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> 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.




> chess.com has more intuitive UI

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 think you're right that it's mostly subjective. I slightly prefer chess.com, to lichess, but I wouldn't call either "outright unusable".


I find the chess.com UI utterly confusing myself.

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.


> simply because the latter offers superior game analysis experience.

But it does so once per day, unless you pay (the low depth analysis you get for free on chess.com is not great to put it mildly)


I would love to know what makes chess.com UI more intuitive in your eyes. They seem quite similar.


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.


for me it's having my game records accessible on the front page, I spend more time analyzing my games than playing.


You could just bookmark https://lichess.org/@/yourusername/all

Also, does chess.com have anything similar to https://lichess.org/insights/yourusername or https://lichess.org/analysis#explorer where you can select "Player" and see how openings play out for your games only (as well as masters and the whole of lichess of course)?

(for the obtuse, replace "yourusername" above with your actual lichess username)




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