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.
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.
I mean such behaviour is not uncommon on chess.com either. I've reported multiple people for game abandonment / abusive language / acting like jerks / taking super long to make moves in a game that's obviously been lost / etc.
My inbox is on chess is full of such generic boilerplate messages from chess.com; I doubt they really kick anyone off their platform though (unless the player does something extreme):
We've taken action on one of the Stalling / Quitting Games reports that you submitted. (To respect the privacy of our members, we don't specify usernames. Our response may have included warning the member, restricting their activity, or even closing the account.)
> 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.
I almost never concede at my (low) level: at my level it's very possible that someone lets me go into a stalemate which is preferable to a loss.
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.
The UI is not only more polished, it is a web application packaged natively. Take that all you naysayers who insist you have to go native to write decent mobile apps.
It is not only a web application, it uses fucking mithril which hasn't seen an update in like 5 years. Take that you clueless hipsters who insist you have to use the latest reinvented framework with a yard length of dependencies to build modern UI.
Chess.com does benefit from their collection of training bots with different strategies and more forgiving play style which are pretty neat to play against. Though most of them are behind a paywall so eh.
Lichess only offers stockfish levels when it comes to bots, and even the lowest level seems more brutal than bots with x2 its ELO on chess.com.
Stockfish level 1 can be beaten by a novice playing their 4th or 5th game ever. Also on Lichess there are other bots you can play against, for example the maia series which is an LC0 bot with a neural network trained on Lichess games of a particular rating level. Maia feels much more like a real person than any bot based on stockfish.
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.
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?
They use different rating systems, different starting values for elo and in general, elo is a measure of your strength relative to the player pool you're playing in, so your elo across websites is not meant to be comparable.
E.g. in Lichess you'll always start at 1500, while in Chess.com you can start at 400 or 1200 (and some values in between I believe), so it's pretty normal if your ratings differ with hundreds of points - in fact it would be very weird if they didn't (unless you're 2400+ I suppose).
By the way, an interesting comparison some people try to make is elo in Lichess/Chess.com and FIDE rating and see if one can estimate FIDE rating for someone who has never played over-the-board just from their Lichess blitz rating.
Your rating being higher on Lichess doesn't mean that the competition is better, Lichess ratings just start higher, see https://lichess.org/page/rating-systems
On the contrary, there are more Grandmasters playing on Lichess (like the World Champion), and if you check your percentile on both sites, you'll most likely see that you're better than a higher percentage of chesscom users than Lichess - which would indicate that Lichess players are better on average.
And yes, I also think Lichess is superior to chesscom i nearly every way.
A great Lichess feature is that you can turn off ratings completely in settings, for the whole site. They're still used for matchmaking but kept completely hidden. Far better experience.
Does chess.com have studies? They've completely changed how I work on openings. It's so easy to start a new study on some line, collect a few interesting games in it, add my own, and then analyze them with Stockfish right there for when I'm interested in it's opinion.
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.
I don't see anything that chess.com does better than Lichess except for having more players on the site. Aside from time to start game, which is usually a difference of only a couple seconds unless at high Elo, Lichess is equally good or better in all aspects. I'm not saying Lichess has better puzzles or other such things, but it is 100% equally good, while being free.
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-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 ) so I don't get the full Stockfish NNUE. That is the only thing I miss really.
Lichess has a monthly subscription you can get for $5 or a custom amount. Does nothing except except make your badge a different color. Totally worth it to support such a great site.
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.
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?
> 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.
Good point. While I never use chess.com, I did find their commentary on the recent championship with Fabi to be pretty amazing.
On the other hand, all of the money they spend on content like that is super effective marketing. It's a lot like how Coke will sponsor sports matches. Still, feelings of good will are feelings of good will.
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!
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.
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.
who cares about absolute rating? no matter what the rating of your opponent is, it's all about the _difference_ between theirs and yours. It would have been nice to just have 1 number and one unit but it isn't. Now you have x on Fide, y on lichess, z on USCF, t on chess.com and w on fics.
(for me it's 2000 Fide, 2300 Lichess, no USCF, no chess.com and 1850 on fics )
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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?
Readit News
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.
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. :)
My inbox is on chess is full of such generic boilerplate messages from chess.com; I doubt they really kick anyone off their platform though (unless the player does something extreme):
We've taken action on one of the Stalling / Quitting Games reports that you submitted. (To respect the privacy of our members, we don't specify usernames. Our response may have included warning the member, restricting their activity, or even closing the account.)
You can review our Community Policies here https://www.chess.com/legal/community.
Thank you for helping Chess.com stay fun and friendly!
Thank you very much, Chess.com Support support@chess.com
I almost never concede at my (low) level: at my level it's very possible that someone lets me go into a stalemate which is preferable to a loss.
It is not only a web application, it uses fucking mithril which hasn't seen an update in like 5 years. Take that you clueless hipsters who insist you have to use the latest reinvented framework with a yard length of dependencies to build modern UI.
Lichess only offers stockfish levels when it comes to bots, and even the lowest level seems more brutal than bots with x2 its ELO on chess.com.
https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a...
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.
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?
I'm not sure how you have a subscription to Lichess when it's a free site. Do you donate?
> My Elo rank on lichess is a full 500 points higher on lichess than chess.com
The ratings difference on lichess is arbitrary. Everyone starts higher (1500 vs 1200), so the average is higher.
> For me games are far easier and quicker to setup with chess.com
Unless I've missed something on chess.com this makes no sense at all.
_To create a game on Chess.com:_
1. load site
2. hover over Play in the sidebar
3. click either New Game or Play (which one?)
4. Select time-control from a matrix (if you click on New Game it defaults to 10 minutes time control; if you click on Play it defaults to 1 minute).
5. click on Play to initiate search
_To create a game on Lichess:_
1. Load site
2. Select time-control from a matrix. search initiates immiediately
E.g. in Lichess you'll always start at 1500, while in Chess.com you can start at 400 or 1200 (and some values in between I believe), so it's pretty normal if your ratings differ with hundreds of points - in fact it would be very weird if they didn't (unless you're 2400+ I suppose).
By the way, an interesting comparison some people try to make is elo in Lichess/Chess.com and FIDE rating and see if one can estimate FIDE rating for someone who has never played over-the-board just from their Lichess blitz rating.
On the contrary, there are more Grandmasters playing on Lichess (like the World Champion), and if you check your percentile on both sites, you'll most likely see that you're better than a higher percentage of chesscom users than Lichess - which would indicate that Lichess players are better on average.
And yes, I also think Lichess is superior to chesscom i nearly every way.
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 ) so I don't get the full Stockfish NNUE. That is the only thing I miss really.
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.
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.
On the other hand, all of the money they spend on content like that is super effective marketing. It's a lot like how Coke will sponsor sports matches. Still, feelings of good will are feelings of good will.
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.
Here I am turning it back on via the menu after saying GG each game! What a chum!
I've found 600-level games on Chess.com much harder to win than 1000-level games on Lichess.
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.
50th percentile lichess and 80th percentile chess.com
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).
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.
There’s definitely a large swath of cheaters in the 1900-2200 range on chess.com.
I doubt it's speed. I was getting constant games with an i3-5100.