19 ms·

Chess.com vs. Lichess

365 points by weekendvampire 5y ago

bytematic 5y ago
Go look at lichess's open source codebase and tell me that isn't a beautiful product
cdot2 5y ago
Newbies should check out r/anarchychess for tips
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Be brave, be honest to yourself and stop this trush talkings!!!
dragontamer 5y ago
For chess analysis, I recommend SCID vs PC. It turns out that chess-playing programs have standardized upon UCI (Universal Chess Interface), meaning any chess-playing program, (IE: Stockfish and Leela Chess) can interface with any UCI program (in this case, SCID vs PC). SCID vs PC can then be tuned to whatever you think is appropriate for review. Add the tablebases if you want perfect endgame analysis, or favor faster reviews with less analysis (if you're going for speed). Or you can run analysis overnight, if you want the computer to spend 20+ minutes per position. -------- With an actual analysis program like SCID vs PC, you can try variations and deeper studies than what either chess.com or lichess.org can offer. There's no replacement to just running these calculations on your own very capable computers... rather than leveraging the limited compute abilities of a shared server with a thousand players on it. (Or in the case of lichess, I think its a Javascript program instead of a proper x86-assembly tuned high-speed analysis bot). Stockfish in particular has a nifty quirk: most of its analysis is done in a giant hash table of positions. Meaning variations / transpositions are very quick for Stockfish to analyze (or more like, Stockfish probably has a variation already partially-analyzed before you even decided to think about it yourself. The hash table stores this partial analysis, and allows Stockfish to have a leg-up on analyzing the position when you decide upon exploring that variation). -------- The equivalent for Go is Lizzie, which is easier since Lizzie comes with LeelaZero and KataGo already. (KataGo is the superior analysis engine IMO. Both are superhuman, but KataGo's score-based analysis is more useful for finding endgame mistakes).
- stouset 5y ago
  Lichess uses Stockfish 14+ NNUE compiled with WASM, so it should be essentially as fast as running it locally on your own machine. They don't expose as many of the tuning options, but that's not an enormous difference for most people. So no, it is just just some Javascript program. And as far as I know, essentially every modern chess engine uses a hashtable of positions such that transpositions are essentially free. This isn't a unique "quirk" of Stockfish.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    Except Stockfish has some hand-written x86-specific bits, such as PEXT / PDEP, or BMI2 instructions. I'm talking hand-tuned assembly here, really good stuff and very high performance. Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds. And those "tuning options" include tablebases, which would provably play perfectly (and Stockfish is smart enough to "think" with tablebases: if it can prove a won position with a tablebase, it won't bother exploring and will just report the mate-in-300 immediately)
    - thom 5y ago
      PEXT is mostly for magic bitboards, right? So it’s more of a one time cost. But still, I’d be amazed if it weren’t much slower in the browser now and forever.
      - dragontamer 5y ago
        No. Magic Bitboards are what you use if you don't have PEXT available. EDIT: I expect the WASM version to use magic-bitboards (which is just a "magical" multiply instruction + a lookup). Every single sliding piece (ie: Rooks, Bishops, and Queens) use PEXT (or magic-bitboards if the PEXT code is unavailable) to determine where to go. Its a fundamental calculation to determine very, very quickly which moves are legal or not. Both PEXT and Magic Bitboards are incredible techniques for solving the sliding-piece question. However, PEXT is much much much faster, but relies upon an obscure x86-only assembly instruction (that is slower on AMD Zen or Zen2 unfortunately. So you still need to know your hardware details, Intel machines should use the PEXT version). --------- Still, even AMD users want the BMI2 version, which has a bunch of bit-operations that can be optimized that are used all the time. (And besides, AMD Zen3 is actually faster on PEXT now, so PEXT is looking good for the future) ----- In either case, I have my doubts that the NNUE neural-net runs anywhere near as good on WASM than on the hand-optimized SIMD / AVX kernels that the Stockfish team wrote. Even if there's some auto-vectorization that WASM can do, its really hard to beat handcrafted assembly / intrinsics (https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/src/nnue/nnue_feature_transformer.h https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...)
Haydos585x2 5y ago
Decent analysis and I agree with all the points. I think if chess.com didn't have the streamer network behind it and Gotham/Hikaru etc moved to lichess that people would entirely forget about chess.com.
thecatwentup 5y ago
This is one area where I think the cosmetics for purchase model makes sense. It could be seen as a way to support a creator in a built in way as part of an app. For many free projects it can be easy to overlook the fact that someone has poured their time and effort into it to make it happen, especially if they don't have "ads" that are asking directly for donations.
willbw 5y ago
It seems pointless to discuss chess.com without mentioning the paid features like game analysis which are much more user-friendly than Lichess.
- dvirsky 5y ago
  For one thing, framing your accuracy in percentage instead of the obscure "centipawn loss" makes understanding how well you played much easier. BTW I've compared their analysis on a number of games, and it seemed like lichess is much tougher on you in what it defines as a blunder.
  - e4e5 5y ago
    I disagree, ACPL is a well defined system, while nobody really knows what the accuracy means or how it's defined. 1 CPL, in short, is the loss of 1/100th of a pawn. Take the average of that and you get ACPL. So a ACPL of 100 means that you on average lost one pawn on every move (of course this isn't literal) that you played.
    - dvirsky 5y ago
      I've read the meaning and I can tell what the numbers mean, but it's still less intuitive than percentage.
      - aflag 5y ago
        Interesting, I find the exact opposite. Measuring things in terms of pawns give me a feel of how far behind I was from optimal play, whereas with the percentage, it's quite abstract. What does 70% accuracy mean?
        dvirsky 5y ago
        That you're 30% far from optimal play :)
mhaberl 5y ago
> Lichess is developed and managed mostly by one guy wow! is this realy true?!
- Barrin92 5y ago
  going based off the github insights, yep seems mostly true, and it's the case for a surprising number of large projects. https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/contributors https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/contributors
- 0x4b63 5y ago
  It is true! He also occasionally streams development of lichess live on twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2 https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2
- jstx1 5y ago
  Yes, he seems to be very happy to be building a cool project with a good community around it - https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lichess_ask_me_anything/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...
hooande 5y ago
which of these sites do people find is better for analyzing games? I have trouble remembering what I learn from looking at one game at a time
- iza 5y ago
  Lichess analysis is free and uses a much newer version of Stockfish, though some people prefer Chess.com's UI.
samdg 5y ago
A feature I was surprised not to see in the "Cleaner page UI during chess games" section: Lichess has a zen mode that maximally simplifies the UI. It removes the chat, navigation menu, move history notation. You're left with the board, clocks, resign/draw/takeback actions, and move replay. You can activate it by pressing "Z" during a game, and there's a menu option too.
- giords 5y ago
  You can even hide player ratings site-wide, to fully focus only on chess.
- Freeboots 5y ago
  Oh my god you can turn it on during a game? Here I am turning it back on via the menu after saying GG each game! What a chum!
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    Same here! I can’t believe there’s a hot key for this! They really do think of everything.
- whoisjohnkid 5y ago
  Yes zen mode is amazing. You’d be surprised at how much better you do when you just focus on the game vs paying attention to your opponents rating.
- wtf_is_up 5y ago
  Love turning on zen mode and just solving puzzles endlessly.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  Anyone not playing Zen mode is doing themselves a huge disfavour. It allows you not to care about your opponents score, nor identity, nor messages.
freediver 5y ago
I spent a lot of time on chess.com (including paying for membership) but recently switched to lichess, because simply it feels a better, more polished, product. Love the fact it does not have ads (https://lichess.org/blog/YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/why-lichess-will-always-be-free https://lichess.org/blog/YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/why-lichess-will-a.... ) unlike chess.com which is ad-infested. Lichess is very customizable. Love the everyday tournaments and the community there as well. Would pay for it. The in-game analysis in lichess is fantastic (too bad my favorite WebKit browser doesn't support WASM SIMD, looking at you Bug #222382 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222382 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222382 ) so I don't get the full Stockfish NNUE. That is the only thing I miss really.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  If you would pay for it, then do pay for it, by contributing a few dollars a month.
- de6u99er 5y ago
  Ever heard about En Passant?
  - LandR 5y ago
    Holy hell
  - dgfitz 5y ago
    I've been teaching my daughter (7) to play chess, and I never knew this rule. She's going to be very excited to learn this one.
    - forty 5y ago
      I have been teaching my daughter too. She is younger (she just turned 5), and En passant is one of the rules I voluntarily skipped (together with Castling). Pawns rules are already such a mess without it!
