Best Free Chess Trainer App 2026 — I Tested 7

Six Weeks, Seven Apps, One Honest Verdict

I was hovering at 1,180 Elo on Chess.com for most of last winter. Not dropping, not climbing — just stuck in that soul-crushing plateau where you feel like you've already learned the openings and yet somehow keep losing on move 12 to the same types of positions. So I made a deal with myself: spend six weeks seriously testing every free chess trainer app I could find, track my accuracy, and figure out what actually moves the needle.

I wasn't looking for a place to play games. I was specifically looking for training tools — apps that help you drill openings, practice positions, and build the kind of pattern recognition that transfers to real games. That's a narrower category than it sounds, and it's where most apps fall apart.

Here's what I tested, roughly in the order I tried them: Chess.com's Lessons, Lichess Studies, Chessable (free tier), ChessKid, Chess Tempo, Aimchess, and CheckmateX. Each one got at least a week of genuine use — not just a quick look around, but actual daily sessions of 20-30 minutes focused on opening training. I tracked my accuracy scores, how well I retained lines 3 days later, and whether any of it showed up in my actual games.

The results weren't what I expected. The app that helped me most wasn't the one with the biggest brand name.

Chess.com Lessons — Good Breadth, Shallow Depth

Chess.com is the obvious first stop for anyone learning chess. I've been a Gold member for two years, and the Lessons section covers an enormous range of topics — openings, tactics, endgames, strategy. The production value is high, the explanations are clear, and there's something for every skill level.

But here's my problem with Chess.com for opening training specifically: it's built around passive learning. You watch a video, you follow a guided walkthrough, and you click through the correct moves. The interface tells you immediately when you make a mistake and shows you the right move. That's helpful for understanding ideas — it's not helpful for building deep recall.

I noticed this clearly after three days. I could watch a full lesson on the Italian Game and feel completely confident about the ideas. Then I'd sit down in a real game, deviate from the mainline on move 7, and have no idea where to go. The lesson hadn't drilled the positions into my memory — it had just shown me the moves once and moved on.

For broad chess education, Chess.com's Lessons are genuinely excellent. For deep opening retention? It's not designed for that, and it shows.

Lichess Studies — Powerful but You Have to Build Everything Yourself

Lichess is free, open-source, and has no paywalled features — which I respect deeply. The Studies feature lets you create or import opening trees, annotate positions, and work through variations at your own pace. There are also thousands of community-built studies covering every major opening.

The problem is friction. To get serious training value out of Lichess Studies, you either need to build your own repertoire study from scratch (which takes hours before you even start training) or sift through the community studies and hope someone built a good one for your specific opening. Some of those community studies are outstanding. Many aren't organized in a way that builds progressive learning.

Lichess also has a practice feature where it plays the moves for you and you have to recall the correct response. That's closer to active recall — and I genuinely like it. But setting it up, and managing what you've already practiced vs. what you haven't, requires a level of self-organization that most players (including me, honestly) won't maintain consistently.

I've written more about the Chess.com vs. Lichess comparison for opening training specifically in my Lichess vs Chess.com opening trainer review — it goes deeper on the strengths and weaknesses of each platform's approach.

Chessable Free Tier — The Right Idea, Gatekept

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Chessable was built around spaced repetition for chess openings, and conceptually it's the best idea in the space. You learn a line, then the app resurfaces it at calculated intervals — you review it when you're about to forget it, which is exactly how memory consolidation works. It's the Anki model applied to chess moves, and in theory it's perfect.

In practice, the free tier is so limited it's almost a joke. You get access to a handful of free courses, and the ones that aren't behind a paywall are mostly short, incomplete, or outdated. The courses you actually want — the GM-written, properly structured, fully annotated ones — cost anywhere from $30 to $100+. If you're willing to pay, Chessable can be excellent. As a free tool? It's a teaser more than a trainer.

I spent about a week on the free courses and felt like I was running on an empty tank. The methodology is sound. The free content isn't deep enough to build a real repertoire. I'd need to spend at least $50 to use it the way it's designed to be used.

CheckmateX — The One That Actually Changed My Training

I want to be upfront: CheckmateX is the app I helped build, so I'm biased. But I'm also the person who knows exactly what it does and doesn't do, which makes me probably the most accurate reviewer. I'll tell you both.

CheckmateX's opening trainer is built entirely around active recall. You don't watch a video. You don't read annotations. You sit in a position and you have to play the correct move — and if you can't, the app tells you you're wrong and makes you try again. No hints until you genuinely give up. That methodology sounds harsh but it's why it works: your brain has to actually search its memory for the right move, which is exactly the cognitive process that creates lasting recall.

I started with the Italian Game and the Sicilian Defense. After two weeks of daily 20-minute sessions, I could play the first 12 moves of both openings from memory — not because I'd watched them, but because I'd been forced to produce them repeatedly under light pressure. My accuracy in the Italian Game specifically jumped from about 65% in the first session to 91% by day 10. More importantly, I started reaching the middlegame positions the opening is supposed to produce, which gave me actual positions I'd studied rather than random chaos.

The puzzles section at /play/puzzles also does something clever — it pulls tactical positions from the openings you've been training, so you're solving puzzles that arise from moves you've already been drilling. That connection between opening prep and tactical training is something none of the other apps in this list do well.

The honest weaknesses: the library of openings is smaller than Chessable's, there's no endgame trainer yet, and the mobile experience is functional but not polished. If you need a full chess education platform, you'd pair it with something else. But for opening training specifically? It's the best free tool I found, and it's what I'm still using today.

For a broader look at how it stacks up against Chess.com and Lichess on every feature, see my earlier CheckmateX vs Chess.com vs Lichess comparison.

Chess Tempo and Aimchess — Tactical Drills, Not Opening Trainers

I want to briefly address the other two apps because they kept coming up in my research. Chess Tempo is excellent for pure tactics training — it's got an enormous puzzle database, a smart rating system, and some sophisticated filtering options. But it's not an opening trainer. If you need tactical pattern recognition, Chess Tempo is worth your time. If you need opening retention, it won't help.

Aimchess does something interesting: it analyzes your actual games and tells you where your openings are going wrong, which positions you're losing from, and what patterns appear in your losses. That diagnostic function is genuinely useful, especially for intermediate players who don't know where their biggest weaknesses are. But it's diagnostic, not prescriptive. It tells you what to fix, not how to fix it.

My final ranking for free opening training: 1) CheckmateX (active recall, directly targets what you forget), 2) Lichess Studies (powerful if you invest setup time), 3) Chess.com Lessons (best for concepts, weak on retention), 4) Chessable free tier (great methodology, insufficient free content). Chess Tempo and Aimchess are both excellent for what they do — they're just solving different problems.

If you want a quick benchmark of where any of these tools sit from an independent perspective, Lichess has a free feature comparison page that's kept reasonably up to date — it's a useful reference for checking what's actually free vs. paywalled across platforms.

If you want to test this yourself, you can start a training session right now at checkmatex.app/play — no account required for the first few openings.