It seems that SCID has just had a major release (version 5.0) within the last day or two. Highlights in the update include a new database format supporting up to 4 billion games, a new engine window, and Chess960 support.
SCID is less polished than ChessBase, certainly. In my experience, it really falls behind in automated game analysis. ChessBase stands out in that arena, especially with its natural language annotations. SCID users may want to supplement it with another program for that kind of automated game analysis (sort of like how one combines Fritz and ChessBase into one workflow I suppose).
There are two things that I much prefer in SCID over ChessBase. The first is a small thing, but SCID's ECO classification just seems strictly superior to ChessBase's. It updates dynamically as you step through the opening moves of a game, catches all transpositions, and overall is much more informative with letting you know what variations you're looking at.
The second thing that I think SCID does better than ChessBase is database maintenance. Especially in finding and deleting twin games, ChessBase has been very lackluster for me in the past. While this may be less of a concern if the user only sticks to heavily curated databases like MegaBase, SCID's thorough twin deletion, spell checking, and of course ECO classification can otherwise be immensely helpful.
Lastly, ChessBase's reference tab sees the most use from me when I'm reviewing a game, but SCID's tree window is comparable and feels about five times more responsive.
In the second paragraph, are you just referring to what is sometimes referred to as "annofritzing"? I'm not a fan of that practice, though of course different people have different opinions on that issue. But just to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your parenthetical at the end of that paragraph, you're not saying that there's any difficulty in using an engine inside SCID, are you?
Ah, sorry for the ambiguity. Indeed, you can set up and use engines for analysis in SCID. It has various amenities for it like hovering over the moves of the engine's output to show a diagram of that specific position, or importing its variations directly into the game notation.
By ChessBase's natural language annotations, I was referring to annofritzing, yes. But the lack of automated game analysis includes things like a one-button "quickly blunder check this entire game" option. Analyzing with engines in SCID is more so just infinite analysis on a position-by-position basis, rather than a whole game at a time.
To supplement SCID's database-centric capabilities, a user would have some other program like Arena for more engine-specific things if desired. This would include the automatic game blunder checking, but also things like setting up an engine vs. engine match or shootout to try to get a rough idea of the character of a position, for example. This is what I meant with the Fritz-ChessBase workflow comment.
While the main SCID branch (that just released an update) doesn't have these options, the Scid vs. PC fork does have more extensive engine features like blunder checking, annotation, or engine vs. engine matches. I'm not certain how often that fork is receiving updates if at all, but if not it's still in a decently stable and feature-complete state.
I've used both chessbase and SCID-vs-PC for years. I prefer SCID-vs-PC over the original SCID because there are a couple of interface differences. SCID-vs-PC has a unique feature I like that chessbase doesn't ... in SCID-vs-PC you can set your player name or names and when you open a game with your player name it automatically flips the board, if necessary, so that your player's color is on the bottom. I don't think the original SCID has that option.
You can put the names of one or more of your chess heroes as one of the "My Player Names" so that, when you open one of their games in your referenced database, the board will flip if necessary, too.
The main reason I prefer SCID to chessbase is that I prefer to use the Linux Operating System rather than Windows and chessbase will only run in a virtualbox Windows session. Also, SCID-vs-PC only costs time to learn, there is no financial cost. I have built a nice database from TWIC and high-level pre-TWIC games going back to Morphy.
Chessbase has more bells and whistles, but SCID-vs-PC has everything I need -- and some things I just like.
Chess newbie here, but LucasChess also has some of the same functions. Not sure how it compares to database specific tools (i.e. SCID or CB), but it is nice to have training tools and my personal games all in one local program.
I've not used CB, and not used SCID, but I can comment on HIARCS.
I use HIARCS on macOS. It has a nice clean UI, can integrate any engine (that supports the standard plugin API). They can maintain databases in PGN format or in their own HCE format (which loads very very fast and is more compact than PGN). The UI is quite nice, I think; with rely nice display of the moves, comments, variations ... I prefer to read through a game record in HIARCS over any other choice (CB online, lichess, chess.com).
I have loads of databases, so no problem maintaining many databases.
It can import CBV (and I think CBH), but only standard games ... it doesn't capture the moves for Chess960 (the CBV format is proprietary to CB with no public documentation, so has to be reverse engineered by any other product wishing to import CBV files. If transferring games from CB to HIARCS, I recommend exporting to a PGN database file and importing that to HIARCS; though if all the games are standard, then CBV should work as well.
