Which Chess Engine Is The Best?

Imagine a game of basketball or soccer, and a robot could play and score every time, defeating even the best players with every touch of the ball. Those new to chess may not fully grasp how much computers and chess engines have mastered the game. This future is the reality in chess. Computers have taken over the world. The chess world, at least. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing; there’s a lot we can learn from computers and chess engines. But first, we need to determine which computers and chess engines are the best. 

What Is a Chess Engine?

The easiest way to understand a chess engine is to think of it just as a computer program that can calculate the best move in a chess position. How quickly or efficiently it does this can vary. The earliest chess engines employed a brute force method of computation, where they calculated every move in a position and slowly went through all the options to find the best one. More modern chess computers do something similar, but tend to have higher computing power and can calculate even faster. Modern engines also utilize neural networks, enabling the engine to essentially teach itself to think more like a human by playing against itself thousands of times.

What are Chess Engines Used For?

Chess engines are often used in chess training and preparation for high-level play. However, they can also be used to analyze games, helping beginners identify areas where they went wrong. Chess computers often work behind the scenes in many popular chess platforms, allowing you to turn on a chess engine to see whether you have played a good move. The difference between a more helpful chess coach and a chess engine is that a coach can provide casual advice or tips, whereas engines rely on brute-force search and evaluation functions.

 Best Chess Engines Today

• Stockfish – Free, open source, and widely considered one of the strongest engines overall. Stockfish began in 2008 as a part of the Glaurung engine and was developed by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, and Joona Kiiski. Built and maintained by a global community, it has become the strongest open-source chess engine and a leader in computer chess. In recent years, it has incorporated neural network evaluations (NNUE), significantly boosting its strength and accuracy.
• Leela Chess Zero (LCZero) – Leela Chess Zero (LCZero) launched in 2018 as an open-source project inspired by DeepMind’s AlphaZero. Unlike traditional engines, it learns through self-play using neural networks and reinforcement learning. LCZero has become a powerful complement to Stockfish in the chess community, recognized for its human-like strategic depth and unique playing style.
• Komodo Chess – Commercial engine praised for its positional understanding and customization features. Komodo was created by Don Dailey in 2010, with Mark Lefler continuing its development from 2013 onward. Grandmaster Larry Kaufmann has made significant contributions over the years, enhancing the strategic strength of the organization. After Chess.com acquired it in 2018, Komodo became a featured engine on their Play Computer page because of its adjustable difficulty levels and varied play styles.

Should You Play Chess Bots?

Being able to play a game against a chess bot is probably the most significant way that chess engines affect beginner players. That, along with the inescapable urge to look at a game review where the chess engine can tell you how well you did in your bullet game. Bots are always available and offer a low-stress alternative to playing against other players in a rated and timed game. The adjustable difficulties also make it an appealing way for beginners to practice their play.

• Limitations of bots:
  
  • Bots will often play odd or “non-human” lines. A low-level bot will sometimes play an inexplicable move just to make sure they are playing at a low enough level. This means that only playing against bots can actually hurt your chess growth. Playing a chess bot can be a good way to practice more practical endgames or openings, where you need to know how to respond even against the best moves. Each engine is different in how it evaluates positions and interfaces with platforms like ChessBase, Chess.com, or Lichess.

Best Practices:

• You can use bots to experiment with new openings or tactical ideas.
• Don’t only play bots—human games teach psychology, pacing, and intuition.
• Analyze your bot games afterward, just like you would a tournament game.

 Factors to Consider When Using a Chess Engine

Your Needs! - What do you need a chess engine for? Do you just need to analyze your games? Are you looking to improve your openings as a master level player? Or do you want to practice basic endgame positions as a beginner? What you need the engine for, and more importantly, how experienced you are in chess, will determine which chess engine you should be using.

Playing strength – When using an engine, it is helpful to know just how powerful and how fast that engine can determine a move. For most users, even your basic-level stockfish or similar engine can quickly find the best move in a position. Most top engines exceed 3500 Elo; choose one based on your goals. If you want a real challenge, play against a top-level engine and see what kinds of moves are played against you.

