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There is about one post a month on this, which seems to most serve as opportunity for lichess users to assert the site is superior in every way. It's snappier, and there are some analysis features that are better than the com's free offering. But overall, if you pay, the com is a much more complete and rewarding experience.
In what ways?
There is plenty of room for all of Chess.com, Chess24 and Lichess to exist. Lichess has the best platform to play on and is free to use. Chess.com is a business. As such they want to earn money. However, without a large, online chess community there will be no subscribers. The amount of effort chess.com has made to sponsor events, streamers etc. is tremendous. Making a living as a chess professional is tough. Streami…
Back when Nike Vaporfly came out and the other shoe manufacturers de facto didn't have an answer yet, you would see e.g. Puma-sponsored athletes in Nike shoes. It's simply better for Puma to have Puma athletes win (quietly) in Nike shoes than to have them lose in Puma shoes.
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Lichess needs money itself. It survives off donations. The evidence points that it is pretty far from being able to sponsor chess players and let them make a living from doing what they love, like a commercial platform could do.
If you read my comment carefully you'll find I didn't say lichess themselves could sponsor prize funds. I explicitly said they'd have to source the funds from other sponsors.
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I would love to know what makes chess.com UI more intuitive in your eyes. They seem quite similar.
for me it's having my game records accessible on the front page, I spend more time analyzing my games than playing.
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)
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,…
There are more reasons, but... At core there is a dichotomy between Chess.com's business-model-ish approach and Lichess' communist approach... to put it in Thibault's own words. No freemium tiers. No subscription plans, ads, etc. Just donations. That approach has been good for keeping the UX lightweight and snapy. Chess.com has been around longer, so Lichess' is still catching up with features. I quite enjoy having t…
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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?
Chess has always had this dichotomy over free/paid services. (a bit not unlike programming tools). I love lichess.org but make no mistake: without the dedication of one talented Scala programmer willing to underpay themselves that site would not exist. Commercial sites can provide more services and offer more opportunities to chess professionals simply due to the funding model. Disclaimer: I've played over 100k onlin…
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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.
Chess has always had this dichotomy over free/paid services. (a bit not unlike programming tools). I love lichess.org but make no mistake: without the dedication of one talented Scala programmer willing to underpay themselves that site would not exist. Commercial sites can provide more services and offer more opportunities to chess professionals simply due to the funding model. Disclaimer: I've played over 100k onlin…
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> Their product is simply inferior in every way 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