Comparison

Chess Premium+ vs ChessLab

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Chess Premium+

Master chess with a powerful, free application. Play against a top engine, solve daily puzzles, and analyze your games with advanced AI. Offers a complete chess experience without ads or subscriptions.

Highlights
  • Play against Stockfish 18 engine
  • Daily chess puzzles
  • Advanced game analysis
  • Custom position editor
  • Multiple AI opponents
  • Achievement system
  • Offline gameplay
Features
Read full description

Chess Premium+ is a modern, powerful, and completely free chess app designed for players of every skill level. Whether you're learning the basics, sharpening your tactics, or challenging one of the world's strongest chess engines, Chess Premium+ provides everything you need in one elegant experience. Powered by Stockfish 18, the app delivers fast, accurate, and reliable chess analysis while maintaining smooth performance and responsive gameplay. Play complete chess games, solve tactical puzzles, create custom positions, and improve your decision-making with advanced AI—all without subscriptions or advertisements. FEATURES • Play Against Stockfish 18 Challenge one of the world's strongest chess engines with adjustable AI strength suitable for beginners through advanced players. • Daily Chess Puzzles Improve tactical vision, calculation, pattern recognition, and checkmating skills with new chess challenges. • Advanced Game Analysis Review completed games, discover mistakes, analyze critical positions, and learn stronger continuations using Stockfish 18. • Position Editor Create any custom chess position, test opening ideas, practice endgames, or explore tactical scenarios with full engine support. • Multiple AI Opponents Play against balanced, aggressive, defensive, and positional AI personalities for a varied training experience. • Achievement System Unlock trophies, complete milestones, and track your progress as you improve your chess skills. • Optimized Performance Enjoy fast engine calculations, smooth animations, responsive controls, and a stable chess experience designed for long playing sessions. WHY CHESS PREMIUM+ • 100% Free • No Advertisements • No Subscription Required • Offline Gameplay • Stockfish 18 Engine • Daily Chess Puzzles • Position Editor • Game Analysis • Modern Premium Interface • Optimized Performance Whether you want to play chess, solve puzzles, analyze games, study openings, practice endgames, or simply improve your skills, Chess Premium+ provides a complete chess experience in one beautifully designed application. Download Chess Premium+ today and start mastering chess for free.

About

ChessLab

Features
Read full description

Completely free, no ads, no account: nothing leaves your device. ChessLab is a complete chess companion for iPhone and iPad: play, analyse, train and experiment, with Stockfish built in, without ever leaving the app. OPPONENTS THAT PLAY LIKE HUMANS Nine characters played by Maia-3, a network trained on millions of human games: it does not look for the best move, it plays the one a human of that level would play, blunders included. Each has a style, a repertoire and a temperament, and a level set on the human scale. Or take on Stockfish, from beginner (~900 Elo) to maximum (~3190). Optional clock, hints, a warning before risky moves and an evaluation bar, all on demand. ANALYSE AND UNDERSTAND Every move is graded (inaccuracy, mistake, blunder, brilliant…), each player gets an accuracy score, and the app tells you why a move was bad. The Coach adds the share of players at your level who play it. At the end, it offers to turn your mistakes and missed mates into puzzles. Load a game by PGN, FEN, position editor or photo scanner. DAILY SESSION Every day, what to review: opening positions that are due, missed puzzles, an endgame. A streak of days and medals to keep you going. OPENINGS 58 hand-written openings (bilingual), checked against the engine: every move is explained, coloured arrows tie the board to the move list, and spaced repetition makes them stick. Import your own repertoires as PGN too. ENDGAMES 78 courses proven by endgame tablebases: no move taught gives up a win, no defence offered loses a draw. Plus free training, where any move that keeps the verdict is accepted. PUZZLES Over 130,000 problems from the Lichess database, filtered by level and theme, plus your own: drawn from your mistakes, or imported from your own PGN files. Personal rating and “At my level”. VARIANTS AND MORE Chess960 and eleven variants against the computer (King of the Hill, Three-Check, Horde, Atomic, Crazyhouse, Duck Chess, Barricades…), each with its own analysis. Two-player mode, and a Laboratory to compare two Stockfish settings. IPHONE AND IPAD A large board with side-by-side panels on iPad, keyboard and trackpad, portrait and landscape. Fully bilingual, French and English. Optional iCloud sync, off by default. PRIVACY Offline by default: no ChessLab server, no analytics, no ads. Your games stay on your device. ChessLab embeds the Stockfish engine (GPLv3 license), the University of Toronto's Maia-3 network (AGPLv3 license) and free vector piece sets — cburnett (GPLv2+/CC BY-SA), chessnut (Apache 2.0) and merida (GPLv2+). Full source code and license notices are available from within the app (Settings → Licenses).

Screenshots

Chess Premium+4 screens
ChessLab4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: Chess Premium+ at every 2 days against ChessLab's weekly. ChessLab's advantage is iOS requirement (18.0 vs 26.2). On price, rating, ratings volume and ads there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Chess Premium