Storyworth is a subscription service that allows you to turn your life stories into books. It provides an excellent way to preserve memories and moments in a keepsake book, share those moments with your loved ones, and discover stories you never knew.
The platform was founded in San Francisco by Kristi Baum and Nick in 2011. By 2014, Storyworth had already submitted over 30,000 stories. Storyworth has been designing books to last for a lifetime, sourced from quality materials that honor stories within.
Storyworth automatically sends you emails with questions about your life every week, with an option to reply via phone or email. The platform then converts these responses, whether in text or audio, into stories that you share privately.
While Storyworth is a great innovation and a perfect gift idea for your loved ones celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations, users sometimes need more than what it offers. For example, some users complain that it doesn’t give options to change fonts.
In this post, I’ll be talking about the best alternatives to Storyworth. If you are among those who have been using it for a while but want to explore better options, stay with me.
Best Storyworth Alternatives
1. lifeArk
On my top list of excellent alternatives to Storyworth is lifeArk. LifeArk is more of a family diary where parents capture and store family history, interests, life stories, and life lessons to share with their children in the future.
It is a digital footprint designed to organize and share what matters to you and is driven by humane technology consolidated by child psychologists. LifeArk offers daily customized questions to help you create an authentic portrait of your personality.
While both Storyworth and lifeArk are dedicated to families, lifeArk is more family-focused than Storyworth. LifeArk can help you build lasting connections with your children. It also makes it easier for children to understand their parents through their life stories.
LifeArk was founded by parents who wanted to share something more than their social media profiles with their children. You can use lifeArk as your diary and create individual timelines for each family member. LifeArk is available for free download via the web or for your iOS device.
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2. FamilySearch
FamilySearch is a nonprofit organization and website that helps you preserve your family’s treasured moments so generations can enjoy them. As an organization, FamilySearch was founded in 1894, while the website was launched in 1999.
Like Storyworth, the FamilySearch app allows you to record, store, and share memories with your loved ones. FamilySearch helps you store photos and audio recordings, and you can choose to work independently or with your loved one to capture and save memories with you.
FamilySearch can work without an internet connection, meaning you can capture your memories from anywhere. Unlike Storyworth, FamilySearch does more than just capture, store, and share memories.
The platform has more features than Storyworth, as it also offers genealogical records and a family tree. The platform boasts a genealogical database of over 1.3 billion users. In 2021, the platform hit a historical records database of over 5.7 billion digital books and images.
FamilySearch makes it easy to add, edit, and share your family history whenever possible. The app syncs with the website to make changes from any device.
It is available for free download on Google PlayStore and App Store.
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3. No Story Lost
No Story Lost is an online platform that helps you capture your family stories and turn them into coffee table books. The platform works similarly to Storyworth, and you can access its services by visiting its official website.
Founded in 2018 in Vancouver, Canada, No Story Lost also interviews its users to collect stories, advice, and memories.
What will make you choose No Story Lost over Storyworth is that it has a group of dedicated staff who conduct writing, editing, and audio transcriptions of stories before printing.
No Story Lost allows you to create and share your stories and memories through three stages. Like Storyworth, the platform starts with having a conversation with you, where you’ll be interviewed to share your favorite memories, advice, and stories.
No Story Lost’s team of professionals will then write, edit, and polish your stories, then print and ship a coffee table book to your doorstep.
It is a paid subscription service offering three packages: The Chronicle package will cost you $899 for 12,000 words, two one-hour phone interviews, and 24 photos included. Other packages include The Anthropology for $1,349 and The Odyssey for $1,799.
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4. Vita Life Story
Vita Life Story made it on my top list because it makes creating and preserving life stories simple and fun.
Additionally, it is a collaborative platform that brings families together and ignites family laughter, love, and personalities.
Vita Life Story is easy to use and enables you to audio record your stories by simply dialing a phone number. The platform allows you to generate vita memory and share recordings, photos, and family recipes with your loved ones.
The platform is ahead of Storyworth, thanks to its salient features such as Vita Memoir which curates your stories, Story Time Cards, reviews from family, and the Vita Experience, among others.
Vita Memoirs are multimedia and designed in a way that the future generation will appreciate. Vita memoirists ensure that they maintain the tone of your voice as they craft the narrative to preserve your personality.
If you are helping a family member create their Vita Life Story, encourage them to conduct their storytelling or interview with less background noise to create a safe and quiet environment.
Prompt them with additional information whenever you can and help them go through old photo albums for further details.
Calm them down by encouraging them to share stories they love talking about and be willing to share more exciting stories later. Make it a family activity. Invite your kids, grandkids, or other family members and give them a chance to participate in the interview.
Vita Life Story is a free web service.