- andrewzah 5y ago
MaxMoney 5y ago
Lichess is much, much better. It's free. Chess.com is a bloated mess and it won't change.. they think they are facebook.
MaxMoney 5y ago
Lichess is so much better. It's free. chess.com thinks its facebook and it looks really childish (they probably copied things from chesskid). They have like a billion developers (why? its chess.. and already done). Lichess is like 1 guy (who I think used to work for chesscom until the ceo was a dick or something)
- thope 5y ago
  haha no he never worked for chess.com, wonder where you heard that one :D lichess is not one guy either, there's a whole community of developers, moderators etc.
  - MaxMoney 5y ago
    i have sources. lots of old employee posts who quit also talking shit about the ceo
imgabe 5y ago
I also recently switched to Lichess after using Chess.com for years. What tipped it for me was that I switched to an iPhone, and for some reason the Chess.com app on the iPhone absolutely obliterated my battery. I'm not sure what the issue was and maybe it's been fixed, but for a while it was just eating up battery life while playing like nothing else. The servers for Lichess I find a little less reliable, but it's mostly fine. I also like the free-ness and ad-free business model of Lichess. I ended up donating $10. Overall Lichess is a better experience. Chess.com is perfectly usable without paying, but the constant nagging to sign up for a subscription is annoying.
- albinofrenchy 5y ago
  The lichess app is all around better. Bullet is unplayable on chess.com's app.
  - chollida1 5y ago
    Really? I play billet games on my phone almost daily. Maybe try to reinstall your app if or crashes or won’t let you play because I’d definitely should.
    - albinofrenchy 5y ago
      It doesn't crash; it's sluggish. It's hard to quantify but it's like there is a quasi animation effect that you can't turn off. In something like 3|2 it's not terrible but in 1 minute games its a real issue. I thought for a while that maybe I was just used to the lichess interface but I don't have the same sluggish feel when playing on my phone on the website vs the app.
      - chollida1 5y ago
        Interesting. I've never seen that, perhaps I'm just lucky, or not as good as you that i notice the lag:)
        5y ago
georgeoliver 5y ago
I've played on both (currently on Lichess). Few other distinguishing features: * Chess.com has many excellent user blogs if you're into analysis and chess history. * As a commercial platform, Chess.com can do a lot more to support professional players (Pro Chess League, etc.). * The Lichess studies feature is really good and I don't think there's a comparable feature on Chess.com?
- dankwizard 5y ago
  Regarding studies, it is kind of similar to https://www.chess.com/library?tab=community-collections https://www.chess.com/library?tab=community-collections
tehnub 5y ago
Multiple premoves is not really a pro for chess.com. Premoves function differently on the two websites. On chess.com, each premove takes 0.1 seconds from your clock when it executes, while on Lichess, they do not take any time at all. Given that difference, having multiple premoves would be too strong. Given the way premoves behave differently, I wouldn't say either one is superior to the other.
- rtpg 5y ago
  Conditional pre-moves on chess.com are very useful for people playing correspondence chess, so that games can finish up a bit more quickly
  - tehnub 5y ago
    That's a different feature, but sounds cool! Didn't know about that.
  - Yxven 5y ago
    You can premove as many moves as you want in a lichess correspondence game. I feel like you can even premove to whatever depth you want, but it has been a while since I've played.
  - Tryk 5y ago
    Lichess also has conditional pre-moves in correspondence chess
    - rtpg 5y ago
      thanks, didn't realize that was in there (I only use lichess on my phone though...)
      - apetresc 5y ago
        For a long time, conditional premoves in correspondence didn't exist on the mobile app, only on the site - but that's fixed now too.
mellosouls 5y ago
I prefer Lichess simply because it handles connections far better than Chess.com which has a long-standing history of dropping them mid-game and denying its a problem at their end. Other than that, I find Chess.com's interface more polished, but Lichess ultimately more personal, I guess as it is less corporate.
jfkw 5y ago
Glad to see Lichess mentioned here. I have been trying without success to log in or password reset using a Gmail account. Messages from Lichess never seem to be delivered to Gmail, even to the Spam folder. Short of creating a throwaway account to access the forums, is there any alternate way to contact Lichess admins to ask if this is a known issue?
- e4e5 5y ago
  You can go on the lichess discord, a lot of mods and admins are online there.
giords 5y ago
If you have some server sitting idle you could consider contributing cycles to the fishnet: https://lichess.org/get-fishnet https://lichess.org/get-fishnet
- sodality2 5y ago
  I requested this a few months ago as my server was sitting unused and I wanted to help. Never got an answer back, maybe because the server's specs aren't great. Either way now I've got nextcloud running so unfortunately too late :(
  - ycombinete 5y ago
    You probably had the "laptop mode" toggled on in the setup. With it on you will rarely get games to analyse. This will only send you games when the network is stressed. If you toggle it off you should get one game after another almost constantly. I doubt it's speed. I was getting constant games with an i3-5100.
    - sodality2 5y ago
      I never even received a response when I filled out the Google Forms, so I don't have an API key to use.
- rdbell 5y ago
  Neat. Is this vulnerable to abuse by submitting bad results back to the server, or have they figured out a low-cost way of verifying the integrity of the results somehow?
  - giords 5y ago
    TBH I don't know if they feature any kind of protection against that. You can check/ask here https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet/issues https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet/issues
tholman 5y ago
If you've been following these two products for the last few years it's definitely clear to see that Lichess is slowly eating chess.com's lunch ... They're not fast at development, but slowly and surely improving and innovating on the space via being open source. For example, Lichess puzzles aren't quite of the same quality yet and their puzzle games are new (BUT) they've built and are improving the tech to create new puzzles from games played on their system which is ever increasing, with the benefit of being REAL positions reached in games. It feels like when Lichess make a move (eg into puzzle games) its sudden and of high quality. ++ Their growth is amazing especially considering they aren't paying chess influencers to use their platform.
- chollida1 5y ago
  Interesting perspective. I have subscriptions to both and my first reaction was the exact opposite of yours. Chess.con is so far ahead of lichens that it wasn’t debatable. What in your opinion leads you to believe that lichess is eating chess.com’s lunch. For me games are far easier and quicker to setup with chess.com. The drills are better at chess.com and so are the lessons, both in-depth and breadth. I can’t really think of a single thing lichess does better so I find it strange that you see things So vastly different. Also the competition on chess.con seems far better. My Elo rank on lichess is a full 500 points higher on lichess than chess.com, so I guess some purple could consider the go cost to be a point for lichess What do you see in lichess that i superior to chess.com?
  - A-Train 5y ago
    How exactly increased elo makes lichess worse? I would only argue that because of the number of players chess.com it seems more stable. I really feel every 50 of elo difference.
    - rharb 5y ago
      It doesn’t. Especially in this case, because lichess doesn’t even use elo ratings. It’s a different rating system altogether. https://lichess.org/faq#ratings https://lichess.org/faq#ratings
thoughtstheseus 5y ago
Sounds like we need a chess DAO. It would be cool to have a piece of the game of "Chess".
- Shared404 5y ago
  Sounds like a hammer seeing nails.
- shyn3 5y ago
  https://discord.gg/VJuEZZuD https://discord.gg/VJuEZZuD it exists
tzs 5y ago
It has been a few years since I looked at any of the major chess sites, but it used to be that chess.com had way more teaching and training material than lichess. Where do they stand nowadays in that regard? I also see that ChessCube.com is gone. Too bad. They had an interesting tournament format whose name I forget that was wild and fun. Instead of having a fixed number of games like normal tournaments, these ran for a fixed time. As soon as you finished a game you could go back into the pool to be paired for another game. So someone who is fast and good had a better chance of winning the tournament than someone who is good but not as fast, because they could play more games.
- jeremyjh 5y ago
  Lichess has some good lessons especially for beginners but they don't have audio like chess.com's. I think they are good though and what is neat about them is they are based on the studies feature, so anyone can create an interactive lesson on Lichess and share them. When my kids got interested in chess I created Lichess accounts for them. Some of chess.com's content helped me when I first started playing again, but I later found other free stuff that's just as good. It is nice to have it all in one place but I cancelled my membership when I found out I only got 25 puzzles a day with my "gold" membership. That is just lame.
- retzkek 5y ago
  Lichess calls that an "arena" tournament, they run constantly.
dvirsky 5y ago
One thing not mentioned here is the players. Chess.com is much more beginner heavy. I'm a pretty bad player, and while on lichess I'm slightly below the median, on chess.com I'm around 80th percentile. It also feels like the common or average playing style is a bit different, more basic and aggressive on chess.com. Here we go, another Fried Liver!
- frogpelt 5y ago
  Would you mind sharing your rating on each? I've found 600-level games on Chess.com much harder to win than 1000-level games on Lichess.
  - dvirsky 5y ago
    The Elo distribution is really different between them. I'm hovering around 1500 on lichess Blitz and 1100 on chess.com Blitz. I would say 1000 on lichess ~= 500-600 on chess.com.
