Heartwood

The living core of your family tree — open, yours, and built to last generations.

Heartwood is an open-source, self-hostable family tree / genealogy platform — the evidence-first data depth of desktop tools like Gramps, with a family editing one tree together from a browser instead of one person's local file. Run it on your own server for free, forever — or let us host it for you for a small fee if you'd rather just fill in your family's story and not think about servers.

The name is the dense, enduring core of a tree's trunk. That's the idea: an open core you truly own, that outlives any single company or subscription.

Contents

• Screenshots
• Works great with Gramps
• How Heartwood compares
• Philosophy
• Open core, fair hosting
• Tech stack
• Self-hosting
• Documentation
• Contributing
• License

Screenshots

People list	Person profile	Add person

Works great with Gramps

Heartwood is built to be the cloud, collaborative counterpart to Gramps — not a competitor to it:

Family fills in the tree together in Heartwood (cloud, live, multiple relatives)
        → export GEDCOM 7.0 / GEDZIP
        → open in Gramps (free, local, offline — reports, DNA tools, custom filters)
        → edit further there
        → re-import into Heartwood, merges back into the shared cloud tree

We deliberately don't chase feature-parity with Gramps' deep desktop power-tools (reports, DNA, plugins) — we hand off to real Gramps for that instead of rebuilding it badly. What Heartwood adds is the thing a single-user desktop app fundamentally can't do: multiple relatives editing the same tree live, from a browser, with no lock-in either direction.

How Heartwood compares

The open-source genealogy space has powerful tools, but they were built in the PHP/desktop era. The polished tools (Ancestry, MyHeritage) are closed and rent-seeking. Heartwood owns the unoccupied corner: modern UX + open + self-hostable + managed-optional, all at once.

Feature	Heartwood	webtrees	Gramps Web	GeneWeb	Ancestry
Setup & Hosting
Open source	✅ AGPL	✅ GPL	✅ GPL	✅ LGPL	❌
Self-hostable	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌
Managed hosting option	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅ ($$$)
One-command deploy (Kamal)	✅	❌	❌	❌	—
SQLite in production — zero DB ops	✅	❌ MySQL	❌	❌	—
No Node.js / no build step	✅	✅	⚠️	✅	—
Core Genealogy
GEDCOM import	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
GEDCOM export — no lock-in	✅	✅	✅	✅	⚠️ limited
Interactive tree view (pedigree / descendants)	✅	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
Person profiles with life events	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Sources & citations (evidence-first, confidence levels)	✅	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
Photo & media attachments	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Rich-text life story / biography	✅	⚠️ notes	⚠️	❌	✅
Relationship calculator	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Collaboration
Multi-user support	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Role-based access (owner / editor)	✅	✅	⚠️	❌	✅
Multiple trees per installation	✅	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
Living-person privacy (built into schema)	✅	✅	✅	✅	⚠️
UX & Design
Modern, responsive UI	✅	⚠️	⚠️	❌	✅
Inline editing — no page reloads	✅ Hotwire	⚠️	⚠️	❌	✅
Timeline view	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Place maps	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Advanced
Smart hints / duplicate matching	⚠️ within-tree	❌	❌	❌	✅ ($$$)
DNA matching	🔜	❌	❌	❌	✅ ($$$)
Free forever, no subscription	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌

✅ Supported · ⚠️ Partial · ❌ Not available · 🔜 Planned · — Not applicable

Philosophy

• Own your roots. Your family's history is too important to rent. The core is AGPL-licensed and self-hostable in minutes.
• Boringly solid. A canonical Rails 8 app — SQLite, Hotwire, vanilla CSS, no Node, no build step, no Redis. Easy to deploy, easy to understand, easy to keep alive.
• For real people. Intuitive enough for a grandparent to add a cousin, powerful enough for a serious genealogist (GEDCOM import/export, sources, media).
• Global by construction. Bilingual (English + Russian) from the first release, on generic Rails I18n — because a popular open-source family-tree app has to work for people who don't read English.

Open core, fair hosting

• Self-host the full core for free under the AGPL-3.0.
• Hosted plan (optional): pay monthly or once, and use our server — same app, zero ops.

Tech stack

The "vanilla Rails" stack, on purpose:

• Ruby on Rails 8.1 — the framework
• SQLite — the database (yes, in production)
• Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus) — interactivity without a SPA
• Propshaft + importmap — assets with no Node, no bundler
• Vanilla CSS — modern CSS, no framework
• Solid Queue / Cache / Cable — jobs, cache, websockets on the database
• Kamal — deploy anywhere with one command

Self-hosting

git clone https://github.com/andreiyurik/heartwood.git
cd heartwood
bin/setup
bin/rails server

Open http://localhost:3000 and start your tree. Production deploy is one kamal deploy away — see config/deploy.yml.

Documentation

The full design lives in a linked Markdown vault at docs/index.md — domain model, GEDCOM/import-export strategy, architecture decisions (ADRs), and the product roadmap. It's written to be read by humans and coding agents alike, and it's the single source of truth: if code and docs disagree, the docs win.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Before working on something non-trivial, please open an issue first to discuss the approach — it's a canonical vanilla-Rails app on purpose (see docs/architecture/stack.md for the hard constraints), and we'd rather align early than review a PR that goes against the grain of the project.

License

The Heartwood core is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). See LICENSE. In short: it's free to use, modify, and self-host — and if you run a modified version as a network service, you share your changes back.