Best Chess App: The Honest Answer, Sorted by What You Need It For

You did not open this page because you wanted a ranked list. You opened it because you are about to do one specific thing in the next few minutes: find a game, understand a loss, memorize an opening, drill tactics, learn the rules, or hand a phone to a kid. No single chart of ten apps sorted by stars tells you which one actually does that particular thing well, because a chart sorted that way is answering a different question than the one you asked.

This page skips the ranking and answers by job instead. And it prints something no roundup selling you a click ever will: Lichess is free, carries no paid tier anywhere in the product, and covers a large share of those jobs outright, no purchase required.

What the ranking pages are actually doing

Chess.com's own article on this exact question, titled "The 5 Best Chess Apps," ranks Chess.com itself first, calling it "the best chess app for pretty much everything you'd want to do with the game," and does not mention Lichess anywhere in the piece. That is not an oversight from a company with hundreds of employees. It is the article doing its actual job, which is selling Chess.com memberships, not helping you compare Chess.com to its closest competitor.

Two of the seven pages we read in full are chess equipment retailers, House of Staunton and Chess'n'Boards, running a "best apps" roundup as a funnel toward their own store; Chess'n'Boards closes its piece with a hard sell for a specific physical set. Two more, Cassandra and CheckmateX, are written by people whose own product sits inside the supposedly neutral list they are publishing. One, The Chess Advisor, carries an explicit affiliate disclosure in its footer, and another, Dad Suggests, discloses Amazon Associates income. Only two of the seven ask the reader anything resembling a qualifying question before recommending anything: The Chess Advisor and CheckmateX. The best of those, CheckmateX, segments its final picks by chess rating band, beginner, 800 to 1400, 1400 and up, tournament watcher, which is genuine personalization and still is not the same thing as asking what you are actually trying to do this session.

The routing table, by job

Six jobs cover most of what people actually search "best chess app" to solve. Here is the plain answer for each, before the reasoning behind it.

An opponent right now, for free

Both real answers cost nothing to start. Chess.com carries the largest player pool of any chess site, so a game at your exact rating and time control is available within seconds at nearly any hour, which is genuinely hard for a smaller product to match. Lichess is close to the same speed for most rating bands and time controls, and it is the one answer here with no paid tier anywhere on the site, ever, funded by donations rather than subscriptions. If pool size and matchmaking speed at the margins matter most to you, Chess.com is the honest pick. If you want a product where nothing you do will ever run into a paywall, Lichess is. We cover both, plus private invite links for two player games with no account required, in our own guide to playing chess online for free. If the opponent you want is one specific person rather than whoever is next in the pool, the account question changes the answer completely, and we work through it platform by platform in our guide to playing chess online with friends.

Reviewing the game you just played

This is where the two apps actually diverge. Lichess gives away, with no account tier restriction, computer analysis run on the latest Stockfish engine, on any game, for free. Chess.com's own Help Center confirms its free Basic tier is capped at one Game Review a day, with unlimited Game Review reserved for its Platinum tier and above. Whether that daily cap is felt in practice is contested, covered in the pricing section below. If you want every game reviewed without hitting a limit, Lichess is the plain answer, and our own breakdown of what a free chess game review actually gives you and guide to reading Lichess's own analysis board both walk through how to use that output rather than just glance at a number.

Learning the rules from zero

Duolingo Chess is free, structured as a curriculum starting from how each piece moves, through best move puzzle style exercises, timed mini match drills, and a player versus player mode, using Duolingo's own spaced repetition scheduling to resurface earlier tactics. It launched on iOS around June 2025 and reached Android at Duocon in September 2025. Two independent reviewers have raised real quality concerns worth naming rather than hiding: one tester reported that 24 percent of 885 puzzles they tried did not make sense, with multiple valid best moves marked wrong, and a separate reviewer argues the course has little left to offer past absolute beginner material. Neither claim was independently reconfirmed here, so treat both as reported rather than settled. For the rules themselves, piece movement, checkmate, castling, en passant, promotion, our own plain guide to chess rules for beginners covers the same ground with no app install required, and our separate look at what Duolingo Chess actually teaches and where it stops goes further into where that free curriculum runs out.

Opening memory and repertoire

This is Chessable's actual specialty, not a side feature. Its MoveTrainer spaced repetition engine is built specifically to make an opening line stick, and many courses ship a free "Short and Sweet" edition with free MoveTrainer access on that content, no subscription required. Full Chessable Pro is reported at $11.99 a month or $74.99 a year, third party corroborated as of this writing, since Chessable's own pricing page returned a blocked response to a direct check on September 6, 2026; individual full courses are sold separately, roughly $20 to $100 or more, one time, and premium multi book repertoires can run $150 to $300 across linked titles. Lichess has nothing built specifically for this job, memorization through repeated, spaced recall, which is the one job on this list where the free option is genuinely thinner than the paid one. We go through Chessable's actual pricing and its real alternatives in our own Chessable review and alternatives, and make the case for a different approach entirely in why memorizing openings is the wrong goal.

Puzzles and tactics

Lichess again answers this one for free and without a daily limit. Chess.com's free tier caps puzzles at three a day per its own Help Center comparison table, with unlimited puzzles unlocked at Gold. If you want a fixed, structured curriculum rather than an endless random stream, CT-ART 4.0 packages 2,200 basic and 1,800 auxiliary exercises across 50 topics for a one time price reported around $12.99 to $23.58 depending on the storefront, checked September 6, 2026, inside a Chess King ecosystem whose broader subscription pricing runs as high as $119.99 a year for every course unlocked. That is a smaller version of the same pricing fragmentation Chess.com has, spread across a legacy store, a newer subscription shop, and app store listings that do not agree with each other. For most people the free option is simply enough; our own piece on which chess puzzles actually transfer to your games is about picking the right puzzles, not the right app.

