Heirfolio vs. Trust & Will

The two products get conflated in search and in conversation because both are commonly described as "estate planning software." They are not substitutes. Trust & Will is a will-and-trust-drafting service — the buyer goes from no document to a notarized estate document in one session, for a one-time fee. Heirfolio is an inheritance platform — the buyer maps existing assets across documents, jewelry, gold, and Bitcoin into a continuously monitored workflow and a four-phase distribution mechanism.

A household that needs a will has a problem Trust & Will solves and Heirfolio does not directly solve. A household that has a will and needs to know what happens to the rest of the estate has a problem Heirfolio solves and Trust & Will does not. Most affluent households need both.

This comparison explains the categorical difference, walks through when each fits, and notes which households should buy both. Heirfolio is in our Estate Planning index at 89 of 100. Trust & Will is not currently scored — it sits in a category we do not score (document drafting), and the comparison below is descriptive against publicly verifiable facts from trustandwill.com.

The categorical difference, in one paragraph

Trust & Will generates documents. The deliverable is a notarized will, a revocable living trust, healthcare directives, or a power of attorney, depending on the package the user selects. The product is finished when the documents are notarized and stored. The relationship with the customer is transactional and largely one-time, with optional renewal subscriptions for document updates.

Heirfolio generates a continuously updated map of the estate. The deliverable is a structured Map of every asset (documents, financial accounts, jewelry, gold custody, Bitcoin self-custody), an AUDIT phase that surfaces gaps against expected patterns, a MONITOR phase that runs semi-annual check-ins and Proof-of-Access validations, and an ACTIVATE phase that releases a three-tier Living Runbook to designated survivors with multi-party authentication. The relationship is subscription-ongoing and the product is never "finished" because the estate is never finished.

The two products operate on different time horizons against different deliverables. A Heirfolio-only customer with no underlying will is missing the legal documents. A Trust & Will customer with no inheritance platform has the documents but no continuously-monitored map of the assets the documents distribute. Most affluent households need both.

What Trust & Will does (per trustandwill.com)

Trust & Will publishes three main product lines on their site:

Product	Published price	What it includes
Will	One-time fee starting at $199	Will document, customized to the user's state, with health and financial directives
Trust	One-time fee starting at $599	Revocable living trust, schedule of assets, pour-over will, healthcare and financial directives
Probate	Variable	Probate-process software and document workflows for estates already in probate

(Pricing as published on trustandwill.com as of May 25, 2026; verify current pricing on the site directly.)

The product is a guided form. The user answers questions about their family, beneficiaries, assets at a summary level, and preferences. The output is a state-specific document set ready for notarization. Notarization is handled either in-person or through online notarization integrations.

Trust & Will publishes attorney-overseen language and updates document templates to track state-law changes. The company has been operating since 2017. The team is identifiable; the executive bench has been profiled in industry press. Trust & Will is genuinely good at what it does — document drafting at scale, at a price point an order of magnitude below traditional attorney drafting for comparable estate complexity.

What Trust & Will does not do:

Track jewelry, gold custody, Bitcoin holdings, or any physical asset over time
Run semi-annual readiness check-ins or Proof-of-Access validations against the asset list the documents reference
Provide multi-party authenticated release of asset details to designated survivors at the moment of need
Integrate live spot pricing for precious metals or cryptocurrency
Provide a beneficiary-tagged asset map that updates when the underlying asset values change

These are not failures. They are out of scope for a will-drafting service. The buyer who needs them is the buyer who needs Heirfolio.

What Heirfolio does (per the entity profile)

Heirfolio's core surface is the Heir Protocol four-phase architecture (MAP / AUDIT / MONITOR / ACTIVATE), running across an asset portfolio that includes:

AI-valued jewelry (Gemini 2.5 Vision primary pipeline)
Gold custody via Argo (Royal Canadian Mint)
Bitcoin custody via Onramp
Auction routing via Worthy / Fortuna partners
Document repository for wills, trusts, insurance, account statements, and deeds
Beneficiary designation as a first-class object on every item

The platform is subscription-priced — Vault Pro at $99/month for the full Heir Protocol AUDIT / MONITOR / ACTIVATE phases plus multi-user family-office features. The free tier includes valuation, family read-only access, and the MAP phase.

What Heirfolio does not do:

Draft wills or trusts. The platform holds the document the attorney generated; it does not generate the document.
Replace estate-attorney review for complex estates with multi-jurisdictional considerations, business interests, or specialized tax planning.
Notarize documents in-flow for state-specific will execution requirements (Heirfolio uses Notarize.com for notarization of platform-specific documents like the Letter of Intent, but the underlying will execution is the attorney's responsibility).

The Heir Protocol Letter of Intent is generated as React-PDF output ready for the user's attorney. This is the structural interface between the two products: Heirfolio produces a Letter of Intent that documents the user's expressed wishes for the assets in the platform; the attorney uses that Letter of Intent (or its equivalent) to draft or update the underlying will or trust.

