Which one do people prefer? I’ve personally found the chess.com UI to be a lot warmer and more inviting than lichess, but I’m interested to hear people’s opinions
Lichess, definitely.
From a technology point of view it’s superb and they have their users and chess as top priority.
people are also much nicer on lichess
lichess.org all day.
Just located an en passant solution in a lichess Puzzle of the day… case closed!
Holy hell!
Oh My Lands! Don‘t forget the Il Vaticano, Too!
I prefer lichess, i like its analysis tools and the dev seems awesome.
Open source all the way!
Regarding the UI, I guess it is a matter of personal preference, although in lichess you have all the time controls in the front page, one click away, while chess-dot-com only has 10 min games in the front page, and for any other time control you need several more clicks.
Lichess has unlimited puzzles, which is a huge plus (although it also a huge temptation for procrastination).
chess-dot-com has better educational material, although nowadays there is lots and lots of high quality material elsewhere.
I really like lichess’ open source model. But to be fair, chess-dot-com re-invest a lot in supporting tournaments and content creators, so they are also a force for good in the community.
At the end of the day, they aren’t mutually exclusive. You can use both of them for different things.
Note that Lichess has an amazing openings explorer, a funny and interactive learning section and a cool studies section.
They also organized a lot of videos for learning by topic.
Surely it feels less premium than chess.com, but that could’ve been said about Wikipedia vs Britannica.
Lichess for me is awesome and truly promotes chess for everybody.
lichess for sure. I even donate ❤️
definitely lichess
chess.com is not available in my country, when lichess open for all
I prefer lichess, but most of my friends are on chess.com
Same here, I find lichess to be a smoother experience. Although I prefer the rating system on chess.com as it seems to be more accurate to elo ratings. Overall I prefer lichess for no ads, no subscription pestering, and being entirely free.
The reason people think the Chess.com rating system is more accurate, is because it had used a more standardized default rating, and now the average on the site is closer to that of FIDE, USCF, etc. In reality, ratings are arbitrary numbers, and the only way ratings can be compared is with other ratings in the same system (site, federation). Chess.com actually uses the archaic Glicko-1, as opposed to the newer Glicko-2, which has important modifications in the realm of volatility, meaning the chance a player does something unexpected, and it leads to more accurate ratings, not less. Lichess, on the other hand, has updated to Glicko-2.
Just a word of thanks for posting this. Hadn’t used lichess.org before but definitely prefer it - the design is no-nonsense but it has equivalent functionality to chess.com, or so it appears. The fact that it’s committed to providing free service and runs on donations seals the deal and I’ll be happy to chip in because I’m switching.
Lichess, for the reason why it exists!
But I give it to chess.com that it does more creative things regarding the gamification around the chess game itself for the “average” chess player.
I didn’t realize lichess was open source when I made this post. Is there more to their story than just that?
Not that much. They also have an anti ad campaign. It’s just Internet as it should have been all along. :)
Holy shit the anti-ad campaign thing is awesome. I never knew they supported it.
Lichess is legitimately one of the most used FOSS projects in the world.
I use lichess because it’s Foss (and I think the ui is better)
The main advantages I see with chesscom is that it has better theme and piece set options, and I usually don’t have to wait as long for an opponent.
Lichess for the studies alone is worth its weight in gold
I use lichess but never used chess.com so it’s not a comparison more that I defaulted to lichess since it’s open source.
I am fairly amazed at what it provides though
Lichess runs much, much lighter than Chesscom. I definitely prefer the UI for things like analysis on Chesscom, but like Lichess more overall. If nothing else the amount of free tools (and 0 ads!) makes me appreciate the ethos of Lichess more. Power to the people.
