MyHeritage vs FamilySearch: What You Pay For, and What Was Free All Along

You have a free FamilySearch account and a MyHeritage trial running out on Friday. The question in front of you is whether to pay, and if so, for which of the five MyHeritage plans on the checkout page.

Most comparisons answer this as if the two sites were competitors fighting for the same customer, and score them on record counts, tree features and price. That framing gets the most useful fact wrong. MyHeritage and FamilySearch signed a partnership in 2013, they share data in both directions, and FamilySearch puts MyHeritage on the computers in its own family history centres.

So the real question is narrower and more practical: what can MyHeritage give you that FamilySearch does not, and are you about to pay for something you already have?

The short answer. MyHeritage and FamilySearch are partners, not substitutes. Under an agreement MyHeritage announced on 15 October 2013, FamilySearch shared more than 2 billion records and its family tree profiles of deceased people with MyHeritage, and FamilySearch has said in writing that the records its volunteers indexed stay free at FamilySearch.org. So part of what a MyHeritage records subscription unlocks is data you can already search for nothing. What MyHeritage adds is its own collections, which FamilySearch's blog has described as including more than a billion French records, and matching technology that runs against your private tree. Check the plan before you pay: MyHeritage's own help centre lists historical records under the Data subscription, not under PremiumPlus. PremiumPlus is a family tree plan. Records come with Data, or with Complete, which bundles the two.

The two sites have shared data since 2013

The partnership is documented on both sides, and both documents are worth reading because they say slightly different things.

MyHeritage's announcement, on its blog on 15 October 2013, said it would add more than 2 billion records from FamilySearch's global collections, plus profiles from FamilySearch's shared family tree, to SuperSearch, MyHeritage's record search engine. Its own question-and-answer section put the parts at about 1 billion profiles of deceased people from the FamilySearch Family Tree and about 1.2 billion additional historical records, and said living people were excluded. It also answered the question you would want answered: some of the shared collections would be free on MyHeritage, and viewing the others would require MyHeritage's existing data subscription.

FamilySearch published its own frequently asked questions about the same agreement. One answer matters more than the rest: volunteer-indexed records continue to be available free at FamilySearch.org, as they always have been, and a person paying for MyHeritage may also access them from within MyHeritage's properties.

Read those two statements together. The same index can sit behind a paywall on one site and in front of no paywall on the other. That is not a scandal, and MyHeritage never hid it. Both companies said it in 2013. It does mean that when a MyHeritage search turns up a record and asks you to subscribe to see it, the first thing to check is whether FamilySearch has the same index for free.

The traffic also runs the other way. A FamilySearch blog post by Amie Tennant, dated 19 December 2023, describes a MyHeritage search box on each person page in the FamilySearch Family Tree, which runs a MyHeritage search from that person's details. A result found that way can be attached to the FamilySearch person as a source.

And one boundary held from the start. MyHeritage's 2013 announcement said that family trees uploaded by MyHeritage users stay on MyHeritage and are never licensed, shared, sold or given to any third party, FamilySearch included. The records crossed over. Your tree does not.

You may already have MyHeritage for free

Before you pay anything, check whether one of three routes already covers you.

At a FamilySearch centre or library. On 4 November 2014 FamilySearch announced that MyHeritage Library Edition, MyHeritage's institutional service, was available free at every FamilySearch family history centre and at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, now renamed the FamilySearch Library. Tennant's 2023 post repeats the point and adds that many public libraries also offer MyHeritage Library Edition to their patrons. FamilySearch's company facts page, updated on 8 September 2026, counts 6,642 FamilySearch centres.

As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On 26 September 2014 FamilySearch announced that Church members could receive free personal subscriptions to Ancestry, findmypast and MyHeritage, under separate agreements with each company. The sign-up runs through FamilySearch's partner access page.

Through your own library card. Library Edition is sold to institutions rather than individuals, so whether your local library has it is a question for the library. It costs nothing to ask.

One honest limit on all three: an institutional session is a research session. You can search, read and save what you find, but your private tree and its automated matches live in your personal account, and that is the part a library terminal does not replace.

