Paying off Chess streamers is pretty much the only way Chess.com can keep people using their site. Their product is simply inferior in every way, except for their library of master lessons, and all these GMs exclusively streaming through Chess.com.
I figure all this spending on sponsorship and GM content is why the rest of their site is so inferior to Lichess. Lichess can spend all their time perfecting the platform, and it really shows.
Completely untrue, I've played on both and the UX + post game Analysis, video content library, etc is far better on chess.com.
I do hope lichess.org is able to improve and find better monetization options that's able to pay for more dev + UX resources, championship prizes + GM commentators which makes watching chess far more entertaining.
Some people will always disagree, but it's been my experience that when people try both sites, most people end up preferring Lichess. Certainly when comparing lichess to Chess.com's free tier, there simply is no contest.
When people say the opposite, it seems to always be people who have been chess.com customers for years, suggesting a possible post-purchase rationalisation
It could be also said, those who tend to talk up lichess don't tend to have much experience using the paid features, so overall tricky to analyse these comments. As often it's the free versions being compared. With com users extolling the paid features, and lichess users extolling their free features.
As someone who had diamond membership on Chess.com for several years(cancelled when my card was accidentally overcharged, triggering an alert with my bank. Chess.com refused responsibility and eventually offered me a free month to make me go away. I refused and just went away instead). I then found lichess. I realised all the features I was paying for on chess.com were available for free, either through lichess, or youtube. St Louis chess club has a wealth of grandmaster lectures on their youtube channel, all free.
I personally prefer the chess.com lectures. But as long as we can agree to not use terms like 'lichess is objectively better' I'm happy we can disagree
I have accounts on both, started both when free, and eventually decided to pay for chess.com. I find the UX and overall experience better, particularly the analysis side, and I like the mobile app better as well. I feel pretty confident in a fair evaluation and not a post-purchase rationalization here.
I have accounts on both. I think the chess.com video content is great, the puzzle content is great, all the extra little features like puzzle rush is great… the one unfortunate thing is the ads. I pay for chess.com but when friends play it sounds pretty annoying.
There’s a lot of incidental stuff I dislike in lichess’ UI, but at the end of the day chess.com offers lots of stuff to learners (straightforward reviews, with recent game review features offering _why_ moves are good)
But hey, more power to everyone! Just tired of people going out of their way to claim that chess.com is garbage. I’m glad lichess exists and will play some games on it. But there’s a reason that chess.com has more users and it’s not just the domain name.
I don't think there's any seeking out necessary - you have 3 things to click on after a game - rematch, new opponent and analysis. Like is there really a user demographic that (1) is interested in game analysis and (2) doesn't notice or understand the button that's shown as an option at the end of every game?
To be fair, I'm pretty sure by "analysis" they mean "engine analysis" (since that's the part you have to pay for on chess.com, not just getting an analysis board of your PGN). On lichess, "Analysis" is one button, but "Request Computer Analysis" is another button _in_ the analysis screen, and its often below the fold and behind a tab on most display resolutions. Probably because even fishnet wouldn't be able to keep up with deeply analysing every game on the site, and the in-browser WASM stockfish is good enough for most blitz/bullet games.
Call me an idiot if you'd like, but it took me more time than I'd like to admit to figure out how to use Lichess' analysis. Even if I sticked to the platform, being a sucker for OSS and free, I've abandonned the analysis option for quite a while thinking it was confusing and inferior to Chesscom's.
You do have to seek it out. Even when you click on analysis, you still have to activate the engine and select a move back in time to start seeing arrows and whatever the score advantage thing is called. It's not rocket science, but you're not handheld and it's certainly not "analysis" followed by a PowerPoint of what great and terrible move happened; it's self-analysis with Stockfish.
In the end I came to prefer Lichess' analysis board, but I think they'd have to gain walking you thru it better. I kinda doubt my father, who's not a dumby nor Internet-illiterate, would find it intuitive as it is. A highlight real of important move would seemingly be trivial to implement while also being straightforward to follow for anyone clicking on analysis for the first time, bringing them to dive in the self-analysis board. It would take nothing away for those who want to flicker thru their whole games, just remember a toggle option.
I think their point was that Chess.com drops you into analysis mode automatically when a game ends, whereas on lichess you have to go to analysis mode.
Being auto-moved to a place I didn't select seems like a worse user experience to me. But I'm sure it helps chess.com's conversion rate to paid users or whatever.
As a subscriber I do "pay for more", so I see the complete analysis available after each game which has better UX and available content.
