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 play way more on Lichess (because I like their tournaments better), but I still prefer chess.com UX and analysis.

I'm with the above poster. I started playing online chess within the past year. I do not pay chess.com a cent. I find their UI to be more pleasing.

The fact that many paying chess.com like the product mostly suggests it's a good product.

the lichess post game analysis is as good as that of chess.com, but isn’t presented in quite such a shiny appealing way.

it’s not hard to find, but you have to seek it out, whereas chess.com shoves it in your face and tries to get you to pay for more

> but you have to seek it out,

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.

precisely

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.

[1] https://chess.com/membership

>after I've paid for a subscription

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.

> better monetization options

Not gonna happen. Lichess is simply not this kind of product. It's like the Wikipedia monetization