Most comparisons of these three come down to a table of record counts and a winner. That's not useful, because record counts are enormous on all three and the number tells you nothing about whether your family is in there.
The three differ on three axes that actually decide it: where their records are strongest, who owns the tree you build, and what you're left with when you stop paying. Here's each, and then a recommendation by situation.
The one-paragraph version
FamilySearch is free, nonprofit, and built on one shared tree everyone contributes to. Ancestry is the largest commercial platform, strongest in US and UK records, with the biggest consumer DNA database. MyHeritage is the international specialist, unusually strong across continental Europe, with the most aggressive automatic matching.
Most serious researchers end up using at least two. That's not indecision — they're built for different things.
Axis one: where the records are
This is the axis that actually decides it, and it's the one most comparisons skip because it requires saying something specific.
FamilySearch has extraordinary reach into parish registers, civil registration, and church records worldwide, built on decades of microfilming archives in person, country by country. Its catalog — a description of everything held, including material not yet digitized or indexed — is the single most underused research tool in genealogy. Coverage is uneven by design: it went where archives allowed access, which produces surprising depth in some countries and gaps in others.
Ancestry is strongest in the United States and the United Kingdom. US censuses, vital records, immigration and naturalization, military records, newspapers. If your research is American, this is where the density is. UK coverage is likewise deep. It also holds an enormous body of user-submitted trees, which is either a shortcut or a hazard depending on how carefully you use it.
MyHeritage built its position on the non-English-speaking world. Continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe are genuinely better served here than at Ancestry, and if your lines run into Germany, Poland, Norway, or the Baltics, this is often the platform that breaks a wall the others can't.
The practical test: pick one hard ancestor — someone you know exists but can't fully document — and run them through the free search on each. Whichever platform surfaces something new is the one your family is on. This takes twenty minutes and is worth more than any comparison article, including this one.
Axis two: who owns the tree
This difference is philosophical, not featural, and it surprises people.
Ancestry and MyHeritage give you a private tree. It's yours. You control it, you decide who sees it, and nobody can alter it. If a distant cousin researches the same great-great-grandmother, they build their own separate copy of her in their own separate tree, and you may never know they exist.
FamilySearch has one tree, shared by everyone, covering deceased people. Your great-great-grandmother has exactly one profile on it, and you and that cousin both work on the same one.
The upside is real: new users routinely connect three generations from memory and find that six more are already documented behind them. It's the closest thing genealogy has to a collective effort.
The downside is equally real: what you contribute can be changed. A profile you carefully sourced can be merged, re-dated, or reattached by someone with a different reading of the evidence. There's no ownership and no final say — disagreements play out in public on the profile itself.
Experienced users mostly conclude the trade is worth it, and they learn to attach solid sources to anything they care about, because a well-documented profile is much harder to casually rewrite. More on how that model works.
On all three, living people are private.
Axis three: what happens when you stop paying
Nobody asks this before subscribing and everybody asks it eventually.
FamilySearch: nothing happens, because there's nothing to stop. There's no paid tier. This is not a freemium arrangement with a conversion waiting at the end of it — the whole service is free, funded because the record-gathering is doctrinally significant to the church that operates it rather than because it's expected to return a profit.
Ancestry and MyHeritage: your tree persists, but your access to the records attached to it doesn't. The distinction matters enormously and people misunderstand it constantly. The census page you attached as a source is Ancestry's document, not yours — when the subscription lapses, the attachment remains but the image behind it goes back behind the paywall. You keep the skeleton; the evidence goes away.
What survives regardless is a GEDCOM export, which every platform supports. Names, dates, places, relationships — the structure of your research, in a plain text file you control. What it does not carry is the attached record images or photographs, which is the part people are shocked by. More on what a GEDCOM actually contains.
The one habit worth adopting today, whichever platform you use: export a GEDCOM periodically and keep it somewhere that isn't a company.
What the money actually buys
No prices here, because all three reprice constantly and any number in this article would be wrong within months. What's stable is the structure.
Ancestry runs several US membership levels that differ mainly by record scope — US-only, worldwide, and a tier bundling newspaper collections. There's also a separately-priced add-on with the more advanced research tooling: tree error checking, advanced filtering, ancestor mapping, and enhanced DNA match analysis. DNA testing is a separate one-time purchase and is not included in any subscription.
MyHeritage splits into a data subscription (records access) and a family site plan (tree tools, with a cap on tree size at the lower level and no cap above it), plus combined tiers and a top tier adding newspapers and other extras. The split catches people out — it's possible to be paying and still hit a wall you assumed you'd bought past.
FamilySearch has no tiers.
Worth knowing: MyHeritage moved its DNA testing to low-pass whole genome sequencing during 2026, a different technology from the genotyping arrays the industry has used for years, and added Y-chromosome reporting for existing kits in August. If DNA is a significant part of your interest, that's a live difference rather than a settled one.
Which one, by situation
| If you... | Start with | Add |
|---|---|---|
| Are starting from scratch, anywhere | FamilySearch | — |
| Research primarily US lines | FamilySearch | Ancestry |
| Research primarily UK or Irish lines | FamilySearch | Ancestry, then a UK specialist |
| Have continental European ancestry | FamilySearch | MyHeritage |
| Have Scandinavian or Eastern European lines | MyHeritage | FamilySearch's catalog |
| Want DNA matching with the largest pool | Ancestry | — |
| Refuse to pay for anything | FamilySearch | Your national and state archives |
| Are stuck on one specific ancestor | Whichever surfaces them | — |
The default recommendation for most people is FamilySearch first, and not because it's free. It's because the shared tree means you may inherit generations of someone else's work in your first session, and because you'll learn what your family actually needs before spending anything. Then add whichever paid platform matches your geography.
The thing all three have in common
They are research platforms. Every one of them is built to help you find, evaluate, and record evidence — dense interfaces full of sources, conflicts, hints, and uncertainty, which is exactly what evaluating evidence requires.
None of them is built to show your family to your family. That's a different job with opposite requirements, and it's the one that goes undone in most households — years of work that lives behind a login and gets looked at deliberately, a few times a year, by one person. More on that gap.
Pick the platform that has your records. Then think separately about where the result of all that work is going to end up.
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