  - demopathos 5y ago
    I'm 1500 lichess and approx 1250 chess.com 50th percentile lichess and 80th percentile chess.com
  - ycombinete 5y ago
    Lichess starts you out at 1500 vs chess.com's 1200. So the whole bell curve is shifted.
    - dvirsky 5y ago
      IIRC in chess.com you can start as beginner/intermediate/advanced and your initial rating will be 800/1200/1600 respectively.
  - gpm 5y ago
    Chess.com and lichess use different rating systems, and give different ratings to new players. Chess.com ratings end up being consistently lower, but that doesn't correspond to you being in a lower percentile of players on chess.com (what parent was talking about). For reference though, I'm 2000 lichess rapid, and 1700 chess.com rapid. I use chess.com as my "I'm not going to play well right now" site so it's a bit worse because of that, but mostly it's because of the difference in rating system/pool.
xiaodai 5y ago
It's amazing to me that an open source product can be better than a paid product. I think OGS is quite good vs fox except that fox has alot more players in the go world
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Linux servers are everywhere, MS uses linux, linux users are common on here, wikipedia killed Encarta. Don't be amazed, its the norm.
  - anthk 5y ago
    On chess: XBoard+gnuchess/stockfish, SCIM... free software won in a lot of places.
gompertz 5y ago
A smidge off topic, but I'm curious; is there a place where you can upload (say) a chess bot you designed and play against other uploaded chess bots? (or any move base game, even as simple as 'paper rock scissors')?
- monkpit 5y ago
  Yeah, I also thought this was going to be bot vs bot :)
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  Lichess allows you to upload a custom bots and play them (and other can too), and I believe you can also run against other bots. There's also https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship, but IDK how one enters.
- ydnaclementine 5y ago
  You can do so on lichess. Basically you create a chess engine, set it as a bot account, and let it go against other engines and real players. I don't do it myself, but more info here: https://lichess.org/blog/WvDNticAAMu_mHKP/welcome-lichess-bots https://lichess.org/blog/WvDNticAAMu_mHKP/welcome-lichess-bo... And here: https://lichess.org/api#operation/botAccountUpgrade https://lichess.org/api#operation/botAccountUpgrade
  - gompertz 5y ago
    Oh! Excellent... Thanks!
- jah 5y ago
  You can also use the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) as a test bed for chess engines. The interface is telnet-based, so it's pretty easy to experiment with and learn. There's also "zippy" mode in xboard that allows you to connect your engine to FICS . The commands below will login as a guest and display all of the computer accounts. Use the finger command to find info about an account. telnet freechess.org g <ENTER> who C<ENTER> finger ACCOUNT Sadly, FICS has been dying a slow death for the past 10 years ... but there are plenty of idle CPU accounts waiting for an opponent.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
chess.com has always been more laggy when moving pieces around than lichess, which is perfectly lag free animation for me. Not sure what is causing it, but I have the feeling, that it affects my blitz performance a lot, especially in time trouble.
ummonk 5y ago
I wonder how much general agreement there is with these opinions. Personally I agreed with most of the UI opinions except the preference for L-shaped knight move arrows.
whoisjohnkid 5y ago
started off with chess.com and moved over to lichess years ago. Haven’t looked back since. Yeah sometimes it takes a while to join a game if you are trying to just play casual, but all in all I like it better. Can’t believe it’s mostly ran by one guy. Thought they had a team of devs, makes me appreciate the product even more now.
jacobsenscott 5y ago
If you get a paid subscription to chess.com it evens out. No ads, etc. You have a lot of control over your view of the chess game - it doesn't need to be cluttered. I appreciate that lichess is free and opensource, but I think chess.com has done a lot for the chess world with all the money they made during the lockdown. Especially during the pandemic, when there were no OTB tournaments chess.com put money into a lot of tournaments.
codemac 5y ago
lichess : chess :: online-go : go
perihelions 5y ago
You can invite a friend to play on lichess, because it's free. This is a good direction for the tech world to go. I'm very glad there are people like ornicar, creating the world they want to see and live in.
1121redblackgo 5y ago
Its good to have options
anikan_vader 5y ago
It's worth noting many of these points are subjective, and I disagree with all of the bullets in favor of chess.com. I'm 2100 Elo on Lichess for what it's worth. 1. I prefer the way Lichess handles right clicks, knight movement tracking, and tracking arrows. 2. 4-player chess: The author mentions that it's their favorite variant to watch. I can't say I've heard that opinion before. Personally I tend to stick to vanilla chess, but it's worth noting that Lichess has many different variants available. 3. Games start faster: I've found games start faster on Lichess for me. 4. Varied playing sounds: Lichess also has different sounds for captures. Personally I turn the sounds off for slow chess since they're annoying, but I can't find my rhythm without them when playing bullet. 5. Multiple premoves: Actually it's much easier to win endgames on Lichess when you have 1 second left, since Lichess does not deduct time from your clock when you make premoves. 6. Social media: I've never seen any content from either on social media. This comment is admittedly just a massive diss of chess.com, but it's not all bad. I think the main reason many people prefer chess.com is that it's familiar from the streams of the likes of Nakamura and Rozman. This is simply because chess.com pays streamers with the money they receive from premium users, whereas Lichess is free.
- doopy1 5y ago
  I prefer to play on my phone as opposed to with a mouse. I like short games 3 mins and under. I've tried so much to like chess.com, but it's just so much worse than Lichess. Chess.com feels choppy, I don't like the style of the pieces, and the app just kind of bugs me in comparison. I'm not a strong player, but I play a ton... maybe we are just creatures of habit and like the apps we are used to?
- mrpotato 5y ago
  > This is simply because chess.com pays streamers with the money they receive from premium users, whereas Lichess is free. Not only that but they also hold tournaments (ie: PogChamps which was a great success IMO) and they also have tournament analyses (ie: 2021 World Championship). They even have good production value! (outside of covid related limitations). That being said, I agree with your diss of chess.com and will mention that I only play on lichess.
kriops 5y ago
I think lichess.org is far superior in that it has a super-polished UX in ways that are not immediately obvious. After I made the switch from chess.com in 2014 (I had the paid features), it was always extremely annoying to come back. Also lichess.org gives you most of what chess.com tries to upsell you on, for free. As it happens I've re-validated this over the last few days with dozens of games on chess.com. A single example, and a counter-point to the article: Drawing knight-moves as "L"-shaped arrows is actually super annoying, because the likelihood that moves between different pairs of squares partially overlap is quite high. And in general, the lichess.org app is miles ahead on visual clarity, giving feedback on your actions, and indicating your turn (seems trivial I know, but it's not). Chess.com on the other hand offers chess content, such as courses tournament coverage, blogs, etc. that lichess does not.
- jeremyjh 5y ago
  Yeah I was surprised at that. I think the arrows on chess.com are one of its biggest shortcomings. They are completely opaque and cover a lot of the board.
  - dubeye 5y ago
    It's subjective. The arrows and circles on lichess really bug me. I much prefer chess arrows.
- blub 5y ago
  The tournament UI has been broken on iOS for years. It doesn't register taps properly and some UI elements are not shown where they should be. OTOH, the website works pretty well on mobile, scrolling aside. In general, I also had the feeling that the lichess UI is a bit more immediate, it was easier for me to get around. But I think a big difference is not in features or UX, but the behaviour of the players. Because of its free nature, lichess has several problems that I haven't seen on chess.com. I do use chess.com significantly less, but I've always had civil interactions there. On lichess: * people are free to act like jerks, since they will likely get away with it. My chat's turned off, but I can't do anything about people abandoning games when they lose, trying to pretend that they've left so that I don't pay attention and lose on time, etc. * severe lack of gentlemanly behaviour. As an example, I don't think I've ever seen someone concede a game, it's almost always a bitter fight way past the point a reasonable player may accept defeat. * Now that I think about it, lichess brings the worst in me. I want to crush my opponents and taunt them. Yet another reason why my chat's turned off. Blitz is a vicious game, full of trickery. :)
darepublic 5y ago
I use lichess. The one downside is apparently the ratings on lichess are somewhat inflated
- dankwizard 5y ago
  I think it's due to new accounts starting with a higher Elo, and the fact I think LiChess' isn't even really Elo but their own measurement
- thope 5y ago
  Lichess uses Glicko-2 rating method, see https://lichess.org/faq#ratings https://lichess.org/faq#ratings
elcapitan 5y ago
Related, but slightly offtopic: Does anybody know sort of an open source/DIY alternative to digital chessboards like DGT boards? Would love to use something like that for input, but real DGT boards are very expensive, unfortunately.
- johtso 5y ago
  At one point I was planning to make something using a glass table with a camera underneath it and ArUco markers on the bottom of the chess pieces. The problem with trying to make something that uses electronics is the number of squares on the board making it quite a big fiddly task.
Ice_cream_suit 5y ago
