Online Will or DIY Will: Which Is Better?

A traditional DIY will pack, whether bought from a shop or downloaded online, is essentially a printed form with blank spaces for names, gifts and signatures, and some general instructions. It relies on you understanding what needs to go in each section and phrasing it correctly, with no check on whether your answers actually make legal sense together.

This can work for extremely simple wishes, but it also means any misunderstanding, an ambiguous gift, a missed residue clause, an executor who is also an essential witness, goes unnoticed until it causes a problem, usually after you have died and can no longer fix it.

A guided online will service asks you a structured sequence of questions and generates the legal wording itself, rather than leaving you to write it. This reduces the risk of ambiguous or incomplete clauses, because the wording is drawn from tested legal language rather than your own phrasing under time pressure.

Good services also prompt you about things a blank template will not mention unless you already know to think about them, such as what happens if a beneficiary dies before you, or whether your chosen witness might also be a beneficiary, which would invalidate their gift.

Whichever format you use, your will only becomes valid once it is signed and witnessed correctly under section 9 of the Wills Act 1837: your signature, made or acknowledged in the presence of two witnesses present together, who then also sign in your presence. This step is entirely manual and identical regardless of how the document was drafted.

A good online service explains this step clearly in writing; a blank DIY pack sometimes gives only brief or generic instructions. Since this is the most common cause of invalid DIY wills, clear guidance here is one of the most valuable things a service can offer. See our guide on how to sign a will.

Blank DIY will packs are often marketed as very cheap, sometimes a few pounds, but this reflects the fact that you are doing all the drafting work yourself with minimal guidance. A guided online will costs more than a truly blank template but far less than a solicitor, because you are paying for structured questions and generated wording rather than a solicitor's time.

Our single will is £69 and mirror wills are £89, one-off, reflecting a fully guided process rather than a blank form.

Both DIY templates and guided online wills are designed for straightforward estates. If you have a business, want to set up trusts, own property overseas, or have a blended family with competing interests, neither format is a substitute for a solicitor's judgement, and using either in those circumstances risks a will that does not achieve what you actually wanted.

For everyone else, a guided online will is generally the safer of the two DIY-style options, because it reduces the number of ways a well-intentioned mistake can slip through unnoticed.