Lichess.org

If you try and accuse someone of cheating you'll get a sleazy message saying repeating this will result in loss of communication. Which is ironic because I was trying to communicate and you've lost me as a player. Just awful. Zero stars.

Lots of cheating players in another words thieves and criminals. Moderators are exactly the same. Criminals. Account gets timed out for allegedly running down the clock when I'm simply communicating with opponents. What's the purpose of chat then? Absolutely disgraceful. Stay away from those crooks. As law enforcement agent I'll be back with a search warrant.

Frequently gives out temporary bans for unknown reasons, and the support is non-existent. When I tried to ask a question on its "Q&A", it gave me a bogus message about having to be a user for a week even though my profile says I have over eighteen days of non-stop game time. Then, when I tried to submit an issue on Github, my issues were immediately closed with no explanation! When I reopened them, I was eventually banned from their github, also with no explanation! Stay away from these people!

Yes, they don't have that much stuff to learn from but the gameplay seems a lot smoother to me. I almost abandoned chess.com (I was a premium member) in favour of lichess and honestly I don't regret. If you happen to play chess more or less seriously, give it a try.

I've played on this site a lot (~3,000 games) however last week I got banned for cheating. I don't care about ratings, I did not cheat. They have a forum for appealing, however when I did this the moderators didn't overturn the obvious error. I play the same system in incredibly short games, there is no way that anyone who actually looks through my games would think I was cheating. Back to chess.com!

There is zero support on this site. Not even an email link. Which considering your bombarded by "donate " prompts is terrible. This also means that moderators... abuse their powers and can allow cheating/ban whoever they like... making for the fairness factor to not be there on this site.

Nearly all of their practice programs are flawed. They present you with puzzles in which you find the "best move", but the moves the computer says are the best work off of a deeply flawed algorithm. It promotes getting check above all else, even when it is suicidal. Another example from my experiences with these puzzles is it presented me with a game in which I had the option to move my knight into a position in which it would either take the opponent's rook or queen, obviously the best move, however, their bot said that the best move was a suicidal check performed by my queen in which it could be taken out by a pawn. Yes, really. It constantly promotes these puzzles and analyses done by the bot, which needs improvement. This is why I do not recommend lichess beyond playing with people or friends. The community is great, the experience you can gain is great, but the bot they continually shove in your face will only serve to annoy you with its complete lack of ability to analyze.

When down to the last 5-8 seconds on your clock and while waiting for your opponent to finish making their move, your clock will instantly go to zero. So much frustration dealing with this that I spent hours more than I wanted to play. Now 24 hours later and my head still hurts, my body aches, and probably have blood clots as a result of dealing with this malicious web site.
I've had to drink some alcohol, been putting a massager device on one of my legs and shortly after putting on my legs my heart was hurting badly and so put the massager all around my heart area.

This site is dangerous to your health!

For many that might not know this site has a bot that plays you pretending to be someone else that your playing. If you go to lobby and see there are almost 6 or 7 players waiting on players but yet if you start a quick game lets say 1 minute game. It seems like magic there are 200 players available to play you right away even tho there was no one in there to play 1 minute games. Also if you play an opening that your used to it almost seem like clockwork the bot plays exactly the same pattern as human would not.

The bravado and indignation with which thibault presents his site can be called nothing else; support is nonexistent, filled with elitists and $#*!s that would rather "look cool" than actually help you with your problem, the algorithm which the site uses to find puzzles is terrible, ineffective and does not help you become better; temporary bans are given out for no reason at all (as Paul said) probably because the mods are bored power-tripping idiots, I could go on but you get the picture. Stay away! Stick with chess.com.

I'm a long-time chess player and this site is horrible. You are playing with bots instead of real people and they ban you for no reason. There are a lot of much better alternatives for my fellow players out there. Please don't waste your time on this garbage, you can do better.