You make it sound like chess.com shoves heaps of dark practice's IAP in your face, which isn't true, after I've paid for a subscription [1] I've seen no more paywall content or any more monetization options, I get full access to their sub content & features, which because it's great value and tastefully done, I intend to re-subscribe next year if I'm still playing by then.
in lichess you can computer analyse the board as many times as you want, for free, without even needing an account. the only catch is that you might not notice the feature if you weren't looking for it.
chess.com shoves it in your face, lets you do a few analyses, and then asks you to pay for more. whether that is still the case after you've already paid for more isn't really the point
Agreed. I would say Lichess is superior in actual gameplay (apart from multi-premove, but that's not available in mobile on chess.com as well), but chess.com is better in the extra features. Their analysis is much more user friendly, especially for beginners.
I play on both, but I often find myself going to chess.com to analyze a lichess game, and I don't think I've ever done the opposite.
3. Daily (correspondence) tournaments and a larger correspondence community. That's mostly what I play, since it allows me to play whenever and for as long as I want. 10-20 simultaneous games means there's always something for me to play. I can blitz out moves for all games in 15 minutes, or spend an hour thinking about one game.
I prefer lichess, but just can't have that experience so I pay for chess.com.
You can setup multiple pre-moves, but each one takes a minimum of 0.1 seconds. Lichess doesn't have this minimum time requirement, so it doesn't let you setup multiple pre-moves.
As someone who started playing without having any idea about the platform landscape, and therefore chose the first Google result, which seemed to have a legit UI and domain name, and then met people who also happen to be on this platform, I would guess that their main strengths are: SEO, UI, brand, and the network effect.
How much does network effect really matter past a certain point for low-to-mid ELO chess players? Whether there are 100 or 10k players in my ELO range at any given time, I'm unlikely to even notice it. IMO you just have to get past a certain threshold (which both Lichens and Chesscom have long passed); granted it is probably higher the better of a player you are as your opponent pool thins out.
In my anecdotal experience, lichess has a smaller playerbase and it's most noticeable in the middle elo where certain lines or trends end up very popular in the lichess community and get overplayed. Whereas on chess.com I am more likely to see a bigger variety of openings. I had written off chess.com in favor of lichess but now that I play both I actually enjoy the chess.com user base as a differentiator between the two.
> Their product is simply inferior in every way, except for their library of master lessons
That's just not true. I've been using both for a long time and chess.com has more intuitive UI. I frequently find myself exporting my games from lichess into chess.com simply because the latter offers superior game analysis experience.
This is just mindblowing to me. It's not just that I disagree but I think the opposite is true, and by a very large margin too. I guess people just have different preferences when it comes to UI but especially for fast time controls, I don't get how people put up with chess.com, it's outright unusable for me.
Strongly agree with you. Both the chess playing UI and exploring the rest of the site -- lichess is vastly superior.
Prominent example when you click "Play" you go to https://www.chess.com/play and get presented with a chess board. At this point, it actually lets you make an initial move. But you're not playing anyone! You then need to click, for example, "Play online".
The rest of the site is disorganised. For example there's stuff under "Learn" and "Resources" and I can never remember where to find things.
I have a lot of friends with a mere passing interest in chess, and most of them had naturally ended up on chess.com. They had never heard of Lichess. But invariably once they tried it they all said the same thing: lichess is much more intuitive and easy to use.
As for analysis, I think computer analysis is not actually very helpful anyway, unless a lot of effort is put into analysing the computer lines and discarding those that you couldn't possibly be expected to find. Most people who use computer analysis don't do this, and they walk away with the wrong conclusions. Chess.com might have a better experience for getting those wrong conclusions, I don't know. And hell, analysing blitz and rapid games is a waste of time anyway, other than looking up opening improvements.
The only analysis I do on Lichess then is mostly looking at the opening in blitz games where the opening went wrong for me, and maybe seeing if I missed a tactic in some position I was unsure about during the game. Lichess is perfectly fine for that.
I agree with you on this. I hear this argument a lot and it seems like people only used parts of both sites or something. I've been using both for a while now, mainly the iOS apps, I have a paid diamond chess.com account. They both have strong and weak points in their UX.
Chess.com has plenty of value, it just isn't as free or open as lichess.
Cheds.com supports more game modes / variations (bughouse and puzzle rush are two favorites!), better social features, built in lessons and lectures you can buy or subscribe to, the client is snappy and lets you set up a sequence of premoves instead of just one, etc.
Lichess also has some killer features of it's own: everything is free, including tournaments, the titled arenas are nice, the analysis tools are free and easy to use, etc.
There doesn't have to be just one platform. A paid and open source platform can both offer different value propositions even if there's some overlap.
