Chess.com vs. Lichess

I love Lichess

Yes, I'm biased. Partly because I still believe the best choice for lunch, is and always has been, free lunch.

Lichess is free from beginning to end, in total. There is nothing more you get if you donate. It's a non-profit that truly provides an outstanding platform to all, for free.

Now, I'm an American, so I really don't have anything against capitalism, and definitely have nothing against competition. I actually like Chess.com, a lot. It provides great opportunities to watch and play the best players in the world. They sponsor tournaments with prize funds. They are definitely helping chess grow in popularity! And they offer some variants that I really like.

So here is a breakdown of a few of the things that differentiate the two in my opinion. But only the things that IMO that matter (for example, I don't care that Lichess' ratings are a little inflated compared to chess.com or that chess.com may have a better algorithm for catching cheaters). And let's just look at the positives!

1. Chess.com has an arrow to show the Knight's path! Love this. And I have no idea why Lichess can't do the same?
2. Chess.com has duck chess. Actually, I'm not a big fan of the variant, but any new variant (and this one is legit), helps grow the game!
3. Chess.com has Bughouse! It has to be the most popular variant among my students (and myself). Why oh why can't Lichess offer it?
4. Lichess has studies. As many as you want. And I actually like that each study can only have 64 chapters. I like the 64, but also that you can't just dump everything into a massive study. 64 can get hard to navigate, I don't want to think of unlimited numbers.
5. Lichess has an excellent learning section - from Basics to Practice - to Studies.

And both are always looking to improve! Gotta' love that. I use the Basics and Practice sections under Learn to teach my beginner students. And the other day I found that Lichess had added a bunch of items under Basics and Practice!

But the big question is what happened to all the other options? There were tons: Chess24, Chessable, Aimchess, ICC, Playchess, FICS, KasparovChess, itsYourTurn...but the question is, how many of those are not owned by Chess.com now? The numbers of choices are dwindling. Hopefully Lichess will survive and continue to be a totally free option for the masses. There's more than enough room for both Chess.com and Lichess.org.

And more importantly, there's a need for both.