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Whoever wrote the glowing #1 review for Ancestry.Com and their FTM software appears to have little or no experience with using it or its companion site Ancestry.Com.
You really cannot talk about one without the other.
I have been using both, FTM and Ancestry.com, for almost a year now and I have to be honest I do not know what to expect when using either one.
FTM 2012 and FTM 2014 are loaded with features that would be great if they worked as advertised. I started with FTM 2012. I found out real soon that it is prone to repeatedly crashing. When FTM 2014 came out in the hopes it would be better I upgraded and experienced even worse problems, mainly synchronizing and crashing. It got so bad that I finally uninstalled 2014 and reinstalled 2012.
After several months I reinstalled 2014 hoping some of the problems have been resolved. Right off the bat I had sync issue requiring uploading a new file from a FTM backup to Ancestry.com. And like FTM 2012, 2014 still crashes but not as often.
It seems every time I use FTM a new quirk shows up. Just recently I discovered a number of people with sex listed as "Unknown." No matter what I did in FTM to correct it, the sex would pop back to "Unknown."
What was really odd that when I would go to Ancestry.com the sex would be correct in some cases and "Unknown" in other. Generally correcting the "Unknown's" in Ancestry.Com would correct the sex in FTM.
Talking with their customer support has proven to be a bust. They are nice and polite but seldom helpful. The majority of the time they want to place the fault on the user, their computer, internet service and so on, for issues face by users of FTM and Ancestry.com.
Ancestry.com is no better and could be even worse than their FTM software. You never know what to expect.
I had a major issue with the website several weeks ago. Their hint system said I had over 300 hints. Trouble was I could not access any of them. Talking with their support was no help with them telling me the problem was on my end even when the support person was looking at the same thing I was on their website.
I finally gave up on them and fixed it on my own. Of course in doing so their "Hint" system generated a completely new set of "Hints" for many of the individuals so that in my FTM tree I have multiple references for the same event listed several times.
The Ancestry.com does contain a multitude of information. But finding it can be easy, complicated, frustrating not to mention time consuming.
In my tree I try to stick to direct-line individuals after about four generations back. Once you run out of census records for ancestors the information gets really messed up.
All one has to do is, is look at the User Family Trees starting in the 1800's and going back to realise tracing your roots is not as "Simple" as Ancestey.com and FTM advertise.
It is clear many users, current and past have given up for whatever reason.
And I can see why Ancestry.com can claim the largest database. Now just how accurate that database is, is questionable. Seems few of the users place a priority on accuracy.
On of the biggest issues I have with both Ancestry.com and FTM is when I need to delete individuals. I ran into this at the start when I started running across individuals in my software that had "No Direct Relationship." Neither FTM 2012ot 2014 has a filter to identify such individuals so they can be reviewed and handled as needed.
The source of the "No Direct Relationship" individuals was Ancestry.com. When I questioned them on this I was told they do not delete individuals.
I have since found this to be partially true. If you make a mistake and add individuals that turn out are not related, it would appear to be easy to delete the person where the incorrect linage starts. WRONG. When the person where the incorrect lineage starts is deleted, any individuals attached to them will disappear and become form what I call 'Ghost Trees" within the online tree. So when FTM and Ancestry.com are synced those individuals will down load into FTM as "No Direct Relationship" individuals.
Finding these "Ghost" individuals in the Ancestry.com tree is almost impossible. The only way I have found is to go through every individual in the FTM database and delete the "No Direct Relationship" individuals one at a time. Needless to say depending on the size of the tree it can be a time consuming and tedious process.
When you go to delete the individual it say all facts related to them will be deleted, again another false statement. If there are citations, photos or places associated with them they will remain.
I have ranted enough.
For those individuals that do decide to go with FTM/Ancestry.com my recommendation is to take your time and try to keep your tree as simple as possible.
In summary, I would not recommend Family Tree Maker (by Ancestry.com) to a friend.
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