Unbiased review of chess.com

*strong points:
- A lot of titled players, specially GM's, so you can sit around and watch them play
- They have been doing good things for the chess community in the whole, like super tournaments with some of the greatest players
- I like their interface, lots of ways to theme and configure in the whole
- Their chess blog are good, with the latest news both in chess.com and chess in general

*weak points:
- Waaaay too expensive, specially for foreigners where the dollar is quite pricey.
- They force you to only pay with CC (dunno if that changed)
- Their tactics trainer are quite weak, chesstempo.com is way better and cheaper
- Sometimes you can have to wait for quite some time to get paired, specially if you choose one time control that is not preset.

Funny my biggest two downsides of Chess.com weren't even mentioned. 1. Its excessively commercial atmosphere.
2. Its bloated design.
edit: Forgot the upside.
I like the option to have multiple premoves and I like their sound theme.

I actually really liked chess.com but the moderators are a joke. Let me tell you my story dudes.....

I was a diamond paying member on there and even gifted a membership to another. I had lots of friends and even sent a travel chess set from the UK to the states as a gift for one of them. However I was soon punished for loving chess too much.

Basically what happened is that I made a lot of threads discussing chess and it attracted a hate squad that were out to get me. They accused me of being a troll and even a staff plant. Things got so bad they decided to ban me for loving chess instead of the trouble makers. I told them so many times I was just there for the chess but they wouldn't listen. I have been allowed back but I am no longer able to comment on the forums.

Not a nice way to treat paying customers.

Pros- interesting forums.

Cons- laggy chess
Expensive - you have to pay for basically everything
Bad moderators - they are all on a power trip

I actually managed to get muted on the chess.com forums twice within my first three days of using them.

In both cases this was lifted after I queried it. It appears that something in my posts managed to get them tagged as spam, not by a human admin, but by a computer. Once a human did look at them, it was obvious that they were innocent, a comparison of DGT and Chronos clocks, and an attempt to post a picture of my best chess set. But I can't be looking over my shoulder all the time, so I don't think I'll bother again. I played a few blitz games there, but there are other places to play online. Such as this one. I'm new here, and don't know how active I'll be, but a couple of people at my local chess club recommended it.

Unless somehow this post gets me automatically banned. :)

Chessdotcom is a good website with one fatal flaw... the lag. It is not just real, its horrible. I had a membership there and didn't really realize the lag until someone mentioned it after I left, and when I went back to do a comparison with lichess I spotted it right away. I even tried to change the settings on the website but it didn't help, still laggy, and I never have lag problems here at lichess.

A lot of the other pros and cons about each website will be pretty much par for the course; cheaters abound, some admins are cool while others are not-so-cool, the kids are trolling and running amok... all in all I'd say chessdotcom and lichess are the best of the 3 I've used, with chess24 coming in a distant 3rd (the most un-userfriendly website I've tried, had a membership for all of a week or so and then came to lichess).

@ ouest:

Fair enough. I just don't like writing lengthy posts about things I've already discussed several times over in the past, you know? I'll nutshell it:

1) Cheaters Haven: By far, Chess.com is the most cheat heavy site you can play chess on out of all the ones we're discussing. Further, Chess.com does the least to detect cheating. Their technology is literally like 1980's vs today's when compared to sites like Lichess, ICC, and ChessTempo.

2) Least intuitive interface: Chess.com is just not a reliable web based interface and it offers no client for download. It has no way to save games in progress (real games), there are more misdrops and misclicks there than anywhere else, and the graphics are just atrocious compared to the other sites.

3) Need diamond sub to get all the features other sites offer for free/less and in doing so, make Chess.com the most expensive (by far) chess server on the internet. Come on - You and I both know that it's not worth more money than ICC and ChessTempo. ChessTempo's gold sub is $3-4 a month! ICC? It's virtually free once you've been on it for a while.

4) Chess.com has the worst community that exists, online or off. Period.

5) Forums are absolutely horrible. This is basically an extension of #4 but any serious player knows that you need to turn the chat off when playing live chess there.

