Eternal Vault vs Everplans: 2026 Digital Legacy Comparison

If you’ve started researching digital legacy platforms, Everplans has probably come up. It’s been around since 2012 and shows up near the top of most search results for “digital estate planning” and “what happens to my accounts when I die.”

But older doesn’t always mean better fit. The two platforms are built on genuinely different assumptions about who should be able to see your data and how your family should be notified when something happens to you. This comparison walks through both, with sources, so you can decide which model actually matches what you want.

A quick disclosure up front: I built Eternal Vault, so treat this as an informed comparison, not a neutral third-party review. I’ve tried to represent Everplans accurately using its own published pricing, security, and help-center pages, all linked below.

The core difference: who can technically access your data

This is the single biggest architectural difference between the two products.

Everplans encrypts stored information with AES-256 and generates a unique key for each user, and the company has passed a SOC 2 Type II audit and states it’s HIPAA compliant (Everplans Security). But Everplans itself generates and holds those encryption keys. Its security page states that “Everplans administrators can never see the plan information,” which is a policy commitment enforced by internal access controls, not a cryptographic guarantee that data is unreadable to the company.

Eternal Vault takes a different approach: encryption happens client-side, in your browser, before anything is uploaded. The master key never leaves your device, so we have no technical path to decrypt your stored data, even if we wanted to or were compelled to. You can read more about how this works on the security model page.

Neither approach is “wrong.” A centrally-held key with strict internal policy is a common, legitimate design used by plenty of reputable services. But if the ability to read your data existing anywhere outside your own control is a dealbreaker for you, that’s a meaningful distinction worth knowing before you commit.

How each platform hands off access to your family

The second big difference is what actually triggers access for the people you trust.

Everplans uses a “deputy” model. You assign deputies (family, friends, an attorney, a financial advisor) and set permission levels, including which sections unlock only “after death.” According to Everplans’ own help documentation, after-death sections stay locked until a deputy formally reports a death and Everplans processes that report, and a deputy requesting access must wait out a response window you configure before access is granted (Everplans Help Center: after-death access). In other words, someone has to know to go report your death to Everplans.

Eternal Vault splits the vault’s decryption key across your verified trusted contacts using Shamir’s Secret Sharing, a well-established cryptographic technique. No single contact, and no one at Eternal Vault, can unlock your vault alone. Access only becomes available through a verified Legacy Access process, which is normally triggered by your automated heartbeats going quiet past your Inactivity Threshold, not by someone remembering to file a report.

That leads to the other differentiator worth calling out.

Automated life monitoring vs manual reporting

This is where the two products diverge the most in day-to-day use, and it’s worth being honest about, since neither company publishes third-party audited uptime numbers for these features.

Eternal Vault runs ongoing check-ins (“heartbeats”) that confirm you’re still active. You can check in manually, connect an API, or link Google Fit so daily activity itself counts as a check-in. You set your own Inactivity Threshold (how long you can go quiet before the system treats it as a signal), and you can run a Practice Run to see exactly what your contacts would experience without actually triggering real access. If you miss a check-in by mistake, there’s a recovery window before anything escalates.

Everplans doesn’t appear to offer an equivalent automated inactivity system based on its public help documentation. Instead, it depends on a deputy actively reporting a death, which works fine when family is paying close attention, but adds a step that relies on someone else’s initiative rather than the system detecting anything on its own.

If you live alone, are the primary point of contact for your own affairs, or simply want a system that doesn’t depend on someone remembering to make a phone call, automated monitoring closes a real gap. If you already have a spouse or close family member who checks in on you daily and you’re confident they’d know to act, that gap matters less.

Storage approach

Everplans centralizes storage inside its own platform. One review that walked through the product start to finish measured a 5 GB document allowance on the tested plan (Senior Living review of Everplans), though Everplans doesn’t publish a storage cap on its own pricing page, so treat that figure as one reviewer’s observation rather than an official spec.

Eternal Vault gives you two options: upload documents directly with client-side encryption, or use bring-your-own-storage to keep files in your own Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box account, with Eternal Vault managing access and encryption around them rather than hosting the files itself. That second option matters if you’d rather not duplicate large files into yet another storage silo.

Feature-by-feature comparison

Category	Eternal Vault	Everplans
Encryption model	Client-side, zero-knowledge; master key never leaves your device	AES-256 with unique keys per user, generated and held by Everplans (source)
Emergency access mechanism	Shamir’s Secret Sharing across verified trusted contacts; no single party can unlock alone	Deputies request access; after-death sections unlock once a death is reported and confirmed (source)
Life monitoring	Automated heartbeats: manual check-in, API, or Google Fit; configurable Inactivity Threshold; Practice Run available	No published automated monitoring; relies on a deputy reporting a death
Document storage	Encrypted upload, or bring-your-own-storage via Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box	Centralized storage on Everplans’ platform
Pricing model	Free plan; paid Individual and Family plans, monthly or one-time lifetime (see pricing)	Free plan (3 items); Premium at $99.99/year as of July 2026 (source)
Company maturity	Independent product built by a solo developer, launched more recently	Founded 2012; acquired by National Guardian Life in 2021, then Precoa in 2024 (source)

Where Everplans is genuinely stronger

It would be dishonest to pretend the two are evenly matched everywhere.

Everplans has fourteen years in the market, a large content library of articles, checklists, and templates, and a dedicated “Everplans Professional” product used by financial advisors and enterprise partners to onboard clients (Everplans Enterprise). If you want a platform with a long track record, an established advisor network, and years of accumulated educational content, that history is real and worth something.

Eternal Vault, by contrast, is built and maintained by an independent developer (me). That means faster iteration and direct access to the person building it, but it also means a shorter track record than a company that’s been operating since 2012 and has been through two acquisitions without shutting down. If institutional longevity matters more to you than architecture, that’s a fair reason to lean toward Everplans.

Which should you choose?

Choose Everplans if you want an established platform with a large content library, you’re comfortable with a company holding your encryption keys under policy-based access controls, and you have a family member who will reliably report your death and manage the deputy process without automated prompting.

Choose Eternal Vault if you want your data encrypted so that no one but you can technically read it, you’d rather have an automated system detect inactivity instead of depending on someone else’s initiative, and you like the option to keep your files in your own cloud storage instead of a third party’s servers.

Neither choice is wrong. They’re built around different trust models, and the right one depends on how much you weigh cryptographic guarantees against institutional track record. And if neither feels right, our roundup of the best digital legacy planning tools in 2026 covers the wider market, including free options.

If you’re not sure where you currently stand, the free digital legacy assessment takes a few minutes and shows you exactly what gaps you have today, regardless of which platform you end up using.

Ready to see the zero-knowledge model in action? Create your free Eternal Vault account and set up your first heartbeat in a few minutes.

This post reflects publicly available information about Everplans as of July 2026. Everplans’ features and pricing may change; check their site directly for current details.