Which Site for Canadian Censuses?

Which is the best website for genealogy? You're probably fed up to the teeth with being asked the question. It depends on the enquirer's needs. Where are you searching? For what time period? Completeness, ease of use, cost ... all are considerations. You can think of others.

The table below is a year by year compilation of the Canadian census records available for five major organization websites. It shows the number of records available and whether the information is linked to an image of the original. More records is not necessarily more complete. There may be duplicates; some organizations may be counting corrections submitted as additional entries.

Overall Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has coverage of all censuses, and some earlier ones not listed, with images of the original available. And it's free.

Ancestry($) and MyHeritage($) both have complete coverage with image access, except for the 1926 census of the Prairie Provinces. The value added by the commercial sites is the suggestions for other records of interest — based on the record found, and a more reliable website — LAC's was down for a day when I was preparing this post.

There are gaps in both FamilySearch and Findmypast($) coverage.

Not included in the table, but worth considering is automatedgenealogy.com which has 5,665,421 lines transcribed for the 1901 census, 802,230 for 1906 and 7,584,277 for 1911 with links to the images at LAC.

Census	Records	Organization	Images
1926
	2,073,271	FamilySearch	Yes
	2,067,393	LAC	Yes
	0	Ancestry	No
	0	Findmypast	No
	0	MyHeritage	No
1921
	8,800,634	Ancestry	Yes
	8,788,483	LAC	Yes
	8,683,491	MyHeritage	Yes
	0	FamilySearch	No
	0	Findmypast	No
1916
	1,811,736	FamilySearch	Yes
	1,690,193	Ancestry	Yes
	1,686,666	LAC	Yes
	1,590,785	MyHeritage	Yes
	0	Findmypast	No
1911
	7,246,159	FamilySearch	No
	7,223,678	Ancestry	Yes
	7,204,838	LAC	Yes
	7,157,334	Findmypast	Yes
	7,157,334	MyHeritage	Yes
1906
	805,908	MyHeritage	Yes
	804,734	Ancestry	Yes
	802,443	FamilySearch	No
	802,442	LAC	Yes
	0	Findmypast	No
1901
	5,371,315	LAC	Yes
	5,343,565	Ancestry	Yes
	5,343,565	FamilySearch	Yes
	5,213,095	MyHeritage	Yes
	5,167,205	Findmypast	Yes
1891
	4,833,239	LAC	Yes
	4,790,154	Ancestry	Yes
	4,787,225	FamilySearch	No
	4,539,639	Findmypast	Yes
	4,539,588	MyHeritage	Yes
1881
	4,281,168	Ancestry	Yes
	4,281,160	FamilySearch	Yes
	4,278,327	LAC	Yes
	4,273,931	Findmypast	Yes
	4,273,931	MyHeritage	Yes
1871
	3,519,941	FamilySearch	No
	3,516,910	Ancestry	Yes
	3,485,761	LAC	Yes
	3,292,788	Findmypast	Yes
	3,292,788	MyHeritage	Yes
1861
	3,112,269	LAC	Yes
	3,087,518	FamilySearch	Yes
	2,958,892	Ancestry	Yes
	2,764,253	Findmypast	Yes
	2,764,253	MyHeritage	Yes
1851
	2,312,919	LAC	Yes
	1,487,802	Ancestry	Yes
	1,487,802	FamilySearch	No
	1,364,567	MyHeritage	Yes
	1,364,597	Findmypast	Yes