The best chess apps in 2026, sorted by what you're trying to fix

The best chess app depends on what you're trying to fix. Lichess and Chess.com are the places to play. Chessable and Chessbook drill openings; Lichess, Aimchess or LearnChess review your games; LearnChess explains moves rather than just evaluating them. Below, each app is judged on one job, with prices checked on 3 October 2026.

There is no best chess app. There is only the best app for the thing holding you back right now, and for most adult improvers that is two apps: a place to play, and a tool that turns the games into something you understand. Every "top 10 chess apps" list I found ranks apps against each other. This one ranks them by job.

How this list was made, and who is writing it

I build LearnChess. I plateaued around 1600 on Lichess, got tired of engine lines I couldn't read, and built the app I wanted. So every sentence about LearnChess here comes from the person who makes it: it is listed where it fits a job, never ranked best overall, and where a competitor does a job better, I say so.

The method: every app is judged on one job, against the same question an improver asks of it (does it get me to play better, or just more?), using each tool's documented features and free tier rather than a lab test. Prices, free tiers and platforms were checked on 3 October 2026 in the US App Store or on each vendor's site; where something could not be confirmed, the text says so.

Two things every list leaves out: whether the free tier is usable or a demo, and whether the app tells you why. Understanding is the bottleneck for every adult I have met who is stuck under 1800, and it is the lens for every verdict below.

The short version

Prices and free tiers checked 3 October 2026 (US App Store listings and vendor pricing pages; regional prices vary). Mated and ChessSolve are web-only scanners with no store listing; they are compared in the screenshot post.

Best for playing: Lichess or Chess.com?

Both. Pick by what you need from the pool, not by the interface.

Chess.com has the largest player base, which matters at the edges: if you play at 3 am, or at 2200, or want a 10-minute game that starts in two seconds, the pool wins. Lichess ratings run roughly 100–200 points higher than Chess.com's for the same player; never compare the numbers across sites. Playing is free without limits; analysis is where it tightens: one Game Review a day for free members on the check date, with the coach commentary and the Insights dashboard reserved for Diamond (about $14.99 a month, about $99.99 a year in the US store). Play Coach, the in-game hint feature from 2025, gives free accounts three games a month.

Lichess is free, open source, ad-free and has no paid tier at all. The pool is smaller but deep enough that anyone under 2000 never waits. Everything an improver needs is included: unlimited server-side Stockfish analysis, an opening explorer with master and Lichess games, studies, puzzle themes and endgame practice. What it does not do is explain. Lichess will tell you 14.g4 was a blunder and show the line; it will not say that it opened the king and why that mattered in this structure.

The improver's recommendation: play slower games than you want to (15+10 or longer; blitz does not build understanding), and play them where your friends are. Choosing cold, Lichess, because the free analysis is the part you will use every day.

LearnChess is not a place to play. It imports from both sites.

What is the best app for chess puzzles?

For most people, Lichess. For rating-tracked grinding, ChessTempo. For puzzles built from your own mistakes, LearnChess, with a daily cap on the free plan.

Lichess puzzles are free, unlimited, and sorted by theme (pins, back-rank mates, Zwischenzug, endgame tactics) and by opening. You get a puzzle rating, a dashboard showing which themes you fail most, and Puzzle Storm for speed. If you do one thing from this post, look at that themes dashboard and drill the two worst.

ChessTempo is the oldest rated tactics trainer still running and the one serious tacticians use. The rating is Glicko-based, the set is well curated, and the paid tiers (Silver and Gold around $3–4 a month on the check date, Diamond $8.99 in the App Store) unlock custom sets that target your weak themes. The interface looks like 2012. It does not matter.

Chess.com Puzzle Rush is limited to a few runs a day for free members and trains speed, not calculation. Dessert.

LearnChess puzzles are rated and adaptive, with a daily puzzle and a community set other players publish from their own games. Two differences worth naming: the blunder mode builds puzzles from the mistakes in the games you imported, so you drill the pattern you actually miss; and any position on your screen (a tweet, a YouTube frame) becomes a puzzle through the screenshot import. The free plan allows 10 rated puzzles a day; Knight lifts the cap and unlocks the theme and blunder modes. Lichess remains the better choice for volume at no cost.

What is the best app to learn chess openings?

This is the category where "memorize or understand" stops being a slogan and becomes a product decision, so here is the trade-off before the apps.

Opening trainers come in two kinds. The first drills moves: you see a position, you play the move, the app schedules a repeat. Chessable, Chessbook and Listudy do this well; drill the Caro-Kann Advance in any of them for a couple of weeks and you will play 12 moves of the main line from memory. The second kind teaches plans: why Black plays ...c5, what happens to the bishop on f5 if it is not traded. The drill apps assume you got that from the course text. Most people skip the text, drill the arrows, then meet 4.h4 and have nothing to lean on.

