Our Review:

RootsMagic Essentials can import directly from several other genealogy programs as well as from a GEDCOM file. This functionality should be more widely supported as a lot of detail is lost in transfers with the GEDCOM format.

RootsMagic Essentials has a variety of source templates based somewhat on Elizabeth Shown Mills "Evidence".

It opens multiple databases or the same database multiple times and displays them side by side.

UTF-8 character encoding is supported.

The reports and charts produced by RootsMagic are generally better in appearance than other competitive programs. Place, citation, to-do list and narrative reports are supported. Bibliographies are available for some reports. Saving reports to other file formats is disabled—viewing and printing is allowed. There is no option to hide living people or events for living folks and no option to exclude private notes in reports. Reports not supported in free version are nicely greyed out.

I like the copy and paste citation functionality.

All parent relationships assume that the parents are married. This would give a very odd impression for children of an incestuous (parent/child) relationship.

RootsMagic displays a nagging splash screen at every start up requiring the user to chose between the free and the Full version. This is immediately followed with a RootsMagic News screen. Many menu choices are not functional in the free version but non-functional reports are greyed out.

It has no People List views and no relationship calculator.

Don't bother selecting the 68M place database download. The free version does not support the function.