First, find the programs that you use or have used and please rate them and write a review for them. That will help this site accumulate opinions and make it more useful for everyone. The easiest way to find your programs are with the search box at the top of the page.
The search box indexes the title and all the words in the description of the software. It does NOT index the categories or the url or the reviews. So you can enter part of the program name, author’s name, or keywords that may be in the description. If you enter multiple words, the listing must have all of them. Use double quotes “to enclose phrases”.
Or feel free to select the categories that interest you, and select the sort order you would like to display the programs.
Click on the title of a program, or on the Reviews link to see the individual ratings and reviews.
For the program you want to review, click on the “Add Your Review” link, to get to the bottom of that program’s page where you can add your opinion.
There are 5 criteria and you can pick from 1 star (worst) to 5 stars (best) for each of them:
- Enjoy Using It: Is it a bother or is it fun to use?
- Use It Often: Is this something you rarely use or always use?
- Easy Input: How simple, fast and easy is data entry into it?
- Useful Output: Does this program give you something you really use?
- Overall Rating: Taking everything into account, would you recommend it?
Then please add your opinion and any other comments you might have in the text box. After that are two lines for what you think are the best and worst things about the program.
Licences:
- Free: no cost to you
- Purchase: you have to buy it, but it may have a free trial.
- Subscription: you have to pay to use it over a time period.
- Unsupported: may still be available, but without support.
Platform:
- Windows: Anything back to Windows 3.0, but not DOS.
- Mac: Any version of Apple’s Operating Systems.
- Unix: Any flavor of Unix or Linux.
- Handheld: Palms, Windows CE, iPods and phones.
- Online: You visit a website with your browser to access it.
Type:
- Full Featured: Input of your genealogy data, GEDCOM output, and more.
- Utility: Does something useful by reading data from GEDCOM files.
- Builds Website: From either a Full Featured or Utility program.
- Auxiliary: A program useful to genealogists, but does not read GEDCOM.
All that’s required is your name and e-mail address. I require those just to help verify that you are a real person and to avoid spam machines from making a mess of this site. Only your name (with a link to your website if you enter one) will be displayed. Your e-mail address will never be displayed on the site. It will be locked away and will never be sold or given to anyone. You will not be spammed by me or anyone else because of your post at this site.
As far as I am concerned, the person who writes the review owns the review. By posting it here, you are giving me permission to allow the site to display your review, but I will never copy or use your post anywhere else without getting your permission first.
Of course, I cannot police the Internet. So I can’t prevent anyone else from copying your review. If you see it anywhere else, I can promise you that I did not give it to them. So if that’s the case and you want it taken down, please contact that site owner to do so.
I truly wanted to hear what people liked and disliked about all the genealogy programs that are out there. See the About page for more of a background on this.
Some of the links on the site to the products do have affilate links. If you get to the product’s website from these links and eventually buy their product, I can get a small commission. But this really only amounts to pocket change.
One of the reasons why I want to hear people’s opinions is so that I can use that information to help guide the development of my program Behold. I am not in any way attempting to bias the ratings and reviews that are submitted here, or even the ratings and reviews submitted for Behold itself. What you see is what was submitted, but I do reserve the right to delete posts that are inappropriate or objectionable.
Any constructive comments, either good or bad will be allowed. Even disagreements or arguments with other reviews are fine. There’s nothing wrong with differences of opinion. But reviews that offer no information of value as to what it is you like or don’t like are subject to deletion. If there is a borderline comment, then it will be kept unless the commenter cannot be identified as a real person. Also multiple reviews in short order of a single program by the same person or the same person attempting to pose as different people, will be deleted. But feel free to come back at a later time and add a new review and rating if your feelings change.
I don’t mind if the developer adds in their own review of their own program, and maybe highlights some features or benefits that the short description doesn’t. They’ll probably rate their own program 5 stars. But I don’t want developers using GenSoftReviews as a place to defend their program with counterpoints or corrections to users reviews. Users should have the right to say what they think, even if they may not be factual. It should be up to other users to defend the program if they see reason to do so. It should not be the developer.
The ratings are weighted by how recently the review and rating were submitted. A rating submitted today will have twice the weight of a rating from a year ago and 4 times the weight of one from 2 years ago. So if you try a simple average of all a program’s ratings, they often will not equal the total rating.
Those little icons are a free service by Snap.com that shows a preview of the website the link will take you to. It lets you get a feeling of where you will go before you go there. Snap is a reputable company (as far as I know). I’ve used those links for many years on other pages I have, and I’ve never heard about any problems with them.
RSS is way for you to get new information from a site without having to visit the site. You get a program that manages your RSS feeds, and it goes out and checks for updates to all the sites you’re interested in watching at once. There is a great little video at YouTube that explains it very simply and entertainingly. Personally, I use the RSS reader that’s integrated into Internet Explorer 7. You can use it, or Google Reader, or any other one that works for you.
You can use the RSS feed link that is in the top section of all the pages of this site to get all the individual reviews that are submitted to this site. If you only want to monitor the reviews of specific programs, you can get the feed for the individual programs on the page with the reviews for that program.
Just go to the Suggest page of this site, and let me know about it. As long as it is software that is genealogy-related, I’ll be happy to add it.
Please let me know. Again, just use the Suggest page of this site, and I’ll fix it as soon as possible.
Telling somewhat what genealogy program is best is like trying to tell them what type of car is best. Each person has different needs, likes, and opinions, so what’s right for someone is not necessarily right for someone else.
Check out the reviews here at GenSoftReviews. Try out programs that sound good (almost all have free trials), and find the one that’s right for you.
You might want to check out the GenSoftReviews User Choice Awards. That lists the programs users rated the best given a minimum number of reviews. It may give you a good starting point.
You can use the Suggest page, or e-mail me directly. My e-mail address is at the bottom of every page of this site.
This site is Copyright © 2008-2010 Louis Kessler, All Rights Reserved