Every other person you will play on this site is an engine cheater or has other guidance, making rating completely worthless as an indicator of skill. Playing games becomes incredibly anti-fun with player after player playing the exact same moves, with the exact same speed. Support people are non-existent, and automatic cheat detection is deficient to the point of being worthless, if any, that is, exists, in the first place.

It's honestly disgusting how badly managed this platform is. Every 2 or 3rd player is abusive, racist and homophobic. If you report that individual to moderators, the MOST they will do is timeout that person for EIGHT minutes. That is the penalty for threatening death and hostility upon other chess players -- 8 minutes in timeout. What an awful joke.

Lichess is free and has a pleasant UI, unlike Chess.com which is very busy and not particularly "friendly". As your victories mount, it will move you into higher level competition. Not bad. But, Lichess likes to play Big Brother and if you either walkaway or in my case, time-out while thinking-out moves. In Blitz, it will put you into a time-out like a wayward child. Not sure, but I think they also slow-down the rate at which they match you up with games, and/or match you up with lower-level players. Further, they won't respond to emails at *******@lichess.org, which I think is irresponsible. So, Lichess is... better than nothing.

My son was trying to login to join tournament on lichess and by mistake he forgot to close the tab and played on other tab. Even though he won first round in tournament lichess claim him for computer assistance which he was not doing. I know this as I was in that room. I can't guide him because I don't know anything of chess.

Corruption, boorish attitude of moderators and users. They threw me into a ban supposedly for cheating, in fact I didn't cheat. I do not recommend lichess.org.

https://lichess.org/@/Megarobot, https://lichess.org/@/SergeyVoronChess - bullies, that have bullying me for 1 year. The Lichess did nothing with them, but when I responded to their insults, my first account was closed, second was muted and third was marked as ToS violation.

Cheaters run amok on the site, protected by admins. Reporting them leads to being muted. Covertly muted, so that others can still talk to you but your replies aren't delivered (you are not told this). Unethical all around.

Terrible site, very laggy I lost a tournament because of that also, the time given to play the fist move should be increased to like 2 minutes. In a real tournament you don't lose until all you time is drained. However, I must give credit to the unlimited puzzle limit, something that some sites like chess.com don't offer

Worst chess site. Dictatorial management. Dumb developers. I can go on and on. Better to play by yourself. They allow cheaters. Better yet encourage it with minor slaps on their wrists. They punish those that let the time run out a few secs while youre thinking ofcourse more harshly than cheaters. I guess youre not allowed to think in this game i a losing position and have to quit the game,,, how stupid. They lag in the game review dept. 2 week wait time to see your games played... another dumb

Played here for 6 months and then suddenly my account gets restricted. I email them and they reply with a one sentence email saying I have been using computer assistance. My rating is 1700 on blitz, 1800 on Bullet and 2000 on rapid. My rating on 1 minute games are similar to what i have when i play 10min games. I beat a few good players at 2000 rating but have lost to several between 1200-1600 (not sure how they got that low rating and played insanely good but whatever). Noticed that when you play 1 min games, some players don't even think for a second. I played a game with 35 moves each, i lost on time and my opponent used 3 seconds. Not humanly possible. So looks like they have tons of people cheating using bots, and they dont care about those but restrict people who try and play fair.
Worst site and support/admins are completely frauds.

The staff support or moderators are very unhelpful. They do not reply to you even if you give them time to reply. The moderators are a disgrace to the definition of "staff". I give this a one star website because of the trigger happy banner moderators. I implore you to please not go to this website. They will ban you even if you play fair or you get too good.

The site claims to be free for all, which is totally true. But they also use this an an excuse to be super arrogant "we are a free site and have no obligations so we/our admins can do whatever they feel like" and this is just horrible

There are A LOT of players that made their account in (For example) in 2011 or 2013, and they played 1 or 2 games and quit, there are a lot of good usernames that are taken because of players like this...
Please make that if a player is offline (Quit) then ban there account or something!
Also, if you are about to mate someone in 1 move, or win, but your time runs out... Please make it just be a draw because a lot of games and rating is dropped because of mate in 1 missed opportunity
Thank You!