The one weird quirk is that ELO tags below 600 are ignored (they become zero). The dev team are aware, but I don't know when or if it will be addressed.
The HCE database format allows "huge databases only limited by memory - 1GB per 8 million games". So it could handle the MegaDatabase's 110 million games if you have enough RAM (perhaps 14 GB free memory). My TWIC db, in HCE form, loads in about 1 second on a 3-yo mac laptop.
It may take some time to load ... the CBV of the entire TWIC database took between 2 and 3 minutes to load. But once in HCE form it takes, as I said above, 1 second or less. I'm showing 3,376,022 games in my TWIC right now (I haven't added the most recent week yet).
The development team is quite responsive. I've emailed them half dozen times this past year with bug reports or feature request and have gotten useful and intelligent personal responses and sometimes had extended conversations with the developers and tech support.
There is a local opening book, and then a few larger opening books that you can subscribe to (updated quarterly from latest tournament games); I do subscribe and find it useful. You can add CTG books, but I have not tried that. There is no tool or feature to create opening books, but you can explore databases using the Tree Explorer.
There is no equivalent of ChessBase Online, no HIARCS specific web publishing platofrm. For that I use Lichess's "Study" feature. A study is a game collection that can be shared privately or publicly. It is useful for publishing analysis, or for collaborative post-mortems, and people build courses using lichess studies. However, each study is limited to 64 chapters (where a chapter is equivalent to one game record). (NOTE: other than the study, you cannot host arbitrarily sized game databases on lichess).
The other HIARCS features I find useful, as a person trying to improve my chess, include:
- copy and paste positions (FEN strings)
- blundercheck (a fast engine analysis of the entire game ... good for finding mistakes I may have missed)
- playing against the engine (either whole games or sparring a position against the engine)
One clarification. It may be that the TWIC db doesn't include a correct variant tag and that is causing the Chess960 CBV import problem. So, don't take my bug reporting as definitive. I'm just a user, not a developer; also I probably only use 10% of the features available in HIARCS, so also add that factor in when considering my comments.
Been using SCID and the fork SCID vs PC for more than 20 years, and it does what I need from it. Not quite as slick as CB, but a lot faster. Can handle quite large databases. I think the limit is around 16 million games per database, which should be plenty for most unless you are planning on importing every single game played on Lichess into one database. Fast and advanced search functions, database maintenance, name checking, removal of duplicate games etc.
I also have purchased Chessbase, but it sees little use. SCID is my daily driver.
I've never used chessbase so I'm a little unsure what it offers. What does it do above what you can do for free on lichess, which as the masters database, lichess database and your own games all built in and free? The study option also enables you to study games and add OTB games too.
I'll give some examples of what you can do with ChessBase, and you can let me know if the same capacities are present with Lichess. First, I can have as many databases as I have storage capacity. I don't want my students' games mixed with my own (my real games, not the throwaway blitz and bullet I play on Lichess), or with each other, or with my opening databases, or with my TWIC or Mega Databases, etc. I can copy games from one database to another more or less instantly, and can with a click or two email games to students or post games to the web (as I do for the blog). I can use my own engines, running on my computer, which are more up to date than the versions used on Lichess, and also more powerful because computer time isn't being split up between all the users. Also, while I'm sure their database is decent, is it as good as the Mega Database? It has more than 110,000 annotated games included in the almost 10 million total games. If there's a way to upload Mega to Lichess as a separate database for one's private use, then great - but is that possible?
There are other cool features too, but all that said, the point of my post was to ask if there were good alternatives to ChessBase, both in general but maybe most especially for new students who don't yet need to jump into the ChessBase + MegaBase universe. If they can create distinct databases in Lichess, and can easily send and receive PGNs and transfer them to those databases, it may well be good enough. If the additions are only by hand or even cutting and pasting them one at a time, however, that's not going to be a good solution. I think even adults would find that annoying; there's almost no chance that primary school kids would do it.
The lichess database as 4,000 million total games in it. But let's say you just wanted rapid and classical games of people over 2000 rating on lichess (perhaps 1500+FIDE), then you've got 44m games. The 'masters' database has and additional 2.5m games in it (not lichess games). The vast numbers of games lets you see the 'real moves' people play in unusual positions as there are simply more examples of every position than you could ever get on a small database of just 10m games.