I considered getting a chess.com subscription because their puzzles are a lot better than lichess'. However, the default tier/starting tier of subscription only gives access to a pittance of "puzzles per day" which is ridiculous.
There's also chesstempo for puzzles if you are not aware of it already, the puzzles are great and free, with subscription tiers for more features (unlimited endgame puzzles, custom puzzle sets, opening trainer etc.).
The UI is ugly, clunky and old, but as long as it is only for puzzles and not playing I can stand it
I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the puzzle quality. Puzzle difficulty is determined algorithmically using an Elo system (where essentially puzzles play against players). That sounds great in theory. The problem is that there’s no penalty for guessing, in fact, the UI forces you to make a guess. This means the rating partly measures guessability instead of solvability. At my low-ish rating, I get a mixture of puzzles I can realistically solve, and extremely hard puzzles where the obvious dumb guess happens to also be the correct solution. I’m not sure if anybody else is annoyed by that as much as I am.
The biggest benefit, in my opinion, of doing puzzles is building pattern recognition. If that obvious dumb guess is consistent for the structure presented in the difficult-but-guessable puzzle, then I think there's still value to doing it.
Well, chess.com spend quite a bit of dev time on gimmicks like their custom 4-player chess variant, that was followed by a torrent of 4 player chess content from their army of chess streamers. To convince someone to buy chess.com, they need to make themself look like the de facto standard site. They also need to invent new features because charging people just to play chess and solve puzzles online is sort of ridiculous when that's been available to people since the damn 90s.
I don't think commercial vs communist has anything to do with it. Thibault is just a very good, hard working programmer. If his political views were different then Lichess would still have the best platform and he would have way more money. There is no reason what so over for chess com playing area being as bad as it is other than them not being able to find a programmer as good as Thibault. It's not only about money, such people are just very rare.
I would agree with you in a lot of cases, especially public administration but...
In Thibault's case, he has consciously and deliberately made it so that his political views do affect choices at all levels. A lot of it is quite direct. If you are "communist^," then you think differently about login, data retention. You make feature decisions differently. You also make hiring/expansion/strategy decisions differently.
Chess.com needs to worry about free-paid conversion rates, crippling features to differentiate subscription plans, analytics people/code to tie it all together. Those require code, infrastructure. They come with performance costs, technical debt. Thibault has explicitly identified these, and deliberately carved advantages out of them. What can you do with much less bloat.
Even just having more money has disadvantages, besides the obvious advantages. You now have teams and senior people responsible for analytics, commercial performance, an extensive (and restrictive) streamer sponsorship program. You have a bigger accounts dept. etc. Modern companies have a lot of bloat, and administrative analogues to technical debt.
That stuff inevitably leads to a difference in product, even if you had the exact same programers. Environments matter. Thibault is trying to win. I like it.
^I'm going to call this ideology "Thibault Communism" to keep it narrow.
But it's not about all the choices, logins, subscriptions or anything like that. It's about the game play alone. It's smooth and fast while you play. The servers don't lag, don't crash, the UI is very responsive, you don't feel like overall slowness and lag of all of it robs you of time or experience.
You can debate all other surrounding stuff being influenced by the author's politics but this one is purely about him being able to implement it and the commercials competitors failing spectacularly.
It's not unique to Lichess btw, back in the day ICC had smooth, responsive gameplay as well. It was commercial and it was great.
This doesn't seem to be much to do with communism. You can operate not for profits or charities in capitalist systems (in fact some of its strongest proponents would much prefer people give money directly to charities to help people, rather than pay taxes to a government that might help people).
I don't see what's communist about it. It's just that the developer has arrived at "charity" via the route of communism. The biggest societal difference is that chess.com allows people to play chess for a living, whereas a free platform does not.
That's why I noted "Thibault Communism" to narrow it to his specific thinking on this, which IMO is quite lovely and unique.
TD is the one who who articulated it this way, and there are pretty strong logical and operative links between his ideas and actions.
There are lots of differences between chess.com and Lichess, societal and otherwise.
Anyway, I'm not claiming that Lichess is superior in every way, just that it's great and unique. There are lots of successful companies/startups/sites operating on the chess.com mindset. Lichess is quite unique.
chess.com satisifices. Have had several times where I thought "Even I could make a better platform than this" (for instance: their PGNs always used to show today's date in the game metadata instead of the date the game was played and it took four emails over a week to make support understand why this was wrong).
When I open the app and look for a 10/0 match though, I always find one right away, and this + cursory game reviews covers ~100% of my use case, so shrug.
I figure all this spending on sponsorship and GM content is why the rest of their site is so inferior to Lichess. Lichess can spend all their time perfecting the platform, and it really shows.