Ancestorii vs a private Facebook family group.

Reach, mostly. Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report found that Facebook is one of the three most commonly used apps among UK adults, along with WhatsApp and Google Maps. In 2020, Meta said more than 1.8 billion people used Groups every month. If your parents, aunts and cousins are already on Facebook, a group asks nobody to download anything new.

Meta has also given groups chats for real-time conversation, events, and topics that sort posts by hashtag. For working out who is bringing what on Sunday, or sharing party photos the same evening, a group works well, and it is free to use.

Only members. Since Meta simplified its group settings in 2019, a private group is one where only members can see who else is in it and what they have posted. It can be visible, so people can find it in search, or hidden. Former “secret” groups became private and hidden, and “closed” groups became private and visible.

Private is not permanent, though. Since November 2025, admins can switch a private group to public. Meta says everything posted before the switch stays visible only to admins, moderators and people who were already members, and the member list is limited to admins and moderators. Any admin can cancel within three days, and every member is told when the change happens.

Every member also needs a Facebook account, and Meta's terms say you cannot use Facebook under 13.

On Ancestorii, My Family has no public setting. Only people invited into your family space can see it, through an email invitation, a share link or a family join code. Everyone inside sees everything, and only the person who added something can delete it. A story becomes public only if a member publishes it on Our Stories, the separate public feed.

Facebook is free because of advertising. Meta's terms, effective from 4 March 2026, say businesses, organisations and other persons pay Meta to show you ads, and that Meta does not sell your personal data.

In September 2025 Meta announced a second option for people in the UK: a subscription for no ads at £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android. Meta says subscribers' personal data will not be used to show them ads, and people on the free version keep seeing ads.

Ancestorii has no ads on either plan, and it does not sell, rent or trade personal data. It is paid for by Premium, at £3.99, €4.99 or $5.99 a month for a whole family, and by the printed keepsakes families order. Both companies say you keep ownership of what you post.

Facebook can memorialise the account, adding “Remembering” above the person's name. When Meta introduced legacy contacts in 2015, it said the person you choose can write a post pinned to the top of your profile, update the profile picture and cover photo and, if you allowed it, download an archive of your photos, posts and profile information. They cannot log in as you or see your private messages. You can instead ask for your account to be permanently deleted after death.

In 2019 Meta added a separate Tributes tab where friends and family can post, which the legacy contact can moderate, and let parents who lost a child under 18 ask to become their legacy contact. It is worth choosing a legacy contact now. Our guide to what happens to your photos when you die covers other services too.

On Ancestorii, what a relative added stays in the family space for everyone in it, and other members cannot delete it, because only the person who created something can. A Loved Ones page can hold someone's dates, including the date they died, and their life story in four chapters. If a family stops paying for Premium, it returns to the Free plan and nothing is deleted.

In a group, a memory is a post. Posts can be sorted by topic with hashtags and searched, but a photo from 1994 shared today sits among today's posts. Ancestorii sorts memories the way families remember them:

Many families will use both, for different jobs.

• Keep the group if everyone is on Facebook and you mostly share news, plan get-togethers and post photos on the day.
• Add Ancestorii if some relatives are not on Facebook, if you would rather keep family memories away from an ad-funded platform, or if you want them findable by person and date years from now.

A simple routine works: let the group carry the news, and when a photo or story is worth keeping, add it to Ancestorii with its date, the people in it and the story behind it. To fill the gaps, send a relative one of Ancestorii's 46 ready-made questions from the app. They answer in the app, and you get an email when they do.