Blackbox Chess vs Aimchess: Which One Tells You What to Fix?
If you have ever come off a losing streak thinking "I know I keep messing up the same way, I just cannot see what it is," you are the exact person these tools are built for. Both Blackbox Chess and Aimchess take a pile of your real games and try to show you where you are quietly bleeding rating points.
They go about it very differently, though, and the difference actually matters depending on what you want out of the thing. Here is a straight comparison, with the strengths and the weak spots on both sides.
Where they overlap
Both start from the same honest idea: your own games are the best textbook you have. Both pull your history straight from Chess.com or Lichess, so you are not typing anything in by hand. And both are trying to replace the vague "just study more" advice with something aimed at your specific weaknesses.
If you have only ever used the built-in game review on Chess.com or Lichess, which looks at one game at a time, either of these is a step up, because they look across dozens of games and find the trend. So the disagreement between them is not about whether hunting for patterns across your history is useful. It is about how they show you the result, and what they actually hand you to do about it.
What Aimchess does
Aimchess connects to your Chess.com or Lichess account, pulls in your recent games, and grades you across six broad areas: opening accuracy, tactics and blunder prevention, converting winning positions, defending worse ones, endgames, and time management. It compares your numbers to other players at your rating, then serves up training exercises aimed at your weaker categories.
The free tier gives you a 40-game report plus a limited number of daily lessons. Premium runs around $8 a month, cheaper if you pay by the year, and unlocks unlimited training and the full stats.
If you like the idea of a daily habit, opening an app, warming up with a few puzzles, and chipping away at a weekly plan, that structure is where Aimchess is genuinely good. It has been around for years, it has polished iOS and Android apps, and the six-category scorecard is a nice at-a-glance way to see that, say, your endgames are the thing dragging you down.
What Blackbox Chess does
Blackbox takes a narrower, sharper angle. Instead of six wide buckets, it runs Stockfish across your last 10 to 100 games and hunts for specific, repeating mistake patterns. The actual named habits that keep costing you. Think "you leave your back rank weak" or "you keep missing your rook's route to the seventh rank," rather than "your tactics sit in the 40th percentile."
Then it ranks those patterns by how many rating points each one is really costing you, so the very first thing you see is the single mistake worth fixing first. No guessing about where to start.
The free report covers 10 games, needs no account and no card, and names your number-one recurring mistake in about a minute. The full report is a one-time $10. It scans 100 games, ranks every pattern by severity, shows you three of your own games where the mistake actually happened with the moves laid out, and builds a short fix course with drills pulled from your real positions. Not a generic tactics set. Drills aimed squarely at the one habit that is hurting you.
The one thing only Blackbox does
Here is the feature with no equivalent on the other side at all. Blackbox can make you a personalized opening video, starting at $5. It shows exactly where you drift out of book in your own openings and talks you through it, using your games as the material. Aimchess has no video product of any kind. If you learn better by watching than by reading a stats page, that is a real gap between the two.
A fair word on who owns Aimchess
Worth knowing before you subscribe: Aimchess is not an independent shop anymore. It was bought by Magnus Carlsen's Play Magnus Group, and Chess.com acquired that whole group in a deal that closed at the end of 2022. So Aimchess is a Chess.com property today, one of a batch of brands they picked up.
That history matters because some of those sibling brands have not done well under the new roof. Chess.com fully shut down chess24, another Play Magnus site, in early 2024. Aimchess itself went through a rough stretch: a multi-week outage in 2024 where paying subscribers got locked out and communication was thin, and people were still posting about login and subscription problems well into 2026. It also has not seen a major update in a good while. None of that means it stops working, and plenty of people still get value from it, but it is fair to go in clear-eyed about how much active care the product is getting.
So which one should you pick?
Pick Aimchess if you want a training app you open every day, a broad six-part scorecard, comparisons against players at your level, and puzzle warmups to build a routine.
Pick Blackbox if you want a blunt, specific diagnosis of the exact mistakes repeating in your games, ranked so you know what to fix first, with the fix built from your own positions instead of a generic library. And if the opening videos sound useful, those live only on this side.
Honestly, they are not really competing for the same job. Aimchess is a daily-practice tool. Blackbox is a diagnosis-and-fix tool. Some players would happily run both. But if what you want, today, is a clear answer to "what keeps going wrong in my games and what do I do about it," that is the exact question Blackbox was built to answer.
Want to see yours? You can find your number-one recurring mistake right now, free, across 10 of your games, with no account needed. Analyze your games free.