Blackbox Chess vs Lichess Analysis: Is Free Enough?
Checked on November 9, 2026.
Lichess is free, has no ads, and says on its own features page that every feature is free for everybody, forever. That includes its analysis tools. So before comparing anything, it is worth being clear: if you are on Lichess, you already have a lot.
What Lichess gives you for free
- Computer analysis: the Stockfish engine checks a finished game on Lichess's servers, up to 40 games a day, and marks your inaccuracies, mistakes and blunders on a graph.
- Learn from your mistakes: after the analysis, Lichess takes you back to each position where you went wrong and asks you to find the better move.
- Analysis board: unlimited engine use on any position you set up.
- Insights: charts across all your Lichess games. You choose what to measure (for example, how accurate you are in each opening, or how often you blunder in each game phase) and Lichess draws it.
- Studies: saved, shareable analysis you can annotate yourself.
What Blackbox Chess does
Blackbox Chess pulls your recent Lichess or Chess.com games, runs Stockfish over every move, and groups your mistakes by type. A type is a named habit, for example leaving a piece undefended where it can be taken, missing a pin (a piece that cannot move without exposing a more valuable one behind it), or pushing pawns in front of your own king. It ranks those types by how often they happen and how much they cost you.
- Free: your last 10 games and your number one mistake type, named and explained. No account and no card.
- $10 one-off report: your last 100 games, every mistake type ranked, three of your own games where it happened, and a fix course built from your own positions. Full refund within 7 days if it is not useful.
- $12 a month or $99 a year: weekly analysis of every new game, a training library that brings your mistakes back until you get them right, an endgame trainer, and a personalized opening video each week.
The real difference
Lichess gives you excellent tools, but you do the detective work. Its computer analysis looks at one game at a time. Insights can chart almost anything across your games, but you have to know which question to ask, and it answers with numbers, not with "here is the habit, and here are the three games where it cost you."
Blackbox Chess does that digging for you. It reads your Lichess games together and names the mistake you keep repeating, then gives you drills from the exact positions where it happened.
Where Lichess is better
- It is completely free, with no limits that most players will ever hit.
- Learn from your mistakes is a great habit to build after every game.
- Insights is flexible, and if you enjoy digging into your own data, it lets you ask almost anything.
Where Blackbox Chess is different
- It finds and names the pattern for you instead of leaving you to search for it.
- It ranks your mistakes, so you know which one to work on first.
- Your drills come back on a schedule until they stick, and every one is checked by Stockfish first.
- It reads Chess.com games too, if you play on both.
Is free enough?
For many players, yes, as long as you actually review your games and are willing to look for the pattern yourself. If you have been doing that and your rating still is not moving, the useful next step is a second pair of eyes across all your games at once.
You can try that free on your last 10 Lichess games, with no account. Analyze your games free.