Open source vs. commercial – One great aspect of chess engines is that there are open-source, free-to-use versions available. You can often access incredible computing power just from your smartphone. 

Opening book support – If you want to learn openings, whether or not the engine you are using has an opening book is essential for training serious openings or building a repertoire.

Where to access the engine - For your average player, you won’t be choosing between chess engines. Instead, you will have to choose between chess websites or applications. Lichess has an easy-to-use chess engine and opening book, and chess.com has perhaps a better array of bots to practice against, and I like chess.com’s endgame trainer as well, where you can practice basic endgames against their engine.

 Chess Programs for Training and Analysis

Many platforms integrate engines for game analysis, hint suggestions, and tactical training. For your average user, this is the only interaction they will have with a chess engine, so choosing a chess engine is more of a question of where you want to do your chess analysis.
Tools like Lichess, Chess.com, ChessBase, and others allow users to compare engine evaluations or play vs. bots. Analyzing these engines can help pinpoint blunders, missed tactics, and positional errors.

Watch Out

Almost every chess coach will give you this warning: don’t overuse the engine in your analysis. Often, we can glance at a computer's evaluation of our moves, see that we could have played some other line, and then move on, thinking we have gained something from that computer analysis. But no, actual improvement comes from analyzing your flaws, determining for yourself what might have gone wrong in the position, then thinking about what you might have played instead. Write down those thoughts, think about what you considered in the game, or about your time usage. All of these insights are things that the computer cannot provide. Knowing you could have played a mate in two instead of four will not significantly improve your chess, but learning where your weaknesses are, consistently throughout many games, will.

How to Use Engines for Learning

A chess engine is best used after you have analyzed your game and then compared your thoughts with the engine’s. Did you catch the blunders the game analysis now points out? Or did you miss them even in the analysis session? This can help you identify the moments you still need to learn from, and not just moments that were tactical blunders brought on by the stress of the game.

For example, if you see this position, and you do not even think to take the knight, therefore weakening the kingside and giving you a strong positional advantage, then there are bigger things that need to be learned than what a quick computer analysis can teach you.

Try This Method

• Avoid clicking through long computer lines. Instead, ask:
  
  • Why was my move worse?
    • “Well, I failed to capitalize on my opponent's mistake, and instead wasted time by doing xyz.”
      
  • What was the idea behind the engine’s choice?
    • The computer can see that I would weaken the king immediately, not only that, but it sees a longer checkmate threat that I missed.”

Consider hiding the engine’s best moves at first, and just look at eval bars or centipawn loss to keep your thinking active. That way, you can see where a mistake happened, but not what that mistake was. 

Use a Coach

A chess coach is a great mediator, or translator, between you and the chess engine. Have you ever looked at a grandmaster's game and been completely baffled by the moves that they play? Of course! So, why do we think we can simply observe a computer’s moves and immediately understand them without a chess coach guiding us, or at least without intense study? If you were to give a chess coach ten games with detailed notes of your thoughts during your game, they would immediately be able to diagnose areas where you need to improve, whereas just seeing the big red question mark from the AI chess coach on a Chess.com game analysis never will.

Computer Chess Championships: Who’s Winning?

If you ever get bored of watching real chess players play chess960 instead of classical chess, you could always watch events like the TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship), as they showcase cutting-edge developments in engine strength. These tournaments reveal differences in play style between engines (e.g., Stockfish’s precision vs. Leela’s strategy). Winners often influence what tools players adopt for analysis or training. You can also always watch top-level computers competing on chess.com’s computer championship page as well.

Are Dedicated Chess Computers Still Relevant?

Dedicated hardware-based chess computers are generally outdated compared to app- and PC-based engines, but they can still be helpful for chess training. If you are preparing for an OTB tournament, playing a game on a physical chessboard can be critical practice. Some e-chessboards have built-in chess engines. Modern devices now run strong engines internally..