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5. Storii
If you are looking for a Storyworth alternative that can help you create precious family memories, look no further than Storii. It allows you to choose from over 100 curated life story questions or create questions independently.
You can also view a library of upcoming questions and change its order as you like. Automatically schedule calls or call in at any time to populate your story. Storii then transcribes all your recordings and adds them to your profile.
You can securely share your stories through email or using links or download your life stories as a beautiful keepsake. Following the various reviews posted on the platform, you can agree that Storii is worth considering and is also a perfect way to discover stories that you never knew.
Storii is a collaborative tool that keeps you connected with your loved ones. The best part is that you don’t need an internet connection to collaborate with your loved ones. You can use a landline to invite someone to receive all your recordings.
Storii goes for $9.99 and $99 for monthly and yearly subscriptions respectively.
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6. StoryCorps
StoryCorps is a unique family-focused platform like Storyworth that can help you capture, store, and preserve your family history and life stories.
Since its launch in 2003, the platform has continued to be a significant milestone enabler for parents, children, and humanity to build stories that connect people.
The platform also aims at creating a compassionate world by teaching the value of listening and weaving into the culture the understanding that every story matters. Like Storyworth, StoryCorps seeks to create invaluable archives for future generations.
The StoryCorps app offers personalized and high-quality interviews to collect and store information for sharing. The platform also allows you to share your preserved records on social media but unlike Storyworth, it does not offer hardcover or audiobooks.
Over half a million people have recorded their stories through StoryCorps. The platform maintains a relentless focus on serving a diversity of participants and treats participants with the utmost care, respect, and dignity.
StoryCorps is a public service, and what will excite you about the platform is its recently launched feature, American Pathways, an initiative that allows refugees, immigrants, asylees, and Muslims to record, preserve, and share their stories and experiences.
StoryCorps is available for free download on Google PlayStore and App Store.
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7. Chatbooks
They say pictures speak a thousand words. That is what Chatbooks is all about. Chatbooks is an excellent alternative to Storyworth that enables you to develop a photo book from your digital photos. You can also connect the app to your social media, like Instagram.
Chatbooks started as a small family affair in 2014. The app is hands down the easiest way to print photos and uses premier-quality paper that will last a lifetime. Chatbooks can create a photo book in minutes through simple steps.
Add photos to the app from your camera roll, edit them, and send them to print with a few taps. You can opt to create a monthly album or a yearly album based on your preferences. You can add text and date on each page.
You’ll love Chatbooks more than Storyworth, as the app allows you to access your Instagram photos alongside their captions and dates. There is little to be done with this app, as all you do is turn a screen into a page and convert those pages into a book.
Chatbooks has a user-friendly interface and can create a photo book with 60 photos, which you can post on your Instagram too. It also delivers the same to your email.
The platform is affordable, with pricing plans starting from $7 per month, and you’ll have your book delivered in a few days. Chatbooks is a web service and app, also available for download on Google PlayStore and App Store.
8. Memorify
As the name suggests, Memorify does an excellent job of capturing and storing memories and life stories. Memorify allows you to record and share video messages. As a Memorify user, you can create videos to share with friends and family in the future.
One feature that stands out with Memorify against Storyworth is the ability to create a photo memory experience for private and corporate activities. It also allows you to determine the length of your recordings in the form of videos, audio, and photos to be stored on the platform.
Hundreds of users trust Memorify as a perfect emotional legacy-sharing platform and emotional insurance. Memorify is available for free download on App Store.
9. PastBook
Another excellent alternative to Storyworth that is worth trying is PastBook. The app does a great job at automagically creating instant photo books to preserve your family’s precious moments. PastBook is hassle-free and faster than Storyworth.
The platform allows you to turn images drawn from your phone, Facebook, Instagram, and other digital sources into outstanding photobooks. Using artificial intelligence, PastBook selects the best photos from these sources and creates a book for you within 60 seconds.
What you’ll love the most about this tool are its easy editing options that make the app perfectly personal. PastBook uses the best printing facilities and high-quality paper to ensure you get a perfect product, just like your memories.
PastBook binds each book in a durable soft or hard cover to last a lifetime. In addition to photobooks, PastBook also specializes in printouts such as calendars, cards, posters, and tiles, which can also be a great add-on to your gift package.
For years, PastBook has established itself as an excellent online partner in celebrating life’s best moments. It operates in 18 countries, thanks to the dedication of its ambitious and tech-savvy team.
So far the platform has printed over 10 million photobooks and delivers the books worldwide.
Its web version features friendly pricing plans from $20, depending on the number of photobook pages and whether you want it in a hardcover or softcover version.
PastBook is available on Google PlayStore and AppStore.
