BillionGraves Review: Is It Free, and How Does It Compare to Find a Grave?
Short answer: yes, BillionGraves is free to search, and the records will stay free — the company says so in writing. What you pay for is BillionGraves Plus, listed at $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year, which adds surname alerts, a "walk through" view of neighbouring graves and high-resolution headstone photos. Against Find a Grave, it trades size for accuracy: fewer records, but each photograph carries the GPS point where it was taken.
That is most of what people want to know. The rest of this review is for the two groups who need more than a sentence — the family historian deciding whether Plus is worth it, and the family who has just found a relative's headstone online and did not put it there.
What BillionGraves Actually Is
BillionGraves is a cemetery database built by volunteers with a phone app. You walk a cemetery, photograph each headstone, and the app stores the image together with its GPS coordinates. Other volunteers — often at home, sometimes on the other side of the world — then transcribe the names and dates from the photos.
Two design choices follow from that, and they explain almost everything good and bad about the site:
- Every record starts with a photograph. There is no such thing as a BillionGraves entry that someone typed from memory or copied from another website. If the record exists, somebody stood in front of the stone.
- Every record has a location. Not "Section C, somewhere near the oak tree" but a point on a map you can navigate to. For anyone who has spent an afternoon walking rows in the rain looking for one surname, this is the feature that sells it.
It calls itself the world's largest GPS-linked cemetery database, and that qualifier matters. It is not the largest cemetery database — Find a Grave is, by a wide margin — but it is the largest where the location of each grave was recorded on the spot.
BillionGraves is also a certified FamilySearch partner. Transcribed records are indexed into FamilySearch's historical records as the BillionGraves Index, which means many people use BillionGraves data without ever visiting the site.
Is BillionGraves Free?
For what most people come for, yes.
Free, with an account:
- Searching every record and viewing the headstone photo
- Seeing the grave's location on a map
- Uploading photos with the app and transcribing records
- Adding information and linking records to relatives
The company's own wording is that "our database of records will always be free."
BillionGraves Plus is the paid tier. The support pages list it at $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year, with discounts offered by email to long-standing and active users, so you may see a lower price when you log in. It adds:
- Record Watches — enter up to 30 surnames and get an email whenever a headstone with one of them is transcribed
- Virtual walkthrough — from any record, browse the headstones photographed around it
- High-resolution images of the stones
- Nearby and related graves — spouses, parents and children buried in the same area
There is also a volunteer route to Plus. Upload 1,000 photographs or complete 500 transcriptions in a month and you are credited with a free month. For a genealogy society photographing a whole cemetery, that threshold is reached in a weekend.
Is Plus worth it? For one grave, no — search is free and the photo is visible. For an active family history project, Record Watches are the one feature that does something you cannot do by hand: they tell you when a stone you did not know existed has just been transcribed. If you are researching a surname across a region, a year of Plus costs less than a single cemetery trip. Buy it when you have a surname list, not before.
BillionGraves vs Find a Grave
| BillionGraves | Find a Grave | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free; Plus $9.99/mo or $59.99/yr | Free |
| Size | Smaller | Largest — 265M+ memorials |
| How records are made | Photographed on site with the app | Photos, typed entries, or both |
| GPS for each grave | Yes, recorded automatically | Sometimes, if a volunteer adds it |
| Records without a photo | No | Common |
| Biographies and memorial pages | Minimal | Yes, often long |
| Owned by / tied to | FamilySearch partner, MyHeritage partnership | Ancestry |
The practical difference is this. Find a Grave is where a grave is most likely to be listed. BillionGraves is where a listed grave is most likely to be exactly where the record says. Find a Grave's entries are frequently created from obituaries or cemetery lists before anyone photographs the stone, which is why so many carry a "photo request" rather than a picture. BillionGraves cannot have that problem; it also cannot list a grave nobody has walked to.
So researchers generally use both, in a fixed order: Find a Grave to find out whether a record exists anywhere, then BillionGraves to see the stone and get the location. If both come up empty, FamilySearch and the cemetery office are next. We lay out the full research sequence, plus the other databases worth checking, in our Find a Grave alternatives guide.
