Which one do people prefer? I’ve personally found the chess.com UI to be a lot warmer and more inviting than lichess, but I’m interested to hear people’s opinions
Open source all the way!
I mean we already use an open source social media platform, why not go all the way? Lichess is completely free and ad-free. The only thing Chess.com do better is the themes, but that’s about it.
Lichess runs much, much lighter than Chesscom. I definitely prefer the UI for things like analysis on Chesscom, but like Lichess more overall. If nothing else the amount of free tools (and 0 ads!) makes me appreciate the ethos of Lichess more. Power to the people.
Lichess, definitely.
From a technology point of view it’s superb and they have their users and chess as top priority.
people are also much nicer on lichess
definitely lichess
I prefer lichess, i like its analysis tools and the dev seems awesome.
I prefer lichess, but most of my friends are on chess.com
Same here, I find lichess to be a smoother experience. Although I prefer the rating system on chess.com as it seems to be more accurate to elo ratings. Overall I prefer lichess for no ads, no subscription pestering, and being entirely free.
Regarding the UI, I guess it is a matter of personal preference, although in lichess you have all the time controls in the front page, one click away, while chess-dot-com only has 10 min games in the front page, and for any other time control you need several more clicks.
Lichess has unlimited puzzles, which is a huge plus (although it also a huge temptation for procrastination).
chess-dot-com has better educational material, although nowadays there is lots and lots of high quality material elsewhere.
I really like lichess’ open source model. But to be fair, chess-dot-com re-invest a lot in supporting tournaments and content creators, so they are also a force for good in the community.
At the end of the day, they aren’t mutually exclusive. You can use both of them for different things.
Note that Lichess has an amazing openings explorer, a funny and interactive learning section and a cool studies section.
They also organized a lot of videos for learning by topic.
Surely it feels less premium than chess.com, but that could’ve been said about Wikipedia vs Britannica.
Lichess for me is awesome and truly promotes chess for everybody.