A kid learning chess

ChessKid is the one purpose built answer here, moderated and designed for a kid safe environment in a way neither Chess.com's adult product nor Lichess specifically targets. Its free Basic account, per ChessKid's own Help Center, is limited to three puzzles a day, bot levels one through three, and beginner only lesson levels. Gold membership, commonly cited around $10 a month or $49 a year per child as of September 2026, with multi child family discounts, unlocks unlimited puzzles and puzzle duels, every bot level, every lesson level, every video and workout, and an unlimited game archive; that price could not be confirmed on ChessKid's own pricing page, which renders its numbers through client side JavaScript rather than static text, so treat it as reported rather than verified. One correction worth making here directly, expanded on below: a Chess.com Premium membership does not include ChessKid Gold. It only qualifies the parent account for a 40 percent discount on it, a distinction that shows up as genuine reader confusion in Chess.com's own forums.

Chess.com cannot tell you its own price

Three independent sources, checked on three different days this year, describe the exact same three membership tiers with three different, non matching sets of numbers.

The fourth row is the actual cause of the first three. Chess.com's Help Center confirms Gold, Platinum, and Diamond are the current tier names, describes a Friends and Family Plan letting up to six people share one Diamond yearly membership, and states each tier's features in detail, unlimited puzzles and lessons at Gold, unlimited Game Review added at Platinum, coach style explanations on every move plus an Insights stats feature added at Diamond. What it does not do, anywhere in its public articles, is publish a single dollar figure. Its live membership page renders the actual price table through client side JavaScript, so a plain page read returns no price text at all. Every third party guide quoting a Chess.com price is, in effect, describing a snapshot of a page Chess.com itself never publishes as static text, which is a reasonable explanation for why none of them agree with each other, or with Apple's own listing of Chess.com's submitted prices.

Lichess does not have this problem, because Lichess does not have a price table. There is nothing to disagree about, because there is nothing to buy.

The daily Game Review cap on Chess.com's free tier carries a smaller version of the same disagreement. Long time forum contributor Martin_Stahl stated in February 2023, and reaffirmed in January 2024, that non premium accounts get one full review a day, with any further same day reviews returned at reduced depth and without full move classification. A different poster, ChemistryE, reported in January 2024 getting three to four free reviews in a single day, a claim Martin_Stahl did not fully reconcile. Neither account is an official Chess.com statement. What is harder to dismiss is that third party tools, Chessigma, ChessRank.org, and BetterChess among them, market themselves explicitly around offering "unlimited free" game review, an alternative that would have no reason to exist as a selling point if the daily cap were not genuinely felt by real users.

Two things the search results still get wrong

Play Magnus Group did not simply vanish after being acquired. Play Magnus Group, co founded by Magnus Carlsen in 2013 and covering Play Magnus, Magnus Trainer, chess24, and Chessable, was acquired by Chess.com, announced August 24, 2022 and closed December 16, 2022. chess24 did shut down for good, on January 31, 2024, which is likely the real source of the belief, still visible in old Chess.com forum threads from 2022 asking whether the merger would kill these products, that the whole lineage is dead. Magnus Trainer was not one of the casualties: it remains live on both app stores in 2026, free to download, with new lessons and games still being added, and a membership required to unlock its full library of more than 250 lessons. Some third party trackers describe its iOS build as being in a slower maintenance mode relative to a more actively updated Android build, worth knowing before installing it expecting fresh weekly content specifically on iPhone.

Chess.com Premium does not include ChessKid Gold, and it is a common enough point of confusion that it shows up directly in Chess.com's own forums: a parent with a paid Chess.com membership assumes their child's ChessKid account inherits Gold features automatically. It does not. What a Chess.com Premium membership actually buys toward ChessKid is a 40 percent discount on a separate ChessKid Gold purchase, not the membership itself, and the two accounts stay entirely separate products with entirely separate bills.

What adjustable difficulty actually means

Most bot difficulty in chess apps works by handicapping a strong engine: capping its search depth, thinking time, or skill level. That produces an opponent that plays cleanly and then drops in a mistake no real person at that level would ever make. Our own on device Maia3 model works differently, since it is trained to predict what a human at a chosen rating actually plays, rather than a weakened search. On one position from the finish of the Opera Game, Morphy against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard, Paris 1858, the probability a real player finds Stockfish's own best move at that point rises from 36.70 percent at a rating of 1000 to 81.11 percent at a rating of 2200. That is what conditioning on a human rating actually buys: a curve that climbs the way a real skill difference climbs, rather than a search that simply gets shallower with a lower difficulty slider. The full seven position breakdown behind this, including one position where that pattern runs backwards, lives in our own piece on how Maia chess works.

How to actually decide

Start from the job, not the app. If you want an opponent in the next minute, open Lichess or Chess.com, both free, and stop reading roundups that rank one above the other by vibe. If you want every game reviewed without ever hitting a cap, Lichess is the plain answer as of today. If the job is opening memory specifically, pay for Chessable, because that is the one job on this page where free genuinely does not cover the same ground. And if what you actually want after a loss is a written reason, in your own language, played back against an opponent that plays like a real person at your level rather than a search engine with its depth turned down, that is a narrower, different job than anything above, and it is the one we built Chessdrive around.