When you need Trust & Will

You need Trust & Will (or an equivalent document-drafting service, or an attorney) if any of the following are true:

You do not currently have a will, and you have dependents, assets, or expressed wishes about disposition. A platform that maps assets without the underlying legal documents to distribute them leaves the disposition to state intestacy law, which is rarely what the principal intends.
You have a will but it is more than ten years old or pre-dates a material life event (marriage, divorce, child, significant asset change, change of state of residence). The document needs updating; Trust & Will is a competitive option for the update.
You need a revocable living trust to avoid probate or to manage assets across multiple jurisdictions. Trust & Will's trust package starts at $599 and is materially below attorney rates for comparable trust drafting.
Your estate is straightforward: a primary residence, financial accounts, life insurance, no business interests, no complex tax planning, no multi-jurisdictional issues. The document complexity Trust & Will handles is well-matched to this profile.

You do not need Trust & Will if you have an existing, current will or trust drafted by an attorney; the documents already exist and the question is what to do with them next.

When you need Heirfolio

You need Heirfolio (or an equivalent inheritance platform) if any of the following are true:

Your estate includes physical assets (jewelry, gold, watches, bullion, art) whose disposition needs to be documented and whose values need to be tracked. Wills typically reference these as "personal property" or via a separate memorandum; tracking the actual items and their values over time is what Heirfolio does that the will does not.
You hold gold or Bitcoin in self-custody and your heirs need a structured handoff path for the seed phrases, hardware wallets, or vault credentials. Heirfolio's Bitcoin custody handoff workflow is the only one in our index that addresses self-custody inheritance alongside physical-asset distribution.
You want continuous monitoring rather than one-time drafting. The MONITOR phase runs semi-annual check-ins (do you still have the password? has the beneficiary information changed?) that surface readiness decay before it becomes a crisis at the moment of need.
You want a multi-party-authenticated release mechanism for sensitive information at the moment of need. The ACTIVATE phase releases asset details to designated survivors in three tiers (immediate, +24h, +72h) with verification via trusted contacts. This is the inheritance workflow itself, not the documents that authorize it.

You do not need Heirfolio if your estate is documents-only (no physical assets, no self-custody crypto), your asset list is static (no acquisition or rotation over time), and you are comfortable with a one-time document-drafting model.

When you need both

Most affluent households need both. The use case is bidirectional:

Trust & Will (or an attorney) drafts the legal documents that authorize the distribution.
Heirfolio holds the documents in the repository, maps the assets the documents distribute, runs the continuous monitoring, and operates the release workflow at the moment of need.

The two products are complementary because they sit at different layers of the same stack. Documents are the legal authority. Heirfolio is the operational layer that makes the documents executable on a real estate over time. Neither layer is sufficient alone for a household with both meaningful physical assets and a need for legal documents authorizing their distribution.

The price stack for the both-product household: Trust & Will trust package at $599 one-time (or attorney-drafted equivalent at a higher price), plus Heirfolio Vault Pro at $99/month for the ongoing platform. The combined first-year cost is competitive with attorney-only estate work and meaningfully cheaper than family-office services that bundle document drafting with ongoing administration.

Where confusion comes from

The two products get conflated because both companies use the phrase "estate planning" in their marketing and because search engines do not distinguish between document-drafting and inheritance-platform queries. A user searching "estate planning software" gets results from both categories. The differentiation only becomes clear when the user investigates the actual deliverable each product produces.

The distinction we hold to in The Touchstone Report's Estate Planning category is: an entity is in the Estate Planning category if it produces an ongoing relationship between the principal and their distributed assets, not a one-time document. Trust & Will produces a document. Heirfolio produces an ongoing relationship. The two are not competitors in the way the conflation implies; they are complements.

Bottom line

Trust & Will and Heirfolio sit at different layers. Choose Trust & Will (or an attorney) if you do not currently have a will or trust, or your existing documents need updating. Choose Heirfolio if you have the documents and need a platform to map, monitor, and ultimately distribute the assets they reference. Choose both if your estate is large enough to need both — which most affluent households are.

The 89 we awarded Heirfolio reflects its position in the Estate Planning category against the one other entity currently in that category (Vigil Protocol at 72). Trust & Will sits outside the category and outside the comparison; it is doing a different thing well at a different price point.

Subject to the next quarterly review.

See full Heirfolio profile → · See Trust & Will (not in index; this comparison is the closest equivalent)

Affiliate disclosure

The Touchstone Report has an affiliate relationship with Heirfolio. We earn a referral fee if a reader signs up for a paid Heirfolio tier via a link from this site. The relationship does not influence the score or the recommendation framework above. The Heirfolio score is determined solely by the published v1.0 methodology and the dimension scores are visible on the Heirfolio entity profile for independent recomputation. The Trust & Will comparison is descriptive against publicly verifiable facts; The Touchstone Report has no commercial relationship with Trust & Will. The full list of affiliate relationships is maintained at /about/affiliates.

Last updated May 25, 2026. Heirfolio scored against v1.0 methodology. Trust & Will data drawn from trustandwill.com as of the date above. Verify current pricing on the Trust & Will site directly.