Lichess is far superior to other chess sites in the interface, quality of play, and quality of the community. Chess.com does have some excellent pay-extra-to-use content.
elcapitan 5y ago
Regarding interactive training resources, there are other good resources which are partially free (or limited) and partially payable content: - https://chesstempo.com/ https://chesstempo.com/ has a great collection of chess puzzles - https://www.chessable.com https://www.chessable.com is specialized on interactive training. They have may free courses and combine what a classical book (text plus moves) would have done with memorization tools (for openings, tactics etc)
GhettoComputers 5y ago
I would love to see XiangQi on Lichess or a suggestion for a good one. I suck at Chinese chess, but after learning it I was demolishing my friends from the headspace it gave me, the complexity really seemed to help me be a better chess player. I feel like I was an amateur "take as many pieces as you can and overwhelm the king" before and Chinese Chess turned me into a "sacrifice your pieces to position yourself better, value the pieces differently at different points of the game, and kill the king ASAP with pressure" player. In Chinese Chess, I try playing against others and I know I probably lost in the first 5 moves often, I really suck at it, and in 10 moves I usually can tell I lost, I have never won once against a player online.
- queuebert 5y ago
  The entire site is open source. You could make your own. People have done that for Go. https://github.com/ornicar/lila https://github.com/ornicar/lila
- S4M 5y ago
  I don't have the source, but I remember read the lichess didn't want to implement other board games in their interface. For XiangQi, I know that you can play it on playok.com (I know the rules and played a few games last time just to get the feeling, but I am more into chess and shogi...).
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Yeah I get murdered there. I should learn to get better I am always beaten by computers too.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - S4M 5y ago
      I just went on playok to play couple of games of xiang qi and... I also got murdered...
distantaidenn 5y ago
Also recently switched to Lichess from Chess.com. The biggest benefit so far is the community. I don't know if Lichess just has better mods or if the two sites just attract vastly different crowds. Some players on Chess.com were downright rude (win or lose) and even had a racial slur tossed at me. So far so good on Lichess.
Brajeshwar 5y ago
I'm not really concerned about the design, UI/UX or the algorithms as I just play pretty much at random to beat boredom, anxiety, and time-fillers. I don't make "friends" nor do I train, puzzles, or anything but just want to play with another human on the other end. I approach game plays on the experience and mistakes, and tries a more heuristic approach. I know I should try to learn the tactics. As of today (on chess.com since Jul 8, 2007), I have played 15,472 and done 1 puzzle and 1 lesson. 1415 rating in Blitz, and I play either 3min or 5min max. I have played 79 games on Lichess since joining in May 10, 2015. 1716 in Blitz. I always land up on chess.com because there are enough people that I open a challenge, I get a player on the other end within seconds. Not so on Lichess - I have waited for 30+ minutes on most occasions.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  In 2021 you can always get a blitz game in 1 or 2 seconds on lichess by choosing one of the standard time controls (in the "quick game" tab, which is the front page).
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Lichess is the best thing that happened to chess since castling. Chess.com just grabbed a good domain name.
0x49d1 5y ago
Lichess is a bit sluggish in navigation, but it's almost purely community driven and you can feel that! I do support them and I really like their transparent philosophy, they even show you WHERE do they spend EVERY received $! Yes, there are some flaws, but me with other guys are actually making the website just better every day. Chess.com sure has their own philosophy, better moderation, better news articles (sometimes written by professional journalists), but hey, it's almost like a comparison of good paid service with good opensource community driven thing. Like... Windows vs Linux. Both do have their downsides, but the core philosophies are different and you just follow them or not.
thelittleone 5y ago
I was just about to open lichess for some blitz games but thought I'd read hacker news first. I used to play chess.com but it just feels spammy in comparison.
pstuart 5y ago
My only online gaming is playing endgames: https://lichess.org/training https://lichess.org/training
travelhead 5y ago
I’ve written extensively on the rampant cheating happening on chess.com: https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-9d29a7a625d8 https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-... LiChess on the other hand has incredible cheat detection algorithms, and I’ve only reported one cheater in the dozens of games I’ve played since quitting Chess.com and moving to Lichess. (I’m approximately 2350 on LiChess).
- rdbell 5y ago
  This is sad to see. I’ve played about 300 Rapid games on chess.com and there’s only one banned player in my game history. Am I just lucky? I’m not good enough to instinctively suspect cheaters, and running post-game analysis on all of your games seems like a big time sink for little gained. Another possible (dark pattern) solution would be an option to only play against other paying customers. I’d assume players who have paid would be less likely to risk losing their account. This would probably be a revenue boost for chess.com but might also upset free account holders. Also, if chess.com shadow-banned accounts by only matching them against bots instead of real players maybe they’d be less likely to immediately create a new account.
  - travelhead 5y ago
    I limited my article to only opponents that chess.com analyzed and banned after my report. There’s dozen more I reported that they failed to ban, and my guess is it has to do with a financial incentive to show more ads. There’s definitely a large swath of cheaters in the 1900-2200 range on chess.com.
geophertz 5y ago
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the ability to play without logging in on lichess. Very convenient when you want to play with a friend.
- michaelscott 5y ago
  Also useful when you want to try strange or unusual openings without ruining your rating
robertlagrant 5y ago
I'm a Lichess fan. Love Puzzle Storm!
DarylZero 5y ago
The chess.com UI was just so unpleasant I never even used it enough to get a feel for the site overall. I like that they fund a lot of the GM streamers on youtube but even in those videos it's unpleasant just to look at.
omnster 5y ago
I think it deserves a separate mention: lichess has so much better clock UI. Their clock is big and very clearly visible both on desktop and mobile. It also goes red when you are low on time. Chess.com's clock is tiny and I saw some GM complaining on his stream about losing on time because he was unable to track his clock because of that.
bananamerica 5y ago
A lot of people have an emotional and philosophical attachment to lichess, which is understandable. It's surprisingly (almost inexplicably...) free, clean, pleasant, awesome, and featureful. However, chess.com does have its advantages as well as unique features. And it is much quicker to find a match. I like both, but chess.com design is too busy for my taste. I'd use lichess a lot more if it didn't take so long to find a match, specially in certain times of the day.
jdthedisciple 5y ago
I started playing on chess.com in 2015 and my main issue was: they UI felt clunky and it seems to be deducting to much time from my clock even with premoves!!! Switched to lichess in 2017 or so and it's just way superior when it comes to UI/UX and performance specifically! I ran site performance tests for both a while ago and they numbers confirmed my subjective experience.
dubeye 5y ago
This comes up so often it’s a bit lady doth protest too much. they have strengths and weaknesses. As a 1200 elo. I prefer the analysis and game review on chess.com. I like the auto playback of alternative lines. Game review is more useful because I actually use it every time. Lichess game review might be more powerful, I don’t know but I find I use it less. Other little things chess has. The charts showing deviation from best move over the game. I like the video lessons. I prefer the square highlighting. I prefer the knight arrows on chess.com too.
crhutchins 5y ago
I always think that Lichess is really the apex website in terms of chess in the internet.
Assiosss 5y ago
The author is mentioning "multiple premoves" as a reason Chesscom is better, which makes the mistanken assumption that more is somehow better. In my (and most strong Bullet players I've talked to) opinion, it changes the Bullet meta for the worse, because it adds more noise. I'm rated 2600 in Bullet on both sites, for what it's worth. "One premove" could just as well be a reason why a site is better than the other than "Multiple premoves". I also think that the chessboard and playing UI is much smoother on Lichess, as opposed to the author - it's a matter of opinion.
Karolis_K 5y ago
For most of course it's not important, but Lichess has "blind mode" - this enables blind people to play chess online. Implementing this feature of course wouldn't pay off for Chess.com.
createunderrate 5y ago
I haven't seen much mention of the fact that Chess.com looks good, and Lichess looks bad. The graphics are prettier on Chess.com, and the sounds are better. Fortunately, this should be a very easy problem for Lichess to fix. Lichess just needs a bit more game juice, and it will feel as good as Chess.com.
blindmute 5y ago
Nit: Lichess does play different sounds between captures and moves.
zestyping 5y ago
I personally find the Lichess board cleaner and more beautiful. Using circles to highlight squares is clearer, and drawing knight moves as straight lines is clearer, as well. I also just prefer the pieces and the board colour.
jvandonsel 5y ago
Here’s an advantage of chess.com that I haven’t heard discussed yet. When playing against the computer I can request hints when I’m stumped. If lichess supports this then I haven’t found it yet. As a mediocre player I find it very instructive.

