Someone else wrote about why Lichess.org is the best chess website in the universe. This was written 3 years ago on May 24, 2017. Lichess.org will continue to improve forever even though it's already perfect. One more thing: chess.com is the most disgusting website in the universe, and they make you pay for their bullshit. Lichess.org is a thousand times better and it's free with zero ads.

Håkon Hapnes Strand

Lichess.org stands head and shoulders above its competitors. Let’s look at some of them.

Internet Chess Club (ICC) was launched as Internet Chess Server (ICS) in 1992 in the earliest days of the commercial internet and is still based on the same core software from those early days. While there’s nothing wrong with it as such, it does feel quite dated. You have to download a desktop application and pay quite a bit for a membership. ICC has a great community, is good at providing content and has a large pool of grandmasters playing on the server, but these advantages are not enough to compete with free in-browser alternatives for the vast majority of people.

Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) is the free version of ICS that split with ICC in the mid-90s. While ICC has made updates and improvements to its software to stay relevant, FICS has not.

Playchess is the online server of Chessbase, a company that’s known for charging insane sums of money for products that have hardly been updated since the 90s. The main reason Playchess has retained at least some of its player base is that Chessbase’s main product is shipped with a Playchess membership.

Chess.com is by far the most popular chess server, with 17 million users. It has a freemium model, which means that you can play for free, but have to pay for extra features. Compared to other chess servers, this one feels slow and buggy. The quality of players is not that high, and the cheating detection is not that impressive either.

Chess24 offers a freemium model similar to chess.com. Its software is superior, but it doesn’t have nearly as many players. The site has excellent coverage of tournaments with grandmaster commentary, though.

Lichess is a superior alternative to all of these. It’s open-source and you don’t have to pay anything. The software is super slick, with many great features that you won’t find at other servers. It’s the second largest server after chess.com, and has started to attract some really strong players. Lichess was originally developed by one French developer. You can feel that the site is made with love for chess and not in an effort to milk people for money.