Chess.com Analysis Board: What Is Free, Where the Limits Are, and What Else to Use
People searching for the Chess.com analysis board usually want one of three things: where the button is, what the free version actually does, or somewhere else to go once the free version stops being enough. This page answers all three, and it keeps the analysis board strictly separate from Game Review, because conflating the two is the single most common confusion in this topic. If you want a board open in the next ten seconds, our free chess analysis board loads in the browser with no account, no daily cap and a paste field for any PGN or FEN.
The Chess.com analysis board is the interactive board you drive yourself: move pieces, branch variations, read a live engine. Opening and using it is free on any account. What the free tier limits, as of 2026, is the automated layer on top: engine depth, how many engine lines you see at once, retry features, and how many full Game Reports you can generate per day. Game Review is a separate, automated pass over one game. For unlimited free board work, the Lichess analysis board is the honest first pick. Chess DNA's free analysis board adds the thing no board does: the pattern across your games.
Interactive lesson, spotting a hanging piece: this is the exact job an analysis board is good at, and the one you should be able to do without it. Play the key move yourself on the board below. One black piece is defended by nothing, and the move that takes it also keeps your own pieces safe. Find the loose piece first, then check that the capture does not walk into a recapture. That two step habit is what the engine toggle is supposed to be confirming, not replacing.
Where the analysis board is on Chess.com
There are two doors, and knowing which one you walked through explains most of the confusion about what you are looking at.
1. From a finished game
Open your game archive, click a game, and choose the Analysis option on the game page. The board loads with that game's moves already in the move list and the clock times attached. This is the route most people take, and it is also the route where Chess.com offers you a Game Review at the same moment, which is why the two get mixed up. The board and the review are two different products sitting on the same screen.
2. As a standalone board
From the site menu, under the learning and tools area, there is an Analysis entry that opens an empty board at the starting position with no game attached. This is the version you want when you are working on an opening line, checking a puzzle you failed, or rebuilding a position from an over the board game. On the mobile apps the same two doors exist: the post game screen and the main menu.
What the board itself does
Once you are on it, the Chess.com analysis board gives you a live engine evaluation, a move list you can click through, variation branching when you play a move from the middle of a game, drawable arrows and square highlights, keyboard navigation, an opening name lookup, and import and export of FEN and PGN. There is a separate position setup editor for placing pieces by hand, castling rights and side to move included. If you want to build a position from nothing rather than from a game, a dedicated chess board editor is faster than fighting a board that is trying to be a game.
Two things worth knowing that are easy to miss. First, the engine runs in your browser on the free tier, so a weak laptop gives you a weaker evaluation than a fast desktop on the same account. Second, the board keeps your variations in a tree, so you can play out a line, press the left arrow back to the branch point, and try a different move without losing the first one. Most players never use the tree and re-enter positions by hand instead.
For a sense of what you are actually hunting for on that board at club level: in Chess DNA's dataset of 6,288 real amateur games from 103 players, analyzed with Stockfish at depth 18, players rated 1200 to 1499 blundered 1.72 times per 100 moves in rapid, and that rate drops only about 30% once players pass 1500. Smaller mistakes barely move at all, from 4.8 to 4.5 per 100 moves. The board is not there to find exotic ideas. It is there to catch the same handful of error types, repeatedly.
The general method for driving any board well, the part that decides whether you learn anything, is in our guide to how to use a chess analysis board. This page stays on Chess.com specifics.
Analysis board vs Game Review vs Game Report
This is the section most people came for without knowing it. Three names, and they are not interchangeable.
| Feature | What it is | You use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Analysis board | An interactive board you control. You move the pieces, you branch the lines, you read the engine. Nothing happens unless you do it. | You have a specific question about a specific position and you want to work it out. |
| Game Review | An automated single pass over one finished game. Returns an accuracy percentage, per move labels such as inaccuracy, mistake, blunder and brilliant, key moment callouts and a coach style narration. | You just finished a game and do not yet know where it went wrong. |
| Game Report | The same automated pass, under the name Chess.com has used at different times and in different places in the interface. Treat Game Report and Game Review as the same thing for practical purposes. | Same as Game Review. The naming has moved around, the product has not. |
The workflow that actually works is sequential: let the automated review find the moments, then take each moment to the analysis board and do the thinking yourself. A review that tells you move 27 was a blunder has taught you nothing until you sit on move 27 and work out what you missed. Conversely, opening a raw analysis board after a game and scrolling through 40 moves hoping something jumps out is the slowest possible way to review, because you have no idea where to stop.