bytematic 5y ago

Go look at lichess's open source codebase and tell me that isn't a beautiful product

cdot2 5y ago

Newbies should check out r/anarchychess for tips

dane-pgp 5y ago
Be brave, be honest to yourself and stop this trush talkings!!!

dragontamer 5y ago

For chess analysis, I recommend SCID vs PC. It turns out that chess-playing programs have standardized upon UCI (Universal Chess Interface), meaning any chess-playing program, (IE: Stockfish and Leela Chess) can interface with any UCI program (in this case, SCID vs PC). SCID vs PC can then be tuned to whatever you think is appropriate for review. Add the tablebases if you want perfect endgame analysis, or favor faster reviews with less analysis (if you're going for speed). Or you can run analysis overnight, if you want the computer to spend 20+ minutes per position. -------- With an actual analysis program like SCID vs PC, you can try variations and deeper studies than what either chess.com or lichess.org can offer. There's no replacement to just running these calculations on your own very capable computers... rather than leveraging the limited compute abilities of a shared server with a thousand players on it. (Or in the case of lichess, I think its a Javascript program instead of a proper x86-assembly tuned high-speed analysis bot). Stockfish in particular has a nifty quirk: most of its analysis is done in a giant hash table of positions. Meaning variations / transpositions are very quick for Stockfish to analyze (or more like, Stockfish probably has a variation already partially-analyzed before you even decided to think about it yourself. The hash table stores this partial analysis, and allows Stockfish to have a leg-up on analyzing the position when you decide upon exploring that variation). -------- The equivalent for Go is Lizzie, which is easier since Lizzie comes with LeelaZero and KataGo already. (KataGo is the superior analysis engine IMO. Both are superhuman, but KataGo's score-based analysis is more useful for finding endgame mistakes).

stouset 5y ago
Lichess uses Stockfish 14+ NNUE compiled with WASM, so it should be essentially as fast as running it locally on your own machine. They don't expose as many of the tuning options, but that's not an enormous difference for most people. So no, it is just just some Javascript program. And as far as I know, essentially every modern chess engine uses a hashtable of positions such that transpositions are essentially free. This isn't a unique "quirk" of Stockfish.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Except Stockfish has some hand-written x86-specific bits, such as PEXT / PDEP, or BMI2 instructions. I'm talking hand-tuned assembly here, really good stuff and very high performance. Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds. And those "tuning options" include tablebases, which would provably play perfectly (and Stockfish is smart enough to "think" with tablebases: if it can prove a won position with a tablebase, it won't bother exploring and will just report the mate-in-300 immediately)
  - thom 5y ago
    PEXT is mostly for magic bitboards, right? So it’s more of a one time cost. But still, I’d be amazed if it weren’t much slower in the browser now and forever.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      No. Magic Bitboards are what you use if you don't have PEXT available. EDIT: I expect the WASM version to use magic-bitboards (which is just a "magical" multiply instruction + a lookup). Every single sliding piece (ie: Rooks, Bishops, and Queens) use PEXT (or magic-bitboards if the PEXT code is unavailable) to determine where to go. Its a fundamental calculation to determine very, very quickly which moves are legal or not. Both PEXT and Magic Bitboards are incredible techniques for solving the sliding-piece question. However, PEXT is much much much faster, but relies upon an obscure x86-only assembly instruction (that is slower on AMD Zen or Zen2 unfortunately. So you still need to know your hardware details, Intel machines should use the PEXT version). --------- Still, even AMD users want the BMI2 version, which has a bunch of bit-operations that can be optimized that are used all the time. (And besides, AMD Zen3 is actually faster on PEXT now, so PEXT is looking good for the future) ----- In either case, I have my doubts that the NNUE neural-net runs anywhere near as good on WASM than on the hand-optimized SIMD / AVX kernels that the Stockfish team wrote. Even if there's some auto-vectorization that WASM can do, its really hard to beat handcrafted assembly / intrinsics (https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/src/nnue/nnue_feature_transformer.h https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...)

Haydos585x2 5y ago

Decent analysis and I agree with all the points. I think if chess.com didn't have the streamer network behind it and Gotham/Hikaru etc moved to lichess that people would entirely forget about chess.com.

thecatwentup 5y ago

This is one area where I think the cosmetics for purchase model makes sense. It could be seen as a way to support a creator in a built in way as part of an app. For many free projects it can be easy to overlook the fact that someone has poured their time and effort into it to make it happen, especially if they don't have "ads" that are asking directly for donations.

willbw 5y ago

It seems pointless to discuss chess.com without mentioning the paid features like game analysis which are much more user-friendly than Lichess.

dvirsky 5y ago
For one thing, framing your accuracy in percentage instead of the obscure "centipawn loss" makes understanding how well you played much easier. BTW I've compared their analysis on a number of games, and it seemed like lichess is much tougher on you in what it defines as a blunder.
- e4e5 5y ago
  I disagree, ACPL is a well defined system, while nobody really knows what the accuracy means or how it's defined. 1 CPL, in short, is the loss of 1/100th of a pawn. Take the average of that and you get ACPL. So a ACPL of 100 means that you on average lost one pawn on every move (of course this isn't literal) that you played.
  - dvirsky 5y ago
    I've read the meaning and I can tell what the numbers mean, but it's still less intuitive than percentage.
    - aflag 5y ago
      Interesting, I find the exact opposite. Measuring things in terms of pawns give me a feel of how far behind I was from optimal play, whereas with the percentage, it's quite abstract. What does 70% accuracy mean?
      - dvirsky 5y ago
        That you're 30% far from optimal play :)

mhaberl 5y ago

> Lichess is developed and managed mostly by one guy wow! is this realy true?!

Barrin92 5y ago
going based off the github insights, yep seems mostly true, and it's the case for a surprising number of large projects. https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/contributors https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/contributors
0x4b63 5y ago
It is true! He also occasionally streams development of lichess live on twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2 https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2
jstx1 5y ago
Yes, he seems to be very happy to be building a cool project with a good community around it - https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lichess_ask_me_anything/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

hooande 5y ago

which of these sites do people find is better for analyzing games? I have trouble remembering what I learn from looking at one game at a time

iza 5y ago
Lichess analysis is free and uses a much newer version of Stockfish, though some people prefer Chess.com's UI.

samdg 5y ago

A feature I was surprised not to see in the "Cleaner page UI during chess games" section: Lichess has a zen mode that maximally simplifies the UI. It removes the chat, navigation menu, move history notation. You're left with the board, clocks, resign/draw/takeback actions, and move replay. You can activate it by pressing "Z" during a game, and there's a menu option too.

giords 5y ago
You can even hide player ratings site-wide, to fully focus only on chess.
Freeboots 5y ago
Oh my god you can turn it on during a game? Here I am turning it back on via the menu after saying GG each game! What a chum!
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Same here! I can’t believe there’s a hot key for this! They really do think of everything.
whoisjohnkid 5y ago
Yes zen mode is amazing. You’d be surprised at how much better you do when you just focus on the game vs paying attention to your opponents rating.
wtf_is_up 5y ago
Love turning on zen mode and just solving puzzles endlessly.
tomcooks 5y ago
Anyone not playing Zen mode is doing themselves a huge disfavour. It allows you not to care about your opponents score, nor identity, nor messages.

freediver 5y ago

I spent a lot of time on chess.com (including paying for membership) but recently switched to lichess, because simply it feels a better, more polished, product. Love the fact it does not have ads (https://lichess.org/blog/YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/why-lichess-will-always-be-free https://lichess.org/blog/YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/why-lichess-will-a.... ) unlike chess.com which is ad-infested. Lichess is very customizable. Love the everyday tournaments and the community there as well. Would pay for it. The in-game analysis in lichess is fantastic (too bad my favorite WebKit browser doesn't support WASM SIMD, looking at you Bug #222382 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222382 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222382 ) so I don't get the full Stockfish NNUE. That is the only thing I miss really.

Buttons840 5y ago
If you would pay for it, then do pay for it, by contributing a few dollars a month.
de6u99er 5y ago
Ever heard about En Passant?
- LandR 5y ago
  Holy hell
- dgfitz 5y ago
  I've been teaching my daughter (7) to play chess, and I never knew this rule. She's going to be very excited to learn this one.
  - forty 5y ago
    I have been teaching my daughter too. She is younger (she just turned 5), and En passant is one of the rules I voluntarily skipped (together with Castling). Pawns rules are already such a mess without it!
andrewzah 5y ago

MaxMoney 5y ago

Lichess is much, much better. It's free. Chess.com is a bloated mess and it won't change.. they think they are facebook.

