So, lets see... GEDMatch, I have ran hundreds of folks, and have ten kits of my own there. Most people on GEDMatch don't have trees. One of the smallest Autosomal DNA databases on the planet. FTDNA, at my last look had less than 2 Million tested. There really isn't enough tests to work with to help one much with shared matches. MyHeritage has a deeper pool around 6 Million testers, and many of those were uploaded from the Big Two. Had I limited myself to the above DNA services, I'd have worked out far, far less than 10% of my matches. 23andMe used to be great for DNA, and they showed which segment start and stop positions, and alone had more tests that FTDNA+GEDMatch+MyHeritage all put together! But their trees were pointless, nor shared. Luckily I had already worked out hundreds of other DNA Cousins with record path trails. Which takes me to Ancestry. Lots of trees, portion not accurate, when looked at from the outside, some of the known NPE events look like tree mistakes, then there are folks just accepting all the hints. But, over *25 Million* DNA tests done. The largest in the world. From there, matches started working, from their easy to access records that are all pre-indexed, I could record path to my matches, many of my matches replied in their internal message system (some take time because they are not nuts like us), piles and piles of shared matches that make the crayon folks glimmer with glee (grouping/sorting your matches), and then there is a very POWERFUL tool called ThruLines. It is based on DNA and existing trees. Often that gets you the majority of the path, and then you have to record trace to verify, due to tree mistakes. Drawbacks, no segment matching, but one can see if the other person will upload so you can utilize the nice tools at MyHeritage or other sites like GEDMatch, etc. in order to work on triangulating three different paths to a common ancestor, all in the same segment on the same chromosome, as well as in records, so one achieves the DNA "PROOF" Ancestor. Additional drawbacks of Ancestry, price! Or one can go waste an inordinate amount of time at a free site and not figure out much. Of course, the even more useful tools at GEDMatch, are hidden behind a paywall called Tier 1, though the cost isn't much at all. But once you shell out your dollars, you also get more matches at GEDMatch. You win some, loose some. If one were to add up the unique tests at FTDNA, GEDMatch(replicated only), MyHeritage, 23andMe, and all the other providers together, I'm not sure you'd match that pay Ancestry site, and it isn't all under one roof. Take out 23andMe, bleh, not much left. It is quite an unfortunate reality.
I've used MitoDNA, I have both Y-700 and mtDNA full sequence, it certainly was not worth the effort of uploading to MitoDNA. I got absolutely zero out of MitoDNA. There is nothing to unleash at all at mitoYDNA.org that already isn't on FTDNA. Lets see, how many tens of thousands of Ancient graves tested for Y-DNA, does Mito give you? Timeline for your haplogroup matches? How about a tree format for all your matches? Looking at the lab reads to see the quality of the call for a specific SNP spot? How about a list of private mutations? Block tree format? Handy user groups with knowledgeable Group Administrators, discussion forums, and charts to compare STR Markers for all the folks in your haplogroup in your project? One could literally go on and on here. Though for folks that tested at Nebula Genomics or Y-Seq, it would be likely for mitoYDNA to show you more. However, often YSeq testers are on the European side, and you find a lot of those tests at a site called YFull. But to get the full advantage, they'll charge you 50 dollars. And they have caught some bad calls, or things that should have been called at FTDNA. If you want to pay to get your .BAM file at FTDNA (Nebula's .BAM is free), Y-Full does a whole new alignment of the DNA strands as read from the lab test, and lots of other things. Probably YFull is the second largest Y-DNA database, with a significant number of tests from other than FTDNA.
I'd please ask folks to state reality, significant short comings, where/why, etc. of the Free sites. But you can't beat free!