If you're a lower rated player, then you can see the 'real moves' of lower rated players and plan your opening strategy around the win rates of those real moves, rather than the unrealistic moves made by GMs. My opening repetoire is created based on this, for example. I care little what stockfish says or GMs, but, instead, what the typical real moves are and my win rates against those.
You can see every single one of your own games played without uploading or downloading anything, and instantly compare any particular position with the billions of other games on the website. You can also see everyone of your student's games too. Each can have a computer analysis done in seconds, which for the average player uses such a powerful engine that is so advanced that it's powerful enough for 99% of all players (even if it's not the very latest version e.g. currently stockfish 14 rather than the latest 15). But, if you want, you can use any engine to analyse your games.
Games can instantly and easily be emailed and, I believe, posted online.
BUT.....
You can't upload an OTB game to your database. Instead you would upload it and create a study (which could be shareable with anyone instantly). Your students could instantly share theirs too. PGNs are quickly and easily uploaded and downloaded, but you can't upload and download a whole database (to my knowledge) to a study.
Studies can be annotated. But you do not have 100,000+ professionally annotated games!
You can not set up your own personal opening database (why not I ask - that would be such a useful feature)!
So, having said all that, it does sound like chessbase has some great points, but for the average chess player the lichess database has a lot to offer. And it's all free, with no need for anyone to buy anything!
For a while I have felt the need for something like Chessbase. My main requirement is to find good quality games for the openings I play. I am especially interested in finding out how games typically branch out from middlegame tabiyas. I was almost about to purchase SCID, when I decided to give SCID a try. It’s early days yet, but so far I like SCID immensely. I have downloaded 7M+ games from various sites and my database is growing. For the limited purpose for which I use SCID, I have no complaints.
It seems that SCID has just had a major release (version 5.0) within the last day or two. Highlights in the update include a new database format supporting up to 4 billion games, a new engine window, and Chess960 support.
SCID is less polished than ChessBase, certainly. In my experience, it really falls behind in automated game analysis. ChessBase stands out in that arena, especially with its natural language annotations. SCID users may want to supplement it with another program for that kind of automated game analysis (sort of like how one combines Fritz and ChessBase into one workflow I suppose).
There are two things that I much prefer in SCID over ChessBase. The first is a small thing, but SCID's ECO classification just seems strictly superior to ChessBase's. It updates dynamically as you step through the opening moves of a game, catches all transpositions, and overall is much more informative with letting you know what variations you're looking at.
The second thing that I think SCID does better than ChessBase is database maintenance. Especially in finding and deleting twin games, ChessBase has been very lackluster for me in the past. While this may be less of a concern if the user only sticks to heavily curated databases like MegaBase, SCID's thorough twin deletion, spell checking, and of course ECO classification can otherwise be immensely helpful.
Lastly, ChessBase's reference tab sees the most use from me when I'm reviewing a game, but SCID's tree window is comparable and feels about five times more responsive.
Excellent comment - thank you.
In the second paragraph, are you just referring to what is sometimes referred to as "annofritzing"? I'm not a fan of that practice, though of course different people have different opinions on that issue. But just to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your parenthetical at the end of that paragraph, you're not saying that there's any difficulty in using an engine inside SCID, are you?
Ah, sorry for the ambiguity. Indeed, you can set up and use engines for analysis in SCID. It has various amenities for it like hovering over the moves of the engine's output to show a diagram of that specific position, or importing its variations directly into the game notation.
By ChessBase's natural language annotations, I was referring to annofritzing, yes. But the lack of automated game analysis includes things like a one-button "quickly blunder check this entire game" option. Analyzing with engines in SCID is more so just infinite analysis on a position-by-position basis, rather than a whole game at a time.
To supplement SCID's database-centric capabilities, a user would have some other program like Arena for more engine-specific things if desired. This would include the automatic game blunder checking, but also things like setting up an engine vs. engine match or shootout to try to get a rough idea of the character of a position, for example. This is what I meant with the Fritz-ChessBase workflow comment.
While the main SCID branch (that just released an update) doesn't have these options, the Scid vs. PC fork does have more extensive engine features like blunder checking, annotation, or engine vs. engine matches. I'm not certain how often that fork is receiving updates if at all, but if not it's still in a decently stable and feature-complete state.