If the automated review side is what you are actually shopping for, including where its daily cap sits and which free tools reproduce its format, that is covered separately in our free Chess.com Game Review alternative guide. And if you want to run a review right now, our free chess game review takes a username or a PGN with no login.
What is free on the board, and what is gated
Stated carefully, because Chess.com adjusts its tiering regularly and anything specific in a guide like this ages badly. As of 2026, the shape of the limit looks like this, and the shape is the durable part even when the exact quotas move.
Free on the board. Opening it. Loading any of your games onto it. Pasting a FEN or PGN. Playing moves out, branching variations, arrows, highlights, keyboard navigation, the position editor, opening names, and a browser engine giving you a live evaluation with a best move. In practice this covers the large majority of what a club player needs from a board. If your question is "was that capture safe", the free board answers it.
Where the paid tiers add. The gating is about intensity rather than access. Paid membership raises the engine depth available, increases the number of simultaneous engine lines shown instead of just the top one, unlocks unlimited automated game reports rather than a small daily allowance, and adds retry and practice features that let you replay a mistake against the engine repeatedly. Some deeper analysis also runs server side rather than in your browser, which matters on slow hardware.
What we will not claim. We are not going to print an exact number of free reports per day or a price, because both have changed more than once and a stale number in a guide is worse than no number. Check the membership page on Chess.com for the current state. What has been consistent for years is the direction: the board stays open, the automation gets metered.
Depth is the variable worth checking, because it is the one every free tier economises on first. Our own floor is Stockfish 17 at depth 18 on every game, free tier included, for a boring reason: below roughly depth 16 the move classifications start disagreeing with themselves on quiet positions, so the same move gets called good on one pass and an inaccuracy on the next. If a free board is giving you a shallow evaluation and you are trying to settle a close positional question, that is where the disagreement comes from, and it is not your reading of the numbers that is wrong.
Chess.com vs Lichess vs Chess DNA, compared honestly
All three boards are good. They are good at different things, and the order below is not the order our marketing team would pick.
| Chess.com analysis board | Lichess analysis board | Chess DNA free board | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to use the board | Free to open and use; depth, extra engine lines and report volume are metered on the free tier | Free, unlimited, no paid tier at all (donation funded non profit) | Free, no signup, no daily cap on the board |
| Account needed | Not for the standalone board; yes to load your own games | No | No |
| Engine | Browser engine on free, deeper and partly server side on paid | Browser Stockfish, plus unlimited server side full game analysis on request | Stockfish 17 at depth 18 on every game, free tier included |
| Standout feature | Proximity. If your games are on Chess.com, the board is one click from the archive, and the review sits next to it | Opening explorer and master and community game databases right beside the engine, plus Studies for sharing annotated work | Groups mistakes from your whole imported history into nine recurring weakness themes and ranks them by cost |
| Weakest point | The good stuff is metered, and you find out which parts on the day you actually need them | No natural language coaching. You read the numbers and supply the interpretation yourself | The board is deliberately simple. For opening theory depth, Lichess beats it outright |
| Best for | Players who live on Chess.com and mostly want the board next to their own games | Anyone who wants unlimited free board and engine work, opening research included. The default recommendation | Finding the mistake you keep repeating, rather than solving one position |
If you have no strong reason to choose otherwise and your question is about a position, use the Lichess analysis board. It is free without an asterisk, the engine is unlimited, and the opening explorer next to it is worth more to a club player than most premium features on offer anywhere. We say this on a page trying to rank for a Chess.com query because it is true, and because the alternative is writing a comparison nobody should trust.
If you already pay for Chess.com, its board is excellent and the proximity to your own archive is a real advantage that no third party tool can match. And if the Lichess side is where you are heading, our guide to Lichess game review covers how to get the most out of its free unlimited analysis, and the Chess DNA analysis hub collects the rest of our analysis tooling and guides.