10. Legacybox
Legacybox offers one of the best ways to preserve your best moments. It is also an excellent way to keep some irreplaceable home photos and movies.
So, if you are looking for a perfect Storyworth replacement that can also convert older analog media into digital formats, consider Legacybox.
In addition to a natural disaster like a fire or flood, your family legacy is also at risk as the way we preserve memories changes daily.
For instance, videotapes are slowly fading away. Instead of neglecting them in your closet, you can digitize them and maintain your recordings for future use.
Unlike Storyworth, which captures your life stories through phone conversations, Legacybox sends you a box that you can fill with photos, films, and home movies. They also send you a step-by-step guide, safety barcodes for each item, and a prepaid shipping label.
Legacybox’s team of professionals then digitizes every item as guided with personalized updates at every step of digitization. It then sends back all your original media alongside well-preserved copies stored on the cloud, marked as DVDs or thumb drives.
Legacybox gives you a perfect idea to surprise your loved ones with digitized versions of their cherished memories. They offer you the best gift ideas for holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, or a random surprise to show them that you care.
Its pricing plan is based on the number of items you want to be digitized. For instance, a two-item starter plan will cost you $35.98, a 10-item family plan 159.99, while a 40-item trunk goes for $629.99.
11. Mixbook
Mixbook is another great replacement for Storyworth that promises you overall value. The platform helps you preserve and share family-treasured memories and moments in photo books. These books are printed in keepsake quality to last for a lifetime.
Mixbook is more straightforward and fun to use than Storyworth and features a modern design that you’ll love. In addition to its appealing interface, the platform features many customization options to bring out your creativity.
The availability of themes for all occasions will make you choose Mixbook over Storyworth.
Whether you want to preserve your travel memories, general family moments, or wedding day, Mixbook provides perfect layouts and story designs that capture your memories all year round.
The photobooks can be softcover, simple and lightweight, and excellent for yearbooks, portfolios, and capturing life’s mini-milestones. The hardcover version is sturdy and durable. Hardcovers are perfect for recipe books, year-in-reviews, and life’s unforgettable moments.
The lay-flat option is a luxe matte finish with elevated paper options. It is a premium choice for preserving weddings, anniversaries, or once-in-a-lifetime events.
The books also come in different shapes and sizes, and you can easily find your perfect design with its fun and flexible editor.
Mixbook also has a mobile app available for free download on AppStore, or you can scan the QR code on its official website to get the app on your computer.
Mixbook Photo Book pricing starts from $9.99 depending on your book’s size, cover, or paper type.
12. Artkive
Artkive is another excellent platform for preserving family happenings. It is slightly different in functionality from Storyworth but still a worthy replacement. Artkive focuses on keeping your child’s memories by helping you transform piles of your kid’s art into art books.
The platform collects your kid’s memorable art documents, takes professional photos and edits each item, and creates a mosaic frame or memory book for your kid’s creative and academic achievements. Artkive books range from 25 to 200 pages.
The tool uses premium matte printing and allows you to add custom captions and covers to your child’s art pieces. You can access your ready digital images through Artkive’s official website or iOS app.
The best part is that Artkive offers free shipping in the continental US. Order an Artkive box and send in your art collection to get started. You will also receive an order form to pick whether you need a photo book, a mosaic, or both.
The team then takes and edits professional photos of what’s in the box, after which they send you an invoice based on the number of art pieces you sent in.
Artkive’s creative team thoughtfully designs your mosaic or book, sends you a copy to review, and prints it once you are satisfied.
ArtKive has served over 400,000 families and printed over 20 million art pieces. You can order an Artkive box for $39, and convert them into Art Books starting at $75, framed mosaic at $249, or a digital gallery for $70.
13. HistoryLines
Last on my list of top Storyworth alternatives is HistoryLines. HistoryLines is more feature-packed than Storyworth.
The tool helps you visualize your family’s past, then places it in a historical context. To start using HistoryLines, upload your stories, memories, and photographs of your family.
The app then shows you an interactive timeline of beneficial events surrounding the years your family member lived. It also shows you a map of where your forefathers might have migrated from and the culture of the society they lived in.
In addition to viewing personal events, HistoryLines allows you to add your photographs, memories, and stories providing historical context to your family and migration history.
HistoryLines is a free web service.
Final Thoughts
These Storyworth alternatives have similar functionality but differ in features and characteristics that make them distinct.
Consider factors such as your budget, the type of memories you wish to preserve, and whether the option will work for other family members with whom you want to share the memories. The best part is that we have free options, so it won’t hurt to try a few until you settle on one.
If you are looking for an excellent Storyworth replacement that does more than create photo books and allows you to actively participate in making the final product, I recommend FamilySearch.
FamilySearch will enable you to edit, add more information, and share your family history whenever you can.