I've used both chessbase and SCID-vs-PC for years. I prefer SCID-vs-PC over the original SCID because there are a couple of interface differences. SCID-vs-PC has a unique feature I like that chessbase doesn't ... in SCID-vs-PC you can set your player name or names and when you open a game with your player name it automatically flips the board, if necessary, so that your player's color is on the bottom. I don't think the original SCID has that option.
You can put the names of one or more of your chess heroes as one of the "My Player Names" so that, when you open one of their games in your referenced database, the board will flip if necessary, too.
The main reason I prefer SCID to chessbase is that I prefer to use the Linux Operating System rather than Windows and chessbase will only run in a virtualbox Windows session. Also, SCID-vs-PC only costs time to learn, there is no financial cost. I have built a nice database from TWIC and high-level pre-TWIC games going back to Morphy.
Chessbase has more bells and whistles, but SCID-vs-PC has everything I need -- and some things I just like.
Chess newbie here, but LucasChess also has some of the same functions. Not sure how it compares to database specific tools (i.e. SCID or CB), but it is nice to have training tools and my personal games all in one local program.
I've not used CB, and not used SCID, but I can comment on HIARCS.
I use HIARCS on macOS. It has a nice clean UI, can integrate any engine (that supports the standard plugin API). They can maintain databases in PGN format or in their own HCE format (which loads very very fast and is more compact than PGN). The UI is quite nice, I think; with rely nice display of the moves, comments, variations ... I prefer to read through a game record in HIARCS over any other choice (CB online, lichess, chess.com).
I have loads of databases, so no problem maintaining many databases.
It can import CBV (and I think CBH), but only standard games ... it doesn't capture the moves for Chess960 (the CBV format is proprietary to CB with no public documentation, so has to be reverse engineered by any other product wishing to import CBV files. If transferring games from CB to HIARCS, I recommend exporting to a PGN database file and importing that to HIARCS; though if all the games are standard, then CBV should work as well.
The one weird quirk is that ELO tags below 600 are ignored (they become zero). The dev team are aware, but I don't know when or if it will be addressed.
The HCE database format allows "huge databases only limited by memory - 1GB per 8 million games". So it could handle the MegaDatabase's 110 million games if you have enough RAM (perhaps 14 GB free memory). My TWIC db, in HCE form, loads in about 1 second on a 3-yo mac laptop.
It may take some time to load ... the CBV of the entire TWIC database took between 2 and 3 minutes to load. But once in HCE form it takes, as I said above, 1 second or less. I'm showing 3,376,022 games in my TWIC right now (I haven't added the most recent week yet).
The development team is quite responsive. I've emailed them half dozen times this past year with bug reports or feature request and have gotten useful and intelligent personal responses and sometimes had extended conversations with the developers and tech support.
There is a local opening book, and then a few larger opening books that you can subscribe to (updated quarterly from latest tournament games); I do subscribe and find it useful. You can add CTG books, but I have not tried that. There is no tool or feature to create opening books, but you can explore databases using the Tree Explorer.
There is no equivalent of ChessBase Online, no HIARCS specific web publishing platofrm. For that I use Lichess's "Study" feature. A study is a game collection that can be shared privately or publicly. It is useful for publishing analysis, or for collaborative post-mortems, and people build courses using lichess studies. However, each study is limited to 64 chapters (where a chapter is equivalent to one game record). (NOTE: other than the study, you cannot host arbitrarily sized game databases on lichess).
The other HIARCS features I find useful, as a person trying to improve my chess, include:
- copy and paste positions (FEN strings)
- blundercheck (a fast engine analysis of the entire game ... good for finding mistakes I may have missed)
- playing against the engine (either whole games or sparring a position against the engine)
That's probably enough ...
One clarification. It may be that the TWIC db doesn't include a correct variant tag and that is causing the Chess960 CBV import problem. So, don't take my bug reporting as definitive. I'm just a user, not a developer; also I probably only use 10% of the features available in HIARCS, so also add that factor in when considering my comments.
I am curious which database has 110 million games.
I think he conflated the two numbers I gave him: it's 10 million games, 110,000 of which are annotated.
Correct; I did make exactly that error. :-/
That makes sense. I was shocked to read in another post about how large the lichess database is!