The thing no analysis board can tell you
Here is the structural limit that all three boards share, and it is not a feature any of them could add.
An analysis board answers one question about one position. You ask, it answers, you close the tab, and the board forgets. It has no idea that the loose bishop you just dropped is the fourth loose bishop this month, or that you have now lost eleven games to an overloaded defender on f7, or that your accuracy collapses specifically in the last three minutes of a rapid game. The engine is not withholding that information. It genuinely does not have it, because it has never seen your other games.
That gap is where Chess DNA sits, and it is a different job rather than a better board. It imports your games from Chess.com or Lichess, runs every one through Stockfish 17 at depth 18, and then classifies each significant mistake into one of nine recurring weakness themes, ranking them by how much win probability each theme has cost you across your history. The output is not "move 24 was a blunder". It is "you have lost this exact way in dozens of games, here are the positions, drill them". A board cannot produce that sentence and a per game review cannot either, because both work one position or one game at a time. If that is the layer you have been missing, the next step is how the weakness diagnosis actually works.
Analyze my Chess.com games free →
FAQ
Is the Chess.com analysis board free?
The board itself is free to open and use. Any Chess.com account, and in most cases no account at all, can load a position, play moves out, branch into variations and run the browser engine. What the free tier limits is the heavy automated work layered on top of the board: the depth the engine runs to, how many full Game Reports you can generate per day, and features such as unlimited retries. Those sit behind a paid membership. If you only want to move pieces and see an evaluation, the free board is genuinely enough.
Where is the analysis board on Chess.com?
There are two routes. From a finished game, open it in your archive and choose Analysis, which loads that game on the board with its move list. For a blank board, open the site menu and pick Analysis under the learning and tools area, which gives you the starting position with nothing attached. On the mobile apps the same option appears on the post game screen and in the main menu. From either board you can paste a FEN or PGN, or switch to the position editor and place pieces by hand.
What is the difference between Chess.com analysis and game review?
The analysis board is a workspace you drive. You move pieces, branch into variations, and read the engine yourself. Game Review, sometimes labelled Game Report, is an automated pass over one finished game that hands back an accuracy score, move labels such as mistake and blunder, and a coach style narration of the key moments. The board answers a question you ask. The review tells you where to look. Most players want both: the review to find the moments, the board to work out why.
Is there a free alternative to the Chess.com analysis board?
Yes, and the strongest one is the Lichess analysis board, which is free with no cap, no membership and no account required, and includes an opening explorer and a master and community game database next to the engine. Chess DNA runs a free browser analysis board that takes a PGN or FEN with no signup. For pure board work with unlimited engine access, Lichess is the honest first recommendation. Chess DNA is the one that also looks across your whole game history instead of one position at a time.
Can I analyze a Chess.com game without a Chess.com account?
Yes. Any Chess.com game has a public PGN you can copy from the share panel of the game page, and public archives can be pulled by username. Paste that PGN into a free analysis board and you get the full game with engine evaluation, no Chess.com login involved. Chess DNA's board and Lichess both accept a pasted PGN directly. This is also the standard way around a daily report cap: the games stay where they are, and the analysis happens somewhere without a limit.
How deep does the Chess.com analysis board engine go?
Deep enough for club play, and deeper on a paid plan. The free board runs an engine in your browser at a moderate depth, which is fine for spotting a tactic or checking whether a capture was safe. Paid tiers raise the depth and the number of engine lines shown at once, and shift some work to stronger server side analysis. For reference, Chess DNA fixes every game at Stockfish depth 18 on the free tier, because below that the move classifications start disagreeing with themselves on quiet positions.
Does the Chess.com analysis board tell me my weaknesses?
No, and neither does any other analysis board. A board evaluates the position in front of it and forgets it the moment you close the tab. It has no memory of the twelve other games where you lost a piece to the same overloaded defender. Finding the mistake you repeat needs analysis across your history rather than one position, which is a different kind of tool: Chess DNA groups blunders from your imported Chess.com and Lichess games into nine recurring weakness themes and ranks them by how much they cost you.
Background on the engine behind all three boards: Stockfish is the open source engine that powers Lichess analysis and Chess DNA alike, and the Lichess project keeps its full analysis free and ad free as a non profit.
