Chess.com vs Lichess in 2026: Feature by Feature, and Who Should Pick Which

If your budget is zero and your aim is to get better, use Lichess. Everything it has is free with no ad layer and no upsell: unlimited puzzles, unlimited engine analysis, an opening explorer, a seven-piece endgame tablebase, studies you can build and share, and a long list of variants. If you want a curriculum handed to you, the deepest pool of opponents at three in the morning, and a social layer of clubs, streams, and events, use Chess.com, and accept that you will end up paying for it. Most improving club players are best served by an account on both: play and study where the tools are free, keep the paid account for the lessons and the community you actually use. What follows is the feature-by-feature comparison, the honest version of the rating question, and the part neither site solves.

The short version

	Chess.com	Lichess
Business model	Commercial, tiered memberships	Nonprofit, donation funded, open source
Cost of full feature access	Paid membership	Free
Puzzles on the free tier	Capped per day at the time of writing	Unlimited
Engine analysis	Game Review with move classifications; free use is limited	Unlimited, server and local engine
Structured lessons	Large video and interactive library, mostly gated	Small free practice module; no video course library
Opening explorer	Yes, with membership limits	Yes, masters and site databases, free
Endgame tablebase	Endgame drills	Seven-piece Syzygy tablebase, free
Study and share tool	Analysis boards, classroom features	Studies with chapters, PGN import, sharing
Variants	Chess960, bughouse, crazyhouse, king of the hill, three-check, fog of war, four-player	Chess960, crazyhouse, king of the hill, three-check, antichess, atomic, horde, racing kings
Community	Clubs, forums, news, streamers, events coverage	Teams, forums, blogs, broadcasts
Support	Staffed support and fair-play team	Volunteer moderation, community support

Feature gating on the free Chess.com tier moves around, sometimes several times a year. Check the current membership page before you decide anything based on a daily puzzle cap.

Puzzles

This is the clearest split. Lichess serves unlimited puzzles from positions mined out of real games on the site, tagged by theme and by phase, with a rating attached to each one and to you. You can filter to a theme, which matters more than it sounds: if your games keep dying to back-rank problems, you can drill only back-rank problems until the pattern is automatic. It also runs three speed formats, which are entertaining and, used as your only training, close to worthless for a player who needs to learn to calculate slowly.

Chess.com's puzzle engine is comparable in quality, its rated puzzle ladder is well calibrated, and Puzzle Rush is the more polished of the timed modes. The difference is the meter. Free accounts get a limited number of puzzles per day at the time of writing, which is the single most common reason improving players upgrade. If your training plan calls for twenty to thirty puzzles a day, the free tier will not carry it and Lichess will.

Analysis and game review

Chess.com's Game Review is the better-designed product. It classifies every move, produces an accuracy percentage, and narrates the game in a way that a 1000-rated player can follow, which has real teaching value. Two caveats. Free access to it is metered. And the move labels invite a bad habit: hunting for the one move the engine called a blunder, fixing nothing, and moving on.

Lichess gives you unlimited server-side analysis, a local engine in the browser, average centipawn loss, a count of inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders, and a "learn from your mistakes" replay that walks you back through your errors. It is plainer and it does not hold your hand. For the loop that actually improves play, which is to annotate the game yourself before you switch the engine on, plainer is an advantage.

Lessons and structured learning

Chess.com wins this outright. It has a large library of video and interactive lessons organized into paths by level, plus drills, bots with defined playing personalities and ratings, and a coach directory. If you want someone else to decide what you study next month, this is what you are paying for.

Lichess has a basic practice module covering checkmate patterns, piece endgames, and a few tactical motifs, and it has Studies, which are a creation tool rather than a course. The best free chess curriculum on Lichess is the one you or your coach builds inside a study. That is more work and it is more yours.

Variants and community

Both cover the standard variant list. Chess.com has bughouse and four-player chess, which Lichess does not; Lichess has atomic, horde, and racing kings, which Chess.com does not. Chess960 is on both and is rated on both. If a specific variant is the reason you are choosing, check that variant before anything else on this page.

On community, Chess.com is the larger, louder place: clubs with hundreds of members, official event coverage, a news desk, and the streamers most new players arrive through. Lichess teams are quieter and skew toward correspondence players, variant specialists, and people running study groups. Broadcasts on Lichess are free to follow and often carry smaller events that never get commercial coverage.

Ratings: why your Lichess number is higher

Lichess ratings run higher than Chess.com ratings for the same player, and the gap is largest in the lower bands and narrows as you climb. Neither number is a FIDE or US Chess rating, and neither pool is calibrated against the other.

The only defensible way to compare is by percentile, not by number. Both sites publish rating distributions for each time control. Find where your rating sits in the distribution on the site you play, then find the rating at that same percentile on the other site. That comparison is stable. A fixed conversion figure quoted with no time control and no percentile attached is not, and you will see plenty of them.

Two more things worth knowing. Rating differences between time controls on the same site are often larger than differences between sites, so compare blitz to blitz. And a rating built on three-minute games tells you very little about how you will perform at a rated over-the-board time control, where you have ninety minutes and no premoves.

Price, and what free actually means

Lichess is free in the unqualified sense. It is run by a French nonprofit, the code is open source, there is no paid tier, and it is funded by donations. If you use it seriously, donate; the cost of the servers running your engine analysis is real.

Chess.com sells tiered memberships. The tiers change names, prices, and contents often enough that any figure printed here would be stale within a year, so the question to ask is not what a tier costs but which specific limit is currently blocking you. If it is the puzzle cap, Lichess removes it for nothing. If it is the lesson library, that is a genuine product you cannot get free, and the tier comparison is worth doing carefully.

What neither site fixes

Both sites are excellent at giving you positions and terrible at making you sit with one. The habit that separates players who improve from players who log thousands of games and stay flat is deliberate, slow work, and that work is easier on paper.

Three purchases do more for a stuck player than any membership. A banded tactics workbook such as the 200-puzzle set pitched at 600 to 1200, solved on a board with the answers covered, because a printed puzzle cannot be brute-forced by clicking. One all-in-one primer, and Levy Rozman's How to Win at Chess is the current best of them for the 1000 to 1400 band. And a paper scorebook, because writing your moves by hand at the club is the raw material for every useful post-game review you will ever do. Above 1400, Silman's Reassess Your Chess Workbook is the standard next step for middlegame planning.

Who should pick which

• Improving on a zero budget: Lichess. Unlimited puzzles and unlimited analysis are exactly the two features a training plan needs, and both are metered on the other side.
• You want a curriculum and a coach directory: Chess.com, with a membership. The lesson library is the thing your money buys and it has no free equivalent.
• You mostly play blitz and want the fastest pairings at any hour: Chess.com, on the strength of pool size, though Lichess pairings at common controls are near instant too.
• You build or follow study material, run a team, or care about correspondence: Lichess. Studies and the free opening explorer and tablebase are the best tools of their kind on either site.
• Playing a variant: check which site rates it before deciding anything else.
• Preparing for over-the-board play: either, as long as you are playing long time controls online and writing the games down. The site matters far less than the time control you choose.