Been using SCID and the fork SCID vs PC for more than 20 years, and it does what I need from it. Not quite as slick as CB, but a lot faster. Can handle quite large databases. I think the limit is around 16 million games per database, which should be plenty for most unless you are planning on importing every single game played on Lichess into one database. Fast and advanced search functions, database maintenance, name checking, removal of duplicate games etc.
I also have purchased Chessbase, but it sees little use. SCID is my daily driver.
I've never used chessbase so I'm a little unsure what it offers. What does it do above what you can do for free on lichess, which as the masters database, lichess database and your own games all built in and free? The study option also enables you to study games and add OTB games too.
I'll give some examples of what you can do with ChessBase, and you can let me know if the same capacities are present with Lichess. First, I can have as many databases as I have storage capacity. I don't want my students' games mixed with my own (my real games, not the throwaway blitz and bullet I play on Lichess), or with each other, or with my opening databases, or with my TWIC or Mega Databases, etc. I can copy games from one database to another more or less instantly, and can with a click or two email games to students or post games to the web (as I do for the blog). I can use my own engines, running on my computer, which are more up to date than the versions used on Lichess, and also more powerful because computer time isn't being split up between all the users. Also, while I'm sure their database is decent, is it as good as the Mega Database? It has more than 110,000 annotated games included in the almost 10 million total games. If there's a way to upload Mega to Lichess as a separate database for one's private use, then great - but is that possible?
There are other cool features too, but all that said, the point of my post was to ask if there were good alternatives to ChessBase, both in general but maybe most especially for new students who don't yet need to jump into the ChessBase + MegaBase universe. If they can create distinct databases in Lichess, and can easily send and receive PGNs and transfer them to those databases, it may well be good enough. If the additions are only by hand or even cutting and pasting them one at a time, however, that's not going to be a good solution. I think even adults would find that annoying; there's almost no chance that primary school kids would do it.
Well...
The lichess database as 4,000 million total games in it. But let's say you just wanted rapid and classical games of people over 2000 rating on lichess (perhaps 1500+FIDE), then you've got 44m games. The 'masters' database has and additional 2.5m games in it (not lichess games). The vast numbers of games lets you see the 'real moves' people play in unusual positions as there are simply more examples of every position than you could ever get on a small database of just 10m games.
If you're a lower rated player, then you can see the 'real moves' of lower rated players and plan your opening strategy around the win rates of those real moves, rather than the unrealistic moves made by GMs. My opening repetoire is created based on this, for example. I care little what stockfish says or GMs, but, instead, what the typical real moves are and my win rates against those.
You can see every single one of your own games played without uploading or downloading anything, and instantly compare any particular position with the billions of other games on the website. You can also see everyone of your student's games too. Each can have a computer analysis done in seconds, which for the average player uses such a powerful engine that is so advanced that it's powerful enough for 99% of all players (even if it's not the very latest version e.g. currently stockfish 14 rather than the latest 15). But, if you want, you can use any engine to analyse your games.
Games can instantly and easily be emailed and, I believe, posted online.
BUT.....
You can't upload an OTB game to your database. Instead you would upload it and create a study (which could be shareable with anyone instantly). Your students could instantly share theirs too. PGNs are quickly and easily uploaded and downloaded, but you can't upload and download a whole database (to my knowledge) to a study.
Studies can be annotated. But you do not have 100,000+ professionally annotated games!
You can not set up your own personal opening database (why not I ask - that would be such a useful feature)!
So, having said all that, it does sound like chessbase has some great points, but for the average chess player the lichess database has a lot to offer. And it's all free, with no need for anyone to buy anything!
4,000 million?
I'm not sure where I got that figure from. Currently it has 880m games.
Now I see. Wrong filter. Open up the full database and it currently it has 4,398 million in total!
For a while I have felt the need for something like Chessbase. My main requirement is to find good quality games for the openings I play. I am especially interested in finding out how games typically branch out from middlegame tabiyas. I was almost about to purchase SCID, when I decided to give SCID a try. It’s early days yet, but so far I like SCID immensely. I have downloaded 7M+ games from various sites and my database is growing. For the limited purpose for which I use SCID, I have no complaints.
I'm on Mac, so Hiarcs is main option.
Hard for me to compare against ChessBase, as I haven't used it for year.
I like what I have with Hiarcs - their openings databases are enough to work with.
They don't have real databases of games (or I don't know how to get them), but TWICs are good enough here.
Worth trying.