The headline numbers do not measure the same thing

Every comparison puts the two record counts side by side. Here they are, with what each one actually counts.

Do not subtract one figure from the other. FamilySearch counts searchable names. MyHeritage counts records, and a record can carry many names or none. A FamilySearch blog post profiling MyHeritage, written when MyHeritage's count stood at more than 7 billion, described that total as including newspapers and names from family trees, which are not the same kind of thing as an indexed baptism. MyHeritage's own pages do not agree with each other either: its help article on subscription types, dated 21 July 2026, says "more than 30 billion historical records", while its about page says 38.6 billion. Both figures may well be right as of the day each was written. Neither tells you whether your ancestor is in it.

Neither site publishes the overlap. Tennant's FamilySearch post puts it carefully: some of FamilySearch's record holdings are the same as MyHeritage's, and there are still many unique collections on each website. We searched both companies' help centres and blogs in October 2026 for a figure on how much of MyHeritage's collection came from FamilySearch, and found none. So nobody outside the two companies can tell you what share of a MyHeritage subscription is FamilySearch data you could have had for free. It is somewhere between a little and a lot, and it depends entirely on the country you are researching.

What MyHeritage holds that FamilySearch does not

This is the part of the subscription that is actually yours to buy, and it is real.

Its own collections. Tennant's post singles out more than a billion French records, and notes that MyHeritage acquired the French genealogy company Filae in 2021, bringing births, marriages, deaths, censuses and public family trees with it. The FamilySearch profile of MyHeritage describes particular strength in Scandinavian records, including Swedish household examination records, the 1930 Denmark census and church records for Denmark and Finland. If your research runs through France or Scandinavia, MyHeritage is likely to hold material you will not find indexed elsewhere.

Matching that works against your tree. MyHeritage's Record Matches compare the people in your tree against its historical records, and its Smart Matches compare them against other users' trees. The same FamilySearch profile notes that MyHeritage was the only one of the big four sites to include unindexed digitised newspapers in its automated hints. FamilySearch has hints too, including the AI-generated ones covered in which AI tools can actually find your ancestors' records, but they run against the shared tree, not a private one.

A private tree. This is the difference people underrate. The FamilySearch Family Tree is one tree, shared by everyone, which anyone signed in can edit. A MyHeritage tree is yours. If you want your working hypotheses kept out of a shared tree until you are sure of them, that alone can justify a MyHeritage account, and the free Basic plan may be enough for it.

DNA. FamilySearch does not sell a DNA test. MyHeritage does, and its about page puts its DNA database at 9.6 million people.

PremiumPlus is a tree plan, not a records plan

This is the most common purchase mistake, and MyHeritage's plan names make it easy to make.

MyHeritage's help article "What Types of Subscriptions Does MyHeritage Offer?", dated 21 July 2026, lists six plans. Read the list for one question only: which of them include historical records?

MyHeritage says the same thing more directly elsewhere. A second help article, on the difference between a family site subscription and a Data subscription, also dated 21 July 2026, files Premium and PremiumPlus as family site subscriptions focused on the tree, and describes the Data subscription as the one designed for historical record research. And MyHeritage's own PremiumPlus sales page, in the regional version it served us, states that the plan does not include access to its historical records or Record Matches, and points to Complete for those.

The free-plan figures come from a separate MyHeritage help article, "Is MyHeritage free?", dated 22 July 2026, which also says that searches are free and that viewing records may require a Data subscription.

So if what you want is records, PremiumPlus on its own is the wrong plan, however good its tree features are. You want Data, or Complete if you also want the tree features. If what you want is a large private tree with automated matching against other trees, and you plan to do your record work on FamilySearch, PremiumPlus may be exactly right.

One thing not to rely on here: prices. We have deliberately not quoted any. MyHeritage's prices vary by country, by currency and by promotion, and its pricing page served us a regional version rather than a single list. Read the checkout page on the day you buy, and read the renewal price as well as the first-year one.

Getting your tree out works differently on each

A subscription decision is also a decision about where your research lives, so check the exit before you commit.

MyHeritage exports a GEDCOM file. Its help article on exporting, dated 22 July 2026, describes the route: Manage Trees, then Export GEDCOM, with an option to include photos. The note underneath matters. The GEDCOM file is text, so it carries links to your photos rather than the photos themselves.