MaxMoney 5y ago

Lichess is so much better. It's free. chess.com thinks its facebook and it looks really childish (they probably copied things from chesskid). They have like a billion developers (why? its chess.. and already done). Lichess is like 1 guy (who I think used to work for chesscom until the ceo was a dick or something)

thope 5y ago
haha no he never worked for chess.com, wonder where you heard that one :D lichess is not one guy either, there's a whole community of developers, moderators etc.
- MaxMoney 5y ago
  i have sources. lots of old employee posts who quit also talking shit about the ceo

imgabe 5y ago

I also recently switched to Lichess after using Chess.com for years. What tipped it for me was that I switched to an iPhone, and for some reason the Chess.com app on the iPhone absolutely obliterated my battery. I'm not sure what the issue was and maybe it's been fixed, but for a while it was just eating up battery life while playing like nothing else. The servers for Lichess I find a little less reliable, but it's mostly fine. I also like the free-ness and ad-free business model of Lichess. I ended up donating $10. Overall Lichess is a better experience. Chess.com is perfectly usable without paying, but the constant nagging to sign up for a subscription is annoying.

albinofrenchy 5y ago
The lichess app is all around better. Bullet is unplayable on chess.com's app.
- chollida1 5y ago
  Really? I play billet games on my phone almost daily. Maybe try to reinstall your app if or crashes or won’t let you play because I’d definitely should.
  - albinofrenchy 5y ago
    It doesn't crash; it's sluggish. It's hard to quantify but it's like there is a quasi animation effect that you can't turn off. In something like 3|2 it's not terrible but in 1 minute games its a real issue. I thought for a while that maybe I was just used to the lichess interface but I don't have the same sluggish feel when playing on my phone on the website vs the app.
    - chollida1 5y ago
      Interesting. I've never seen that, perhaps I'm just lucky, or not as good as you that i notice the lag:)
      - 5y ago

georgeoliver 5y ago

I've played on both (currently on Lichess). Few other distinguishing features: * Chess.com has many excellent user blogs if you're into analysis and chess history. * As a commercial platform, Chess.com can do a lot more to support professional players (Pro Chess League, etc.). * The Lichess studies feature is really good and I don't think there's a comparable feature on Chess.com?

dankwizard 5y ago
Regarding studies, it is kind of similar to https://www.chess.com/library?tab=community-collections https://www.chess.com/library?tab=community-collections

tehnub 5y ago

Multiple premoves is not really a pro for chess.com. Premoves function differently on the two websites. On chess.com, each premove takes 0.1 seconds from your clock when it executes, while on Lichess, they do not take any time at all. Given that difference, having multiple premoves would be too strong. Given the way premoves behave differently, I wouldn't say either one is superior to the other.

rtpg 5y ago
Conditional pre-moves on chess.com are very useful for people playing correspondence chess, so that games can finish up a bit more quickly
- tehnub 5y ago
  That's a different feature, but sounds cool! Didn't know about that.
- Yxven 5y ago
  You can premove as many moves as you want in a lichess correspondence game. I feel like you can even premove to whatever depth you want, but it has been a while since I've played.
- Tryk 5y ago
  Lichess also has conditional pre-moves in correspondence chess
  - rtpg 5y ago
    thanks, didn't realize that was in there (I only use lichess on my phone though...)
    - apetresc 5y ago
      For a long time, conditional premoves in correspondence didn't exist on the mobile app, only on the site - but that's fixed now too.

mellosouls 5y ago

I prefer Lichess simply because it handles connections far better than Chess.com which has a long-standing history of dropping them mid-game and denying its a problem at their end. Other than that, I find Chess.com's interface more polished, but Lichess ultimately more personal, I guess as it is less corporate.

jfkw 5y ago

Glad to see Lichess mentioned here. I have been trying without success to log in or password reset using a Gmail account. Messages from Lichess never seem to be delivered to Gmail, even to the Spam folder. Short of creating a throwaway account to access the forums, is there any alternate way to contact Lichess admins to ask if this is a known issue?

e4e5 5y ago
You can go on the lichess discord, a lot of mods and admins are online there.

giords 5y ago

If you have some server sitting idle you could consider contributing cycles to the fishnet: https://lichess.org/get-fishnet https://lichess.org/get-fishnet

sodality2 5y ago
I requested this a few months ago as my server was sitting unused and I wanted to help. Never got an answer back, maybe because the server's specs aren't great. Either way now I've got nextcloud running so unfortunately too late :(
- ycombinete 5y ago
  You probably had the "laptop mode" toggled on in the setup. With it on you will rarely get games to analyse. This will only send you games when the network is stressed. If you toggle it off you should get one game after another almost constantly. I doubt it's speed. I was getting constant games with an i3-5100.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    I never even received a response when I filled out the Google Forms, so I don't have an API key to use.
rdbell 5y ago
Neat. Is this vulnerable to abuse by submitting bad results back to the server, or have they figured out a low-cost way of verifying the integrity of the results somehow?
- giords 5y ago
  TBH I don't know if they feature any kind of protection against that. You can check/ask here https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet/issues https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet/issues

tholman 5y ago

If you've been following these two products for the last few years it's definitely clear to see that Lichess is slowly eating chess.com's lunch ... They're not fast at development, but slowly and surely improving and innovating on the space via being open source. For example, Lichess puzzles aren't quite of the same quality yet and their puzzle games are new (BUT) they've built and are improving the tech to create new puzzles from games played on their system which is ever increasing, with the benefit of being REAL positions reached in games. It feels like when Lichess make a move (eg into puzzle games) its sudden and of high quality. ++ Their growth is amazing especially considering they aren't paying chess influencers to use their platform.

chollida1 5y ago
Interesting perspective. I have subscriptions to both and my first reaction was the exact opposite of yours. Chess.con is so far ahead of lichens that it wasn’t debatable. What in your opinion leads you to believe that lichess is eating chess.com’s lunch. For me games are far easier and quicker to setup with chess.com. The drills are better at chess.com and so are the lessons, both in-depth and breadth. I can’t really think of a single thing lichess does better so I find it strange that you see things So vastly different. Also the competition on chess.con seems far better. My Elo rank on lichess is a full 500 points higher on lichess than chess.com, so I guess some purple could consider the go cost to be a point for lichess What do you see in lichess that i superior to chess.com?
- A-Train 5y ago
  How exactly increased elo makes lichess worse? I would only argue that because of the number of players chess.com it seems more stable. I really feel every 50 of elo difference.
  - rharb 5y ago
    It doesn’t. Especially in this case, because lichess doesn’t even use elo ratings. It’s a different rating system altogether. https://lichess.org/faq#ratings https://lichess.org/faq#ratings

thoughtstheseus 5y ago

Sounds like we need a chess DAO. It would be cool to have a piece of the game of "Chess".

Shared404 5y ago
Sounds like a hammer seeing nails.
shyn3 5y ago
https://discord.gg/VJuEZZuD https://discord.gg/VJuEZZuD it exists

tzs 5y ago

It has been a few years since I looked at any of the major chess sites, but it used to be that chess.com had way more teaching and training material than lichess. Where do they stand nowadays in that regard? I also see that ChessCube.com is gone. Too bad. They had an interesting tournament format whose name I forget that was wild and fun. Instead of having a fixed number of games like normal tournaments, these ran for a fixed time. As soon as you finished a game you could go back into the pool to be paired for another game. So someone who is fast and good had a better chance of winning the tournament than someone who is good but not as fast, because they could play more games.

jeremyjh 5y ago
Lichess has some good lessons especially for beginners but they don't have audio like chess.com's. I think they are good though and what is neat about them is they are based on the studies feature, so anyone can create an interactive lesson on Lichess and share them. When my kids got interested in chess I created Lichess accounts for them. Some of chess.com's content helped me when I first started playing again, but I later found other free stuff that's just as good. It is nice to have it all in one place but I cancelled my membership when I found out I only got 25 puzzles a day with my "gold" membership. That is just lame.
retzkek 5y ago
Lichess calls that an "arena" tournament, they run constantly.

dvirsky 5y ago

One thing not mentioned here is the players. Chess.com is much more beginner heavy. I'm a pretty bad player, and while on lichess I'm slightly below the median, on chess.com I'm around 80th percentile. It also feels like the common or average playing style is a bit different, more basic and aggressive on chess.com. Here we go, another Fried Liver!

