Not everybody prioritizes planning for the future. For example, less than half of Americans over the age of 50 have a will.

However, estate planning is critical, no matter how old you are. It safeguards your legacy, future-proofs your family, and ensures there are clear instructions to make things easier for loved ones after you die. 

A digital family vault can help you streamline your estate planning, and there are a few options on the market today. To help you make sense of those options, let’s break down the features of two industry leaders: Trustworthy and GoodTrust, both founded in 2020.

Read on to see how Trustworthy tops GoodTrust in terms of security, features, ease of use, customer support, and more.

What Is Trustworthy?

Trustworthy’s Family Operating System® is designed to help users organize, optimize, and protect their important family documents, including IDs, financial records, insurance policies, wills and trusts, medical directives, property deeds, legal papers, and tax returns.

Unlike other digital vault platforms, Trustworthy supports a range of next-level features that enable families to get organized quicker – including smart suggestions, customizable templates, intelligent reminders (so you won't miss a deadline or pay a bill late), access to Trustworthy Certified Experts™, AI-powered automations, and more.

What Is GoodTrust?

GoodTrust is an estate planning platform that focuses on helping individuals set up digital wills, trusts, and directives.

After drafting estate planning documents, users can upload them into GoodTrust’s Smart Digital Vault. From there, users can share those documents with loved ones and set up extra estate planning features, such as issuing instructions to delete or memorialize social media accounts.

You can probably already tell that Trustworthy and GoodTrust are pretty different. Customers appreciate those differences: Trustworthy gets a 4.8 rating on review site Trustpilot vs. a 3.5 rating for GoodTrust.

So, let’s break down some key features and look at how they stack up against each other.

Trustworthy vs. GoodTrust at a Glance

Trustworthy Offers Comprehensive Family Management

Both Trustworthy and GoodTrust enable you to upload important family documents. But GoodTrust is more limited in scope.

GoodTrust’s main focus is estate planning. It has pathways for new users to set up a digital will or trust, and it supports you with other estate documents like medical directives, financial powers of attorney, or pet trusts. 

If you’re only looking for a place to store your estate plan, that might be enough. But life management stretches way beyond just estate documents. That’s why Trustworthy comes out on top in this department.

Trustworthy offers a range of tools to help you get organized in all aspects of family life,  whether it’s legal matters, financial information, and personal information.

And because all of Trustworthy’s paid plans include unlimited document storage, you’ve got scope to upload anything and everything important to you and your family. 

Document Organization Made Simple

One element that makes Trustworthy stand out is the simplicity of onboarding your documents.

Trustworthy offers a range of organization templates and predefined categories that prompt you to upload certain documents. You can get a prompt if you forget to upload something important, like your home insurance policy, which means nothing gets lost or overlooked.

Everything about Trustworthy is designed to take the friction out of digital organization. For example, its AI-powered Autopilot feature even recommends file names and destination folders when you upload a new document. Autopilot also summarizes the information from your documents.

GoodTrust’s digital vault is functional, but it’s not quite as structured. 

When launching a new account with GoodTrust, you can opt to start by setting up a will or a trust. But your digital vault itself lacks structured categories, which means the process of getting organized and finding what you need is a longer, manual process.

Easy Family Collaboration vs. Basic Sharing Tools

When choosing a digital family vault, a key feature is collaboration. How can you control who has access to key documents and when they get to look at them?

GoodTrust lets you assign trusted contacts to access each document you upload. Once you’ve added a new contact to your account, you can control their access using a simple toggle system that grants them access now, after your death, or never.

Trustworthy’s role-based permissions are more advanced.

After setting up a Trustworthy account, you can onboard an unlimited number of collaborators. Those can be full-access collaborators (who can access everything in your vault) or limited-access collaborators (whose access is limited to certain sections or folders in your vault).

This is ideal if you’ve got a folder for estate planning that you want to share with your attorney, another folder for tax returns to share with your accountant, and a folder with insurance information you want to share with your spouse.

But you can also grant granular, one-off access to anyone you want to see certain files with Trustworthy’s SecureLinks™ feature.

SecureLinks™ enables you to set up unique, view-only access links to specific items in your Trustworthy vault. You’re then able to share those links with anyone, and you can even set up a time limit for access. Trustworthy sends push notifications when your recipient accesses a file or the link expires, and you can ‌revoke access whenever you want.

Because its collaborative features are so much more advanced, Trustworthy definitely finishes first in this category.

Trustworthy’s Advanced Security Offers Peace of Mind

The security protecting your digital vault needs to be top-notch, and while GoodTrust has satisfactory security, Trustworthy is a lot more advanced in terms of extra safety features.

Everything you upload to your GoodTrust vault uses AES 256-bit encryption to ensure all your personally identifiable data is protected. GoodTrust also supports multi-factor authentication to protect against unauthorized access.

Trustworthy has all of that and a whole lot more.

In addition to AES 256-bit encryption and multi-factor authentication, Trustworthy offers biometric authentication and physical security keys to take your account security to the next level.

Next, there’s Trustworthy’s tokenization security feature. Not familiar with tokenization? It’s a smart security feature that removes sensitive data from the Trustworthy app and then replaces it with a unique token. That means your data is always separate from your account and totally secure.

A lot of banks can’t even do that, but Trustworthy’s got it down.