Chessable has the largest library by a mile, 1,000+ courses from authors up to Magnus Carlsen, and the MoveTrainer drilling is excellent. Many courses have free "short" versions. Pro is $11.99 a month or $74.99 a year on the App Store; courses are bought separately, and good ones cost $30–100. The choice if you want a grandmaster's complete repertoire and the discipline to read it.

Chessbook is the best repertoire builder I have used. Enter your own lines; it shows coverage against what opponents at your rating actually play (from the Lichess database), flags the gaps and drills them. The free tier covers 400 moves, a complete beginner repertoire; Pro is $7.99 a month or $79.99 a year. Web and iOS confirmed; I could not confirm an Android app on the check date.

Listudy is free, open source and web-only: drill your repertoire or any Lichess study against the computer. Fewer features than Chessbook, no price.

ChessMood is a coaching program, not an app in the sense of the others: GM-taught video courses, live events, and a free Basic tier with the first section of every course. Essential is $79 a month ($948 a year), Pro $99 a month ($1,188 a year) on the check date. That buys a structured program, not a trainer you dip into.

LearnChess sits on the understanding side. The opening guides explain the plan behind each move (the Caro-Kann Advance guide is a good example), and the repertoire tool makes you prove a line before it counts: play it from memory and answer engine-verified questions about the ideas, 80 percent or better to pass. A 90-day review then re-tests it; a fixed re-test, not a scheduling algorithm. There is no course marketplace and nothing authored by a GM; the library is 100+ openings written to be understood. If you want a titled player's full repertoire, Chessable. If you want to stop losing on move 9 when the opponent leaves the book, read a guide first and drill second, whichever app you drill in. The method side is in how to build an opening repertoire you actually understand.

Best for reviewing your games

Four tools accept a Lichess or Chess.com import and tell you something about the games. They tell you very different things.

Lichess analysis is free, unlimited Stockfish with a move-by-move accuracy report and a "learn from your mistakes" mode that makes you find the better move yourself. For the 10 test games it found the same turning points as every paid tool. The what, in full, for nothing.

Chess.com Game Review adds move labels (brilliant, great, miss, blunder) and, for Diamond members, short coach sentences at each key moment. Better than two years ago, still formulaic: it names the tactic, rarely the plan. One free review a day on the check date.

Aimchess is a statistics layer: connect your accounts and it reports accuracy by phase, time-trouble patterns, opening performance, and a daily set of exercises drawn from your weak spots. Best of the four at showing trends across 100 games, weakest at explaining any one of them. Premium is $9.99 a month or $71.99 a year, with 15 free lessons a day.

LearnChess Coach reads the games you imported and ranks your leaks as measurable habits: "you score 38 percent against 1.d4", "18 percent of your blitz losses are on time", "the game after a loss scores 31 percent". The statistics are free; the ranked leaks with evidence are Knight and up, and Queen turns the top two into a four-week plan with a Sunday check-in. The game review grades every move, marks where you left book and surfaces the one swing that decided the game. A typical first finding is that the game after a loss scores far below the rest, which has nothing to do with chess. Details on the Coach page. Free plan: 100 game imports and unlimited Stockfish.

If you want trends, Aimchess. If you want the engine for free, Lichess. If you want to be told what to fix first, in a sentence, LearnChess Coach.

Which chess app explains why a move is good, not just that it is?

"AI chess coach" meant two things in 2026, and it pays to know which one an app is selling.

The first is a language model wrapped around an engine: you ask about a position, it answers in sentences. The risk is well known: ask a general chatbot about a position and it will confidently invent a line that is not on the board. The second is the Chess.com approach: pre-written explanation templates triggered by engine features (a hanging piece, a fork, a weakened king). These never hallucinate and never say anything you could not have guessed from the arrow.

Chess.com Coach explanations are the template kind, included with Diamond. Reliable, shallow.

Noctie is the most interesting of the AI-opponent apps: it plays like a human at your level, blunders the way a human does, and gives warm feedback on your games. The coaching is light, more encouragement than analysis, but as a sparring partner it is the most convincing of the group. No free tier; a 7-day trial, then €14 a month or €96 a year. Web, iOS and Android, confirmed on its own site.

LearnChess AI coach (Knighty) is the language-model kind with the guard-rails that matter: it reads the actual board, and every answer is grounded in the live Stockfish evaluation, master-game databases and opening theory before it says anything. Ask why 14.g4 was wrong and the answer is about your king, the bishop on f5 and the pawn break Black now has, with the engine line attached rather than invented. It sits inside the analysis board, the lessons and the game review, so you ask about the position you are already looking at. Free plan: three coach messages, enough to see if the answers are the kind you want; Knight gives 10 a day, Queen unlimited. The AI chess coach page explains the grounding.