6) Least knowledgeable, helpful, and up to speed staff you'll find anywhere in the world of chess. Once again, online or off.

7) Makes it clear that it's priority is casual players using their phone or tablet to play 3/0 blitz.

8) Shuffles all players of live chess into cookie cutter time controls that aren't even really relevant time controls in real tournament chess.

9) Has virtually ZERO (if not literally at this point) true classical chess community. ICC, ChessTempo, and Lichess all feature any time control you can imagine. I see guys playing like 180+30's on ICC and CT regularly. 30/0 is about as long as anyone goes on Chess.com. That's just a SUPER casual site, obviously.

10) The technology, from the interface, to the analysis tools, to the tactics trainer, to ...absolutely everything about the site...is years behind the three aforementioned sites we've been comparing Chess.com to. I mean, you have to have a special affinity for getting less than everyone else has access to if you consider yourself a serious chess player and you spend the bulk of your time on Chess.com.

Lichess, ICC, ChessTempo. Total cost a month (if you just pay monthly and get no discount) = $13.99. If you want to go crazy and spend another $5 USD a month you can get a Chessbase Premium account, too. See how ridiculous Chess.com's $14 monthly price tag is? If you just pay for a year upfront it's still $99. In any event, it's just ridiculously overpriced especially when you consider that it really is the worst chess site out there.

@CoffeeAnd420

First off, cool name; I see what you did there.

Secondly, nice break-down for Chess.com I played on it for maybe a month, then realized it was just a poor attempt at a cash grab lol

LiChess Mods really do crack down on cheaters here. I reported a guy earlier that was inflating his rating having 2400 rated accts. resign after 4 moves to his fresh 1500? acct. over and over. I reported him and within 7 minutes he was gone.

@CoffeeAnd420
thank you for your answer.

I agree that discussing chess.com's pros and cons over and over again is tiresome, but then, you and I are still attracted to discussions about it...

Apart from Live games' flaws which I cannot discuss on experience (I prefer playing live at home and use correspondence chess to perfect positional play), I agree with most of your points, not all though:

1. I think chess.com is very active in controlling cheaters, but cannot deal with the vast amount of cheaters. Therefore they are most effective at working on reported cheaters. I'd say it is the same here. This is a downside to commercial success.

3. I don't think chesstempo can be compared with chess.com. Training is chesstempo's primary reason of being, and is developed to its extreme, not the case for Playing, and least of all for Correspondence playing. For the rest, chesstempo is an old fashioned website, slow and esthetically depressing. I agree chess discussions are very good there, and a mine for new developments.

4. Agree 100% and never understood why. I guess a small minority sets the pace and others feel free to behave the same.

6. "kohai" was a great moderator and help, online and off. A great person. She was fired and never replaced with anyone of the same quality. Others were for the most part pretentious, but I think the job of dealing with the crowd on chess.com makes the job a torture.

9. Absolutely. Goes with point 7. I have never understood why the site wasn't open to real classical games, shutting out a very large part of the best of our chess community. Any idea?

10. I was a Diamond member too, and decided that my money was going into accessing the chess news, blogs, free lessons, etc.

I left when they decided to go ahead with V.4 (was it?) The banality of the interface was sending a message that chess.com would no longer listen to its small community of active, serious, faithful, working old timers (organizers of team tournaments, writers, data compilers, etc) , 99% of which were against the new interface.
I'm sure most of those people have left the site by now.
I left after appealing time and over to their honesty about the number of members: 8 Million members (in 2012) was the number of members since the site was launched, most of them gone by then, with accounts closed, but still calculated into that declared total. Dishonest publicity, and efficient.
It seems the site keeps on attracting players, a mystery to me.

I left the site 9 months ago when I found Lichess and have never missed it since.

The only (big) plus point I can think of in favour of chess.com is their system for allowing annotated games or positions to be posted in the forum, which allows for a much better flow of dialogue (assuming the ever-present and apparently uncontrollable trolls don't move in).

Otherwise, Lichess wins hands down. Great site!