Lichess

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

18677 stars · 2774 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Lichess (lila) is a free, adless, open-source online chess server written in Scala 3 on a modified Play framework, with a TypeScript web client and mobile apps. It supports realtime play, tournaments, puzzles, Stockfish computer analysis, studies, and a free PGN game database.

Use cases

• play chess online for free without ads
• run or join arena and swiss tournaments
• solve chess tactics puzzles
• analyze my games with Stockfish
• study openings with a large game database
• self-host an open-source chess server
• play correspondence chess
• share and collaborate on chess studies

When to choose

• you want a fully free, ad-free, open-source chess platform
• you need realtime multiplayer chess with variants and tournaments
• you want engine analysis, puzzles, and training tools in one place
• you want to build on or fork an open-source chess server or its API/database

When to avoid

• you need a small embeddable chess library rather than a full server (use chessground or scalachess)
• you require commercial support or SLAs
• you want a lightweight offline chess app without server infrastructure

Facets

application · maturity stable

web-framework http-server websocket search-engine machine-learning api-framework templating routing gaming-tools web-development education analytics cross-platform browser self-hosted chess scala play-framework stockfish non-profit open-source tournaments puzzles mongodb elasticsearch redis typescript mobile-app pgn-database real-time web-server mobile docker linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="lichess-org/lila")