frogpelt 5y ago
Would you mind sharing your rating on each? I've found 600-level games on Chess.com much harder to win than 1000-level games on Lichess.
- dvirsky 5y ago
  The Elo distribution is really different between them. I'm hovering around 1500 on lichess Blitz and 1100 on chess.com Blitz. I would say 1000 on lichess ~= 500-600 on chess.com.
- demopathos 5y ago
  I'm 1500 lichess and approx 1250 chess.com 50th percentile lichess and 80th percentile chess.com
- ycombinete 5y ago
  Lichess starts you out at 1500 vs chess.com's 1200. So the whole bell curve is shifted.
  - dvirsky 5y ago
    IIRC in chess.com you can start as beginner/intermediate/advanced and your initial rating will be 800/1200/1600 respectively.
- gpm 5y ago
  Chess.com and lichess use different rating systems, and give different ratings to new players. Chess.com ratings end up being consistently lower, but that doesn't correspond to you being in a lower percentile of players on chess.com (what parent was talking about). For reference though, I'm 2000 lichess rapid, and 1700 chess.com rapid. I use chess.com as my "I'm not going to play well right now" site so it's a bit worse because of that, but mostly it's because of the difference in rating system/pool.

xiaodai 5y ago

It's amazing to me that an open source product can be better than a paid product. I think OGS is quite good vs fox except that fox has alot more players in the go world

GhettoComputers 5y ago
Linux servers are everywhere, MS uses linux, linux users are common on here, wikipedia killed Encarta. Don't be amazed, its the norm.
- anthk 5y ago
  On chess: XBoard+gnuchess/stockfish, SCIM... free software won in a lot of places.

gompertz 5y ago

A smidge off topic, but I'm curious; is there a place where you can upload (say) a chess bot you designed and play against other uploaded chess bots? (or any move base game, even as simple as 'paper rock scissors')?

monkpit 5y ago
Yeah, I also thought this was going to be bot vs bot :)
joshuamorton 5y ago
Lichess allows you to upload a custom bots and play them (and other can too), and I believe you can also run against other bots. There's also https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship, but IDK how one enters.
ydnaclementine 5y ago
You can do so on lichess. Basically you create a chess engine, set it as a bot account, and let it go against other engines and real players. I don't do it myself, but more info here: https://lichess.org/blog/WvDNticAAMu_mHKP/welcome-lichess-bots https://lichess.org/blog/WvDNticAAMu_mHKP/welcome-lichess-bo... And here: https://lichess.org/api#operation/botAccountUpgrade https://lichess.org/api#operation/botAccountUpgrade
- gompertz 5y ago
  Oh! Excellent... Thanks!
jah 5y ago
You can also use the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) as a test bed for chess engines. The interface is telnet-based, so it's pretty easy to experiment with and learn. There's also "zippy" mode in xboard that allows you to connect your engine to FICS . The commands below will login as a guest and display all of the computer accounts. Use the finger command to find info about an account. telnet freechess.org g <ENTER> who C<ENTER> finger ACCOUNT Sadly, FICS has been dying a slow death for the past 10 years ... but there are plenty of idle CPU accounts waiting for an opponent.

zelphirkalt 5y ago

chess.com has always been more laggy when moving pieces around than lichess, which is perfectly lag free animation for me. Not sure what is causing it, but I have the feeling, that it affects my blitz performance a lot, especially in time trouble.

ummonk 5y ago

I wonder how much general agreement there is with these opinions. Personally I agreed with most of the UI opinions except the preference for L-shaped knight move arrows.

whoisjohnkid 5y ago

started off with chess.com and moved over to lichess years ago. Haven’t looked back since. Yeah sometimes it takes a while to join a game if you are trying to just play casual, but all in all I like it better. Can’t believe it’s mostly ran by one guy. Thought they had a team of devs, makes me appreciate the product even more now.

jacobsenscott 5y ago

If you get a paid subscription to chess.com it evens out. No ads, etc. You have a lot of control over your view of the chess game - it doesn't need to be cluttered. I appreciate that lichess is free and opensource, but I think chess.com has done a lot for the chess world with all the money they made during the lockdown. Especially during the pandemic, when there were no OTB tournaments chess.com put money into a lot of tournaments.

codemac 5y ago

lichess : chess :: online-go : go

perihelions 5y ago

You can invite a friend to play on lichess, because it's free. This is a good direction for the tech world to go. I'm very glad there are people like ornicar, creating the world they want to see and live in.

1121redblackgo 5y ago

Its good to have options

anikan_vader 5y ago

It's worth noting many of these points are subjective, and I disagree with all of the bullets in favor of chess.com. I'm 2100 Elo on Lichess for what it's worth. 1. I prefer the way Lichess handles right clicks, knight movement tracking, and tracking arrows. 2. 4-player chess: The author mentions that it's their favorite variant to watch. I can't say I've heard that opinion before. Personally I tend to stick to vanilla chess, but it's worth noting that Lichess has many different variants available. 3. Games start faster: I've found games start faster on Lichess for me. 4. Varied playing sounds: Lichess also has different sounds for captures. Personally I turn the sounds off for slow chess since they're annoying, but I can't find my rhythm without them when playing bullet. 5. Multiple premoves: Actually it's much easier to win endgames on Lichess when you have 1 second left, since Lichess does not deduct time from your clock when you make premoves. 6. Social media: I've never seen any content from either on social media. This comment is admittedly just a massive diss of chess.com, but it's not all bad. I think the main reason many people prefer chess.com is that it's familiar from the streams of the likes of Nakamura and Rozman. This is simply because chess.com pays streamers with the money they receive from premium users, whereas Lichess is free.

doopy1 5y ago
I prefer to play on my phone as opposed to with a mouse. I like short games 3 mins and under. I've tried so much to like chess.com, but it's just so much worse than Lichess. Chess.com feels choppy, I don't like the style of the pieces, and the app just kind of bugs me in comparison. I'm not a strong player, but I play a ton... maybe we are just creatures of habit and like the apps we are used to?
mrpotato 5y ago
> This is simply because chess.com pays streamers with the money they receive from premium users, whereas Lichess is free. Not only that but they also hold tournaments (ie: PogChamps which was a great success IMO) and they also have tournament analyses (ie: 2021 World Championship). They even have good production value! (outside of covid related limitations). That being said, I agree with your diss of chess.com and will mention that I only play on lichess.

kriops 5y ago

I think lichess.org is far superior in that it has a super-polished UX in ways that are not immediately obvious. After I made the switch from chess.com in 2014 (I had the paid features), it was always extremely annoying to come back. Also lichess.org gives you most of what chess.com tries to upsell you on, for free. As it happens I've re-validated this over the last few days with dozens of games on chess.com. A single example, and a counter-point to the article: Drawing knight-moves as "L"-shaped arrows is actually super annoying, because the likelihood that moves between different pairs of squares partially overlap is quite high. And in general, the lichess.org app is miles ahead on visual clarity, giving feedback on your actions, and indicating your turn (seems trivial I know, but it's not). Chess.com on the other hand offers chess content, such as courses tournament coverage, blogs, etc. that lichess does not.

jeremyjh 5y ago
Yeah I was surprised at that. I think the arrows on chess.com are one of its biggest shortcomings. They are completely opaque and cover a lot of the board.
- dubeye 5y ago
  It's subjective. The arrows and circles on lichess really bug me. I much prefer chess arrows.
blub 5y ago
The tournament UI has been broken on iOS for years. It doesn't register taps properly and some UI elements are not shown where they should be. OTOH, the website works pretty well on mobile, scrolling aside. In general, I also had the feeling that the lichess UI is a bit more immediate, it was easier for me to get around. But I think a big difference is not in features or UX, but the behaviour of the players. Because of its free nature, lichess has several problems that I haven't seen on chess.com. I do use chess.com significantly less, but I've always had civil interactions there. On lichess: * people are free to act like jerks, since they will likely get away with it. My chat's turned off, but I can't do anything about people abandoning games when they lose, trying to pretend that they've left so that I don't pay attention and lose on time, etc. * severe lack of gentlemanly behaviour. As an example, I don't think I've ever seen someone concede a game, it's almost always a bitter fight way past the point a reasonable player may accept defeat. * Now that I think about it, lichess brings the worst in me. I want to crush my opponents and taunt them. Yet another reason why my chat's turned off. Blitz is a vicious game, full of trickery. :)

darepublic 5y ago

I use lichess. The one downside is apparently the ratings on lichess are somewhat inflated

dankwizard 5y ago
I think it's due to new accounts starting with a higher Elo, and the fact I think LiChess' isn't even really Elo but their own measurement
thope 5y ago
Lichess uses Glicko-2 rating method, see https://lichess.org/faq#ratings https://lichess.org/faq#ratings

elcapitan 5y ago

Related, but slightly offtopic: Does anybody know sort of an open source/DIY alternative to digital chessboards like DGT boards? Would love to use something like that for input, but real DGT boards are very expensive, unfortunately.

johtso 5y ago
At one point I was planning to make something using a glass table with a camera underneath it and ArUco markers on the bottom of the chess pieces. The problem with trying to make something that uses electronics is the number of squares on the board making it quite a big fiddly task.

