# Chess.com

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Chess.com and 15 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for puzzles, review mode, custom variants and easy navigation. Critics most often say paid features cost too much.

## What people warn about

- Expensive paid tier (3 comments): "I hate that chess.com puts game reviews under their most expensive plan, I ain't paying so much for something I can get in lichess for free." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49692944)) "Chess.com is just not worth the price to me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745538)) "I'm not paying for a second year for sure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693376))
- Data leak and weak security (2 comments): "It might very well be possible that there were API endpoints that exposed way too much information." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49692275)) "Email addresses were not supposed to be leaked but they were, which hints at atrocious security." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738153))
- Heavy, slow site loads (2 comments): "it loads 150mb of data for new visitors and 1200 request (40mb) for home page in a minute" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082167)) "They are terrible at caching, optimization etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082271))
- Outages and lost games (2 comments): "Chess.com isn't the shining beacon of 99.9999 SLA - sometimes this just happens." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46619700)) "I regularly had games end abruptly and be completely removed from my game history" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706559))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Lichess](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lichess.md): 42 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.chess.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Chess.com", https://hackerapproved.com/p/chess-com/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).