The FamilySearch Family Tree does not. FamilySearch's help centre says in plain words that you cannot download GEDCOM files from Family Tree. For a while it offered an export of eight generations in GEDCOM 7 format, and that page now says the resource no longer supports GEDCOM export and points you to compatible tree-management apps in its Solution Gallery instead. That is a reasonable design for a shared tree, which is nobody's private file, but it means your personal copy of the work has to live somewhere else.

Even a clean export does not guarantee your notes and citations arrive intact, which is its own problem, covered in which parts of your family tree survive a GEDCOM export.

How to decide, by what you are actually doing

The ranking below is ours, not either company's, so treat it as judgement.

If you are starting out and want records: FamilySearch first, and for a while FamilySearch only. It is free, it holds 16.93 billion searchable names, and its Full-Text Search, which FamilySearch made part of its standard tools in a post dated 30 August 2025, reads the handwriting inside nearly 2 billion images. Use MyHeritage's free Basic plan alongside it for a small private tree.

If your ancestors are French or Scandinavian: MyHeritage's own collections are a genuine reason to pay, and the plan you want is Data or Complete. Search on MyHeritage first to see whether the hits are in collections that exist only there.

If you already pay for MyHeritage: before you renew, search FamilySearch for the records you value most. If they are FamilySearch indexes, you can reach them for nothing.

If you can get to a FamilySearch centre or a library with Library Edition: do your record searching there and keep your paid subscription for the tree and the matching, or skip the subscription entirely.

If you are a Latter-day Saint: you very probably do not need to buy MyHeritage at all. Check partner access first.

For where these two sit among desktop programs, Ancestry and the DNA companies, see our comparison of ten genealogy tools.

What KleioBase does with MyHeritage and FamilySearch, and what it does not

Disclosure, since we sell a tool.

KleioBase is an AI research companion that turns scattered historical records into one connected family archive. It is not a third record site and it is not trying to be one. It works on the records you have already found, wherever you found them.

So it sits downstream of both. The images you save from FamilySearch or MyHeritage can be uploaded, and each one's people, dates, places and relationships are extracted and linked to everyone else in your archive, so the baptism from one site and the census from the other end up on the same person instead of in two tabs. A GEDCOM import brings in a tree exported from MyHeritage, and a re-import of an updated file can skip the people you already have. Duplicate matching then flags where the same person arrived twice. And the Research Companion can be asked about the whole archive at once, or asked to search the public web for the archive most likely to hold a record you are still missing.

GEDCOM import is available on every plan, including the free Explorer plan, limited only by the plan's person limit: 200 people on Explorer and 2,000 on Researcher, which is $15 a month.

Now the honest limits. Three of them.

It holds no records. It cannot search inside FamilySearch or MyHeritage for you, and it will not replace either subscription if a subscription is what you need.

It cannot pull your FamilySearch tree. Because the FamilySearch Family Tree does not export GEDCOM, there is no direct import from it. You would need one of FamilySearch's partner apps to produce the file first.

A large tree outgrows the free plan quickly. An imported MyHeritage tree of more than 200 people will not fit on Explorer. The import preview says so before anything is imported, and nothing is charged, but it is a limit you should know about before you export.

Where to start before your trial runs out

Take the five ancestors you most want records for, and for each one write down the country and the decade.

Search all five on FamilySearch first, signed in, using Full-Text Search as well as the ordinary index. Note what you find.

Then search the same five on MyHeritage, which is free to do on any plan. For every result it asks you to pay for, look at the collection name and check whether FamilySearch holds the same collection. What is left over, the hits that exist only on MyHeritage, is what a Data subscription would actually buy you.

If that list is long, buy Data or Complete, not PremiumPlus. If it is short, check whether a nearby FamilySearch centre or library offers Library Edition, and use your trial days there instead.

The volunteers who indexed most of FamilySearch's records did it so that anyone could search them for nothing, and FamilySearch has kept that promise in writing for more than a decade. A paid site can still be worth every penny. You just want to be sure the pennies are buying something the volunteers did not already give you.