Echovita Obituaries: Is It Legit, How to Remove One, and 5 Alternatives
Most people arrive at Echovita the same way: someone googles a relative's name in the week after the funeral, and there is the obituary, on a site nobody in the family has ever heard of, wrapped in buttons selling flowers and virtual candles. Sometimes a detail is wrong. Sometimes the funeral home's own version is nowhere near the top of the results and this one is.
If that is why you are here, this article answers three questions in order: what Echovita is and whether it is legitimate, how to get an obituary removed or corrected, and where to publish one you control instead.
What Echovita Actually Is
Echovita is a free obituary and memorial site. Anyone can create and share an obituary on it at no charge, and readers can send flowers, plant a memorial tree or light a virtual candle from the page. Those purchases are how the site makes money — the same model most funeral home websites and obituary portals use.
The part that surprises families is that a large share of the obituaries on Echovita were not submitted by anyone in the family. They were copied from funeral home websites and republished, sometimes reworded, sometimes with errors introduced along the way.
This is not a rumour. In 2024, CBC News reported on the practice twice — once on the ethical questions it raises and once on funeral homes in New Brunswick warning families about it. Funeral directors described grieving families phoning them about altered death notices they had never seen before.
Is Echovita Legit?
It depends what you mean by the question, and the three meanings pull in different directions.
Is it a scam? No. Money you spend on flowers or a tree goes to a real order. Scam-detection services rate the domain as legitimate, and the company responds publicly to complaints. If you bought something through an Echovita page, you have not been defrauded.
Is it official? No. An Echovita page is not the family's page, not the funeral home's page, and carries no authority over the facts. If the date or the list of survivors is wrong there, it is wrong because the copy was imperfect, not because anyone in the family approved it.
Is it ethical? That is the real argument, and reasonable people land in different places. Echovita's position is that obituaries are public announcements meant to be spread, and that the site helps them reach more people. Critics — including the commentary that has followed the company for years — argue that republishing a stranger's death notice in order to sell flowers against it is monetising someone else's grief without asking. What is not in dispute is that families keep finding pages they did not create.
The practical takeaway is narrower than the ethics: an obituary on Echovita is a copy, and copies drift. If you want one accurate version that stays accurate, it has to live somewhere you control.
How to Remove an Obituary from Echovita
Echovita's own process is short, and it works more often than families expect.
- Open the obituary page on Echovita.
- Scroll to the end of the obituary text and click Report.
- Fill in the form. Say plainly that you are an immediate family member and whether you want the page removed or corrected.
- Submit and wait. Echovita's FAQ says removal requests can take up to three days, with most approved within about 24 hours.
A few things worth knowing before you start:
- Ask for a correction if the page is mostly right. If the only problem is a misspelled middle name or a wrong service time, a correction gets you a fixed page in a day. A removal leaves the search results to whatever ranks next.
- Search for duplicates. Echovita is not the only aggregator doing this. Search the full name plus the town and work through the first two pages of results; there are often two or three copies, each needing its own request.
- Tell the funeral home. They usually want to know, and several have started adding notices to their own obituary pages because of it.
- Do not fight it alone with a lawyer's letter first. The Report form is free, fast and generally honoured. Escalation is for when it is ignored.
Removing the copy solves half the problem. The other half is that something has to rank in its place — otherwise the next aggregator fills the gap.
Five Alternatives Worth Considering
Ranked with free options first, because that is the question most families are actually asking. Each entry says what it does badly, too.
1. The funeral home's own obituary page — free, and already exists
Nearly every funeral home publishes the obituary on its own site at no extra charge, and that page is the authoritative one. It is also the copy the aggregators scrape, so it is worth getting right.
Where it runs out: funeral home sites are built around the arrangements, not the years afterwards. Pages are often archived or dropped when the site is redesigned, and you have no control over that. Ask them directly how long the page stays up — the answer is frequently "we don't know."
2. Legacy.com — paid, and the widest reach
Legacy powers the obituary sections of a large number of newspapers. If you want the notice to appear where an older generation still looks for it, this is the route, and it is the one aggregators respect most.
Where it runs out: it is priced per line by the newspaper, which for a full obituary can run into the hundreds of dollars, and the page is a listing rather than a memorial. We go into the pricing and the alternatives in our Legacy.com comparison.
3. Ever Loved — free, and strong on logistics
Ever Loved handles the practical week: service details, RSVPs, and a fundraiser on the same page, with no platform fee on money raised beyond standard card processing.
Where it runs out: the page is funeral-shaped. Six months later there is not much reason to return to it. See our full Ever Loved comparison for the detail.
4. Forever Missed — free tier, long-form friendly
Good for a written life story rather than a notice, with a long track record and a generous free tier.
Where it runs out: the free tier carries advertising, and the design shows its age. Forever Missed alternatives covers this in depth.
5. GetMemorial — a memorial page rather than a notice
This is our product, so weigh it accordingly. GetMemorial is built for what happens after the obituary: photos, stories and tributes accumulating over years, added by family members from their own phones without sharing a login.
Pricing. Free to start. Premium is $4.99 a month, $39.99 a year, or $89.99 once for a lifetime page. Free pages carry no ads.
What it does badly. It does not publish to newspapers, does not run fundraisers, and has no funeral RSVP. There is a native iOS app; Android is in development, not shipped. If what you need this week is a paid death notice in a local paper, this is the wrong tool and Legacy is the right one.
Which to Choose
| If you want… | Go to |
|---|---|
| The accurate, authoritative version, today | The funeral home's page — and check it word by word |
| Newspaper reach for older relatives | Legacy.com |
| Service details, RSVPs and a fundraiser | Ever Loved |
| A long written life story, free | Forever Missed |
| A page the family keeps adding to for years | GetMemorial |
Most families end up with two: one notice that goes wide in the first week, and one memorial that stays. The mistake is doing only the first, because a notice with no permanent home is exactly the thing aggregators pick up and republish.
If you are still deciding, our comparison of ten online memorial websites puts the field side by side, and the obituary site roundup covers where to publish the notice itself.
FAQ
Can Echovita legally publish my relative's obituary? In most cases yes, which is why the debate is ethical rather than legal. Obituaries are published as public announcements, and the parts of them that are plain facts — a name, a date, a service time — are not easily protected. That is also why the Report form exists: the company handles it as a courtesy request rather than a legal obligation, and usually grants it.
How long does removal take? Echovita's FAQ says up to three days, with most requests approved within about 24 hours. If nothing has happened after a week, submit again and keep a copy of both submissions.
The obituary has the wrong information. Should I remove it or correct it? Correct it if the page is mostly accurate — a correction is faster and leaves a right answer in the search results. Remove it if the page is substantially wrong or if seeing it upsets the family.
Will removing it stop this happening again? Not by itself. The most reliable defence is having a page you control that ranks for the name — your own memorial page, linked from the funeral home's obituary. See why a permanent memorial matters.
Do I have to pay Echovita to take something down? No. The Report form is free. Anyone asking for payment to remove an obituary is not Echovita.
GetMemorial helps families build beautiful, lasting online memorials in minutes — a permanent home for tributes, photos, and stories. Start a free online memorial website of your own.