Ice_cream_suit 5y ago

Lichess is far superior to other chess sites in the interface, quality of play, and quality of the community. Chess.com does have some excellent pay-extra-to-use content.

elcapitan 5y ago

Regarding interactive training resources, there are other good resources which are partially free (or limited) and partially payable content: - https://chesstempo.com/ https://chesstempo.com/ has a great collection of chess puzzles - https://www.chessable.com https://www.chessable.com is specialized on interactive training. They have may free courses and combine what a classical book (text plus moves) would have done with memorization tools (for openings, tactics etc)

GhettoComputers 5y ago

I would love to see XiangQi on Lichess or a suggestion for a good one. I suck at Chinese chess, but after learning it I was demolishing my friends from the headspace it gave me, the complexity really seemed to help me be a better chess player. I feel like I was an amateur "take as many pieces as you can and overwhelm the king" before and Chinese Chess turned me into a "sacrifice your pieces to position yourself better, value the pieces differently at different points of the game, and kill the king ASAP with pressure" player. In Chinese Chess, I try playing against others and I know I probably lost in the first 5 moves often, I really suck at it, and in 10 moves I usually can tell I lost, I have never won once against a player online.

queuebert 5y ago
The entire site is open source. You could make your own. People have done that for Go. https://github.com/ornicar/lila https://github.com/ornicar/lila
S4M 5y ago
I don't have the source, but I remember read the lichess didn't want to implement other board games in their interface. For XiangQi, I know that you can play it on playok.com (I know the rules and played a few games last time just to get the feeling, but I am more into chess and shogi...).
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Yeah I get murdered there. I should learn to get better I am always beaten by computers too.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - S4M 5y ago
    I just went on playok to play couple of games of xiang qi and... I also got murdered...

distantaidenn 5y ago

Also recently switched to Lichess from Chess.com. The biggest benefit so far is the community. I don't know if Lichess just has better mods or if the two sites just attract vastly different crowds. Some players on Chess.com were downright rude (win or lose) and even had a racial slur tossed at me. So far so good on Lichess.

Brajeshwar 5y ago

I'm not really concerned about the design, UI/UX or the algorithms as I just play pretty much at random to beat boredom, anxiety, and time-fillers. I don't make "friends" nor do I train, puzzles, or anything but just want to play with another human on the other end. I approach game plays on the experience and mistakes, and tries a more heuristic approach. I know I should try to learn the tactics. As of today (on chess.com since Jul 8, 2007), I have played 15,472 and done 1 puzzle and 1 lesson. 1415 rating in Blitz, and I play either 3min or 5min max. I have played 79 games on Lichess since joining in May 10, 2015. 1716 in Blitz. I always land up on chess.com because there are enough people that I open a challenge, I get a player on the other end within seconds. Not so on Lichess - I have waited for 30+ minutes on most occasions.

DarylZero 5y ago
In 2021 you can always get a blitz game in 1 or 2 seconds on lichess by choosing one of the standard time controls (in the "quick game" tab, which is the front page).

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Lichess is the best thing that happened to chess since castling. Chess.com just grabbed a good domain name.

0x49d1 5y ago

Lichess is a bit sluggish in navigation, but it's almost purely community driven and you can feel that! I do support them and I really like their transparent philosophy, they even show you WHERE do they spend EVERY received $! Yes, there are some flaws, but me with other guys are actually making the website just better every day. Chess.com sure has their own philosophy, better moderation, better news articles (sometimes written by professional journalists), but hey, it's almost like a comparison of good paid service with good opensource community driven thing. Like... Windows vs Linux. Both do have their downsides, but the core philosophies are different and you just follow them or not.

thelittleone 5y ago

I was just about to open lichess for some blitz games but thought I'd read hacker news first. I used to play chess.com but it just feels spammy in comparison.

pstuart 5y ago

My only online gaming is playing endgames: https://lichess.org/training https://lichess.org/training

travelhead 5y ago

I’ve written extensively on the rampant cheating happening on chess.com: https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-9d29a7a625d8 https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-... LiChess on the other hand has incredible cheat detection algorithms, and I’ve only reported one cheater in the dozens of games I’ve played since quitting Chess.com and moving to Lichess. (I’m approximately 2350 on LiChess).

rdbell 5y ago
This is sad to see. I’ve played about 300 Rapid games on chess.com and there’s only one banned player in my game history. Am I just lucky? I’m not good enough to instinctively suspect cheaters, and running post-game analysis on all of your games seems like a big time sink for little gained. Another possible (dark pattern) solution would be an option to only play against other paying customers. I’d assume players who have paid would be less likely to risk losing their account. This would probably be a revenue boost for chess.com but might also upset free account holders. Also, if chess.com shadow-banned accounts by only matching them against bots instead of real players maybe they’d be less likely to immediately create a new account.
- travelhead 5y ago
  I limited my article to only opponents that chess.com analyzed and banned after my report. There’s dozen more I reported that they failed to ban, and my guess is it has to do with a financial incentive to show more ads. There’s definitely a large swath of cheaters in the 1900-2200 range on chess.com.

geophertz 5y ago

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the ability to play without logging in on lichess. Very convenient when you want to play with a friend.

michaelscott 5y ago
Also useful when you want to try strange or unusual openings without ruining your rating

robertlagrant 5y ago

I'm a Lichess fan. Love Puzzle Storm!

DarylZero 5y ago

The chess.com UI was just so unpleasant I never even used it enough to get a feel for the site overall. I like that they fund a lot of the GM streamers on youtube but even in those videos it's unpleasant just to look at.

omnster 5y ago

I think it deserves a separate mention: lichess has so much better clock UI. Their clock is big and very clearly visible both on desktop and mobile. It also goes red when you are low on time. Chess.com's clock is tiny and I saw some GM complaining on his stream about losing on time because he was unable to track his clock because of that.

bananamerica 5y ago

A lot of people have an emotional and philosophical attachment to lichess, which is understandable. It's surprisingly (almost inexplicably...) free, clean, pleasant, awesome, and featureful. However, chess.com does have its advantages as well as unique features. And it is much quicker to find a match. I like both, but chess.com design is too busy for my taste. I'd use lichess a lot more if it didn't take so long to find a match, specially in certain times of the day.

jdthedisciple 5y ago

I started playing on chess.com in 2015 and my main issue was: they UI felt clunky and it seems to be deducting to much time from my clock even with premoves!!! Switched to lichess in 2017 or so and it's just way superior when it comes to UI/UX and performance specifically! I ran site performance tests for both a while ago and they numbers confirmed my subjective experience.

dubeye 5y ago

This comes up so often it’s a bit lady doth protest too much. they have strengths and weaknesses. As a 1200 elo. I prefer the analysis and game review on chess.com. I like the auto playback of alternative lines. Game review is more useful because I actually use it every time. Lichess game review might be more powerful, I don’t know but I find I use it less. Other little things chess has. The charts showing deviation from best move over the game. I like the video lessons. I prefer the square highlighting. I prefer the knight arrows on chess.com too.

crhutchins 5y ago

I always think that Lichess is really the apex website in terms of chess in the internet.

Assiosss 5y ago

The author is mentioning "multiple premoves" as a reason Chesscom is better, which makes the mistanken assumption that more is somehow better. In my (and most strong Bullet players I've talked to) opinion, it changes the Bullet meta for the worse, because it adds more noise. I'm rated 2600 in Bullet on both sites, for what it's worth. "One premove" could just as well be a reason why a site is better than the other than "Multiple premoves". I also think that the chessboard and playing UI is much smoother on Lichess, as opposed to the author - it's a matter of opinion.

Karolis_K 5y ago

For most of course it's not important, but Lichess has "blind mode" - this enables blind people to play chess online. Implementing this feature of course wouldn't pay off for Chess.com.

createunderrate 5y ago

I haven't seen much mention of the fact that Chess.com looks good, and Lichess looks bad. The graphics are prettier on Chess.com, and the sounds are better. Fortunately, this should be a very easy problem for Lichess to fix. Lichess just needs a bit more game juice, and it will feel as good as Chess.com.

blindmute 5y ago

Nit: Lichess does play different sounds between captures and moves.

zestyping 5y ago

I personally find the Lichess board cleaner and more beautiful. Using circles to highlight squares is clearer, and drawing knight moves as straight lines is clearer, as well. I also just prefer the pieces and the board colour.

jvandonsel 5y ago

Here’s an advantage of chess.com that I haven’t heard discussed yet. When playing against the computer I can request hints when I’m stumped. If lichess supports this then I haven’t found it yet. As a mediocre player I find it very instructive.