.03 out of 5

Congratulations to all the winners! Please continue to make your users happy!


A Few Observations

The top rated program this year was Second Site for TMG achieving a perfect 5.00 score on 24 reviews. Second Site was written by John Cardinal and is a Windows program that creates a website directly from the database of the the program The Master Genealogist (TMG) by Bob Velke. TMG was discontinued in 2014 but there are still many users of that program. Those users continue to like TMG and have continued to rate it high enough to earn another Users Choice Award this year.

John Cardinal has a second program on the list as well:  GedSite creates a website like Second Site, but uses a GEDCOM file as input instead of a TMG database.

Another website creator program in second place is Darrin Lythgoe’s The Next Generation (TNG). Darrin’s program is one of 4 winning programs that first won  a GenSoftReviews Users Choice award in 2009, the first year of the awards. The other programs that also won in 2009 are Personal Ancestral File (PAF), Brother’s Keeper and Reunion.

Three programs are winners for the first time this year:  Second Site for TMG, Gedsite and Mundia.  Mundia was an online site that Ancestry purchased and then closed down in 2014. But there are still users that relish the memory of it.

In addition to Mundia, the winners include 5 other no longer supported programs that users still love. They are: Personal Ancestral File (PAF), Generations, The Master Genealogist, Family Tree Maker - Up To Version 16 and Ultimate Family Tree (UFT). It is especially eyebrow-raising that UFT is still loved by users since it was discontinued in 2003 which is now 17 years ago.

Supported full-featured Windows programs on the list include Brother’s Keeper, Family Historian, Ahnenblatt and Ancestral Quest.

Supported full-featured Mac programs on the list are: Reunion and iFamily for Mac.

Supported full-featured Online programs on the list are:  webtrees, Genealogie Online, Famberry and MyHeritage.

The winner list includes one winning utility program: Family Book Creator which is a plugin for Family Tree Maker that creates family books from your FTM data.

Winners from 2018 that are absent from the list this year include Roots Magic, Family Tree Builder, Clooz, Oxy-Gen and Relatively Yours, as each received a few reviews that put them below the 4.00 threshold, and Evidentia, Rootstrust, Familienbande and Ancestris that did not have at least one review in 2019.


Thank You

Thank you to all the people who have come to GenSoftReviews to rate and review the genealogy software you use. Since I opened the site on September 24, 2008, you have contributed close to 5,600 reviews!

Please do continue to go to GenSoftReviews each year to update your assessment of the programs you use. Hopefully your reviews at GenSoftReviews will help the software developers to make the programs better for you and for everyone.

     


    Update: Jan 5: Ahnenblatt’s rating was adjusted due to seven negative reviews found to be made by one person and now are weighted as one person instead of seven.

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    The Following 1 Site Has Linked Here

    1. Genealogy News Bytes - 3 January 2020 - Geneamusings - Randy Seaver : Sat, 4 Jan 2020
      * GenSoftReviews Users Choice Awards 2019

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