Finally, there’s Trustworthy’s advanced threat detection. Trustworthy uses advanced behavior analytics to keep an eye on unusual activity so that users are notified immediately if anything seems amiss.

But don’t just take our word for it: Trustworthy has the compliance certificates to prove it.

Trustworthy is California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant. It also has a SOC-2 Type II and SOC-3 certification. 

That’s miles above ‌industry standards in terms of digital security.

Support That Puts Families First vs. Self-Service

When it comes to customer support, Trustworthy goes the extra mile. 

GoodTrust offers customer support only via email, so if you want to talk to a real human, you’ll have to wait. 

Meanwhile, Trustworthy offers customer support via email and chat support in its Silver plan, plus phone support in its Gold plan.

That means you have more choices when it comes to how you get in touch with the Trustworthy team. If you go for Trustworthy’s Platinum or Diamond Plans, you’ll even get a Trustworthy Certified Expert™ appointed to your account.

Trustworthy Certified Experts™ are real, live professionals on hand to offer you one-to-one support. They can help you onboard documents, develop organization strategies, or even help you choose from a range of insurance plans or find the right attorney.

Trustworthy’s Platinum Plan provides up to three hours with your expert, and the Diamond Plan offers up to six hours of access.

GoodTrust’s platform doesn’t have that. It’s more about self-service, which is fine if you know exactly what you’re doing all the time. But most of us don’t, so personalized support is a major selling point.

That’s why Trustworthy wins in terms of customer service and support.

Trustworthy’s Estate Planning Integration Is Top-Notch

Both Trustworthy and GoodTrust support individuals with estate planning. However, GoodTrust’s focus is pretty narrow, while Trustworthy’s approach is holistic.

GoodTrust was founded around the idea that individuals should be working to share their digital legacy and provide clear instructions for how that legacy should be maintained after death. 

That’s why their platform focuses primarily on creating wills or trusts — with additional support around other estate planning tools like powers of attorney, health directives, and pet directives. One cool legacy feature of GoodTrust is that you can record yourself talking about memories for loved ones to enjoy when you’re gone.

These are all important aspects of estate planning, and once you set them up, you can upload them to your GoodTrust vault.

Meanwhile, Trustworthy goes beyond your run-of-the-mill planning documents to look at broader estate organization. 

Trustworthy enables you to create and store wills, trusts, and directives, too. But with uncapped storage, you can also upload and organize all the other important documents in your life. 

We’re talking about everything:

• Insurance policies.

• Legal documents.

• Family IDs.

• Personal and business contracts.

• Financial information.

• Tax information.

• Medical records.

• Property information.

• Passwords.

If it’s important to you, you can upload it to your Trustworthy vault. 

From there, you can use templates to populate different categories so your digital vault is simple to navigate,  meaning everything is where it should be, and your loved ones can find everything they need after you’re gone.

More Bang for Your Buck

The final piece of the puzzle is price.

We’ve already pointed out that GoodTrust offers a fairly basic service, which is why they offer a basic price. GoodTrust offers one plan priced at $149. After 12 months, you’ll then get charged $39 per year if you want to make any updates to what you’ve placed in your digital vault.

But if you’re looking for more flexibility and choice, Trustworthy’s range of plans provides better options.

Trustworthy offers a 100% free plan for new users to test the waters and upload important family IDs and resources. And if you do opt for a paid plan, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.

From there, you can choose from among four flexible plans:

• Silver: $120/year.

• Gold: $240/year.

• Platinum: $495/year.

• Diamond: $870/year.

Each plan includes unlimited data storage and customer support. Trustworthy also offers a 50% hero discount for first responders and a multi-year and multi-household discount.

Even with those discounts, you might end up paying more for Trustworthy than you’d pay with GoodTrust. But Trustworthy offers superior customer support, AI-powered organization features, a wider range of document categories, unlimited storage, access via app and Chrome extension, support from Trustworthy Certified Experts™ — the list goes on and on.

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for.

Why Trustworthy Is the Better Choice for Families

GoodTrust is a decent digital legacy tool if you’re looking for a way to set up and store your will or a trust. But life can be pretty complicated, and so a lot of families need more in a digital vault. That’s why Trustworthy is the clear winner here.

Trustworthy offers a wider range of choices when it comes to plans, a broader range of features, and a more personalized approach when it comes to customer support. Not only can Trustworthy help with estate planning, but it also supports you with your day to day. 

That’s why Trustworthy is the better choice for families in need of a more holistic approach.

Other Trustworthy Features

Forward emails to your inbox – fast and easy organization:

• Just forward your family’s important documents to your personalized Trustworthy email address, and they’ll be automatically added to your Trustworthy Inbox, with suggested names and recommended filing locations.

Chrome extension:

• With drag-and-drop functionality, you can easily add files, email attachments, or save screenshots directly to your Trustworthy Inbox as you browse. 

Trustworthy mobile app:

• Scan and upload documents from your phone.

• Access and share documents on the go.

Legacy access:

• Allows trusted individuals to access your account when you die.

Tool integration:

• Plaid data-transfer software.

• Uploads from Ricoh ScanSnap scanners.

Advanced search:

• Quickly locate critical files, folders, and more, whether you’re on your computer or your phone, with just a few keystrokes.

So, are you ready to learn more? Check out Trustworthy and set up a free account now to discover how the original Family Operating System® can help your family get (and stay) organized.