Where BillionGraves Falls Short
Being fair about a free, volunteer-built tool means being specific.
Coverage is uneven. Because every record needs a volunteer on site, well-photographed cemeteries tend to be in places with active genealogy communities. A large urban cemetery near a keen volunteer group may be almost complete; a rural churchyard two hours away may have nothing. Check the cemetery page before assuming a grave is not there.
Transcriptions can be wrong. The photo is always real, but the name and dates beside it were read by a person, sometimes from a weathered stone. When a record matters, look at the photograph yourself rather than trusting the text.
It is a record, not a memorial. A BillionGraves page is a headstone photo, dates, a map pin and links to relatives. That is exactly right for genealogy. It is not a place for a eulogy, fifty photographs of someone's life, or messages from the people who loved them — and it does not try to be.
The paid features are research features. Nothing in Plus makes the page more personal. It makes searching faster.
If Your Relative's Grave Is on BillionGraves
This surprises families more often than it upsets them — usually it is simply a photo of a headstone that is already standing in a public cemetery. But if you would rather it were not public, BillionGraves has a published process, and it gives you more options than a simple delete.
Open a support ticket with three things:
- Your relationship to the person who died
- The exact URL of the record — they will not search for it on your behalf
- The level of restriction you want
The four levels are:
- Public — anyone can see it
- Private — only signed-in users can see it
- Restricted — only family members can see it
- Deleted — removed entirely
"Restricted" is worth considering before "Deleted". It keeps the record useful to future relatives researching the family, without leaving it open to strangers.
One caution from BillionGraves' own help page: changing the record does not immediately change search engine results. Expect 30 to 60 days, sometimes longer, before Google stops showing the old listing.
Alternatives, Depending on What You Need
If you are researching:
- Find a Grave — the biggest database; start here.
- FamilySearch — free with no paid tier, and already includes BillionGraves' indexed records.
- WikiTree — one shared, sourced family tree; useful when you need a citation for a burial claim.
GetMemorial is deliberately not on that list. We have no grave search, no GPS, no family tree and no transcriptions.
If you want a place to remember someone rather than locate them:
- GetMemorial — Editor's Pick ⭐. A memorial page the family owns, where relatives add photos, stories and tributes from their own phones over the years. Free to start with no ads on free pages; Premium is $4.99 a month, $39.99 a year, or $89.99 once. Native iOS app; Android is in development, not released.
- Keeper Memorials — the closest thing to both halves at once, with grave navigation, QR markers and memorial pages. Its free tier is limited to five photos or videos. See our Keeper Memorials review.
The two kinds of page work best linked together: the grave record answers where, the memorial answers who. A QR code on the headstone is the usual way to connect them for visitors standing at the grave.
Who BillionGraves Is For
- Family historians — yes, and Plus is worth a year once you have a surname list.
- Someone trying to find one grave — yes, free, and the map pin may save you an afternoon.
- Genealogy societies and volunteers — yes; the app is well designed for photographing whole cemeteries, and the volume rewards are real.
- A family who lost someone recently and wants somewhere to gather memories — no. That is not what it is built for, and it will feel cold. Start with something designed for it, and add the grave record years later when you begin recording the family history.
FAQ
Is BillionGraves free? Yes. Searching, viewing headstone photos, seeing grave locations and contributing are free. BillionGraves Plus, the optional paid tier, is listed at $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year.
Is BillionGraves legit? Yes. It is a long-running volunteer database, a certified FamilySearch partner, and its records are indexed into FamilySearch's historical collections.
Is BillionGraves better than Find a Grave? Neither is better overall. Find a Grave has far more records; BillionGraves records always include a photo and a GPS location. Most researchers check both.
Can I remove a relative's grave from BillionGraves? A family member can ask for the record to be made private, restricted to family, or deleted by opening a support ticket with their relationship, the record URL and the restriction they want. Search engines may take 30–60 days to update.
Does BillionGraves have an app? Yes, on both iPhone and Android. The app is how volunteers photograph headstones and record their GPS location.
GetMemorial helps families build beautiful, lasting online memorials in minutes — a permanent home for the stories and photos a headstone has no room for. Start a free online memorial website of your own.
