Chess has always been a famous game, played (and used in metaphor) for millenia. But it can only be said to truly have entered the mainstream during the pandemic era. Stuck at home with nothing to do, people turned to online chess.

At the time, the two main established sites were Chess.com and lichess.org, along with lesser-used ones like the Internet Chess Club. Having the nicer domain, Chess.com has always been more popular. But ever since I learned about Lichess, I’ve been committed to it.

The “Li” in Lichess is for “libre,” meaning free. It reflects the completely free and open-source nature of Lichess. Everything about it is open—you can not only read the code, but copy it and create your own website, too. Frankly, the features page comparing the features available on free accounts versus patron accounts is one of my favorites on the internet: they are exactly the same. In fact, the only benefit to being a patron are some nice little patron wings by your username and moral fulfillment.

Lichess has so many free features, it’s easier to go over the ones that Chess.com makes users pay for. Firstly, Chess.com makes you pay to use the site itself! Not with money, of course, but with your data and attention. Chess.com already suffers from an inferior User Interface/Experience (UI/UX) in my opinion, but for the regular user, it’s significantly worse: they host ads. So, while you try to focus on your game, there’s a huge distracting banner ad that can even be animated! Needless to say, Lichess is completely ad- and tracker-free. Actually, besides playing games, most of Chess.com isn’t free, actively hindering beginners’ progress. For example, it’s typically best practice to analyze your games using a chess engine to learn from your mistakes. The most popular chess engine, Stockfish, is open-source, like Lichess. That also means Chess.com is allowed to use it and charge for it. Technically, you can analyze your games for free with a weaker version, but they do try to push their own customized “coach” as much as possible. Chess.com’s basic analysis also won’t annotate your mistakes, and can’t analyze the entire game. The reason is it is too complex to run for most machines, and so must be run on the cloud, and Chess.com wouldn’t just give away that computing for free. Of course, Lichess manages. It uses an initiative called fishnet, where volunteers can provide their computers to analyze your games. Admittedly, Lichess does limit this “computer analysis” feature to 40 games/day, but in my 7 years and 9,000 games, I’ve never faced that limitation. Another important resource for beginners are puzzles, chess positions where you need to find the best move. Chess.com limits free users to—believe it or not—three per day. Three! Of course, Lichess provides unlimited. Oh and by the way, Chess.com is a tiered membership—you can pay and not even get all the features! 

But it’s not even that Lichess offers almost everything Chess.com does (there are a few gimmicky “features” that aren’t needed) for free, but it does things better, too. Lichess has great studies, a feature where you can store and annotate games to, well, study. Their chess insights page is… insightful, and its UX is, in my opinion, superior. There’s also lesser-known features. Everyone always asks “what’s your Elo?” when really they are referring to online rating. Only FIDE, the international over-the-board chess governing organization, uses that outdated system (interestingly, before the pandemic, no one said that, they just asked for your rating). Chess.com uses the Glicko-1 rating system, while Lichess uses Glicko-2. Two guesses at which one is better. Another unsung feature I haven’t really seen touted anywhere is the ragesit counter. One of the most annoying occurrences in chess is your opponent running down their clock instead of resigning in a lost position, essentially wasting your time. Well, Lichess detects that and updates their “ragesit” counter, essentially determining what players have good and bad manners. It then pairs people with similar counters against each other. Lichess’ lag compensation is also amazing. Oh and its premoving is so smooth. In fact, Lichess has historically been the most popular for the fastest time controls in chess, bullet. 

But if Chess.com was only popular because of the name, surely then the top players, the ones in-the-know, would know better and play on Lichess, right? Well, they did. But the second part of the name is also important. Chess.com is completely for-profit, while Lichess is a non-profit organization that tries to scrape by on as little as possible (in fact, you can see all of their spending at lichess.org/costs and also see its charity audits). That means Chess.com can pay top players to play on their website and never mention the Lichess name. 

So that’s why I’m writing this article—to spread the word about Lichess!