Nothing here replaces a human coach. What it replaces is the hour you would spend decoding "+1.4, Bd3 Nc6 Rfe1" alone.

Best for endgames

Endgames have exact answers, which makes this the easiest category to judge: does the app teach the technique, and does it check your moves against the truth?

Lichess Practice is free, covers the essential king-and-pawn, rook and queen endings, and makes you play them out against the engine. A sentence of explanation per exercise, but the positions are the right ones.

Chessable endgame courses (100 Endgames You Must Know is the standard) drill the key positions with the same engine as the opening courses. Excellent for retention; bought per course.

LearnChess endgame guides explain each technique (the opposition, Lucena, Philidor, the square rule) and then make you play the position out against Knighty inside a move budget. The budget is not a guess: every position up to seven pieces is checked against the Syzygy tablebases, so the par is the tablebase's distance to mate or promotion; larger positions are checked by Stockfish. Slip into a drawn or lost position and the play-out stops and offers a retry from the slip. The endgame guides are free to read; completing the advanced lessons is Queen, with one full lesson free on every plan and one a week on Knight. Which six positions to learn first is its own post.

Best for scanning a board from a screenshot or photo

A small category that removes the most annoying step in studying: rebuilding a position square by square from a video, a book or a tweet.

Chessvision.ai is the specialist. A browser extension scans any board on a web page; the mobile app photographs a diagram or a physical board; both open the position on an embedded Lichess analysis board with Stockfish, one click to full Lichess analysis. Free with limited scans; $5.99 a month or $45.99 a year for unlimited. It also indexes chess videos by position, which nobody else does.

LearnChess does the same job and keeps you in the app: the free Chrome extension grabs the board from any tab, the iOS and Android apps read a screenshot or photo from your library, and the web app accepts a paste or a drop. The position opens in the analysis board with Stockfish and the coach, or becomes a puzzle in one click. Five scans a day free, unlimited on Knight. The walkthrough is in turn a chess screenshot into an analysis board.

Chessvision if your home is Lichess and you want video search. LearnChess if you want to ask the coach about the scanned position without leaving the page.

Best for kids

ChessKid (from Chess.com) is the answer, and the only answer: a walled garden with no open chat, lessons taught by cartoon characters, a play pool of other children, and Gold at $7.99 a month or $39.99 a year on the check date. Nothing else in this post is for a child, and ChessKid is not for an adult improver.

I'm stuck at 1200. What app or website should I use to improve?

Two apps, chosen by what the rating band is usually missing. These are the stacks I would set up for a friend; what each plateau looks like is in stuck at 1200.

Under 1200: Lichess + a puzzle habit. Play 15+10 on Lichess, run the free analysis on every loss, and do 15 minutes of Lichess puzzles by theme a day. Do not buy an opening course. Nothing is holding you back except hanging pieces, and no app sells a fix for that beyond repetition. Cost: zero.

1200–1600: Lichess or Chess.com + something that explains. The band where the engine stops helping. You already know the move was a blunder; you need to know what idea you missed. Keep playing where you play, and add Chess.com Diamond (if you are there anyway and template explanations are enough) or LearnChess (if you want follow-up questions and your leaks ranked). Read opening guides before drilling lines. Around $5–15 a month.

1600–1800: Chessbook + a reviewer with statistics. By now the losses are structural: holes at move 10, time trouble, a recurring endgame you misplay. Chessbook for the gaps, Aimchess or LearnChess Coach for the trends across your last 100 games. Chessable only for a specific course you will actually read. Around $15–25 a month, and the band where it starts to be worth it.

For iPhone and Android specifically: every app in the table except Listudy and ChessMood has a native mobile app; Chessbook's Android app is the one thing I could not confirm. The platform does not decide the choice. The job does.

What I would skip

Any app whose feature list is "Stockfish analysis" plus a subscription. Engine evaluation is free on Lichess, free on the LearnChess analysis board, and free on a dozen other sites; an app that charges for a number the engine produces in milliseconds is charging you for a wrapper. The same goes for "AI coach" apps that will not say what the coach is grounded in. Ask one question about a position you know well; if the answer names a piece that is not on the board, close the tab.

Skip, too, the idea that the next app is the fix. I tried most of these during my own plateau and nothing moved until I changed what I did with them: slower games, every loss reviewed, one opening understood before the next was added.

If your problem is understanding why you lost

That is the one job LearnChess was built for. Import your games from Lichess or Chess.com, let Coach rank what is costing you points, open the game that decided it and ask Knighty why the move you played lost. The engine and the first 100 imports are free, and every guide is readable without an account. If you want this done for you, start with the Coach; the free plan's three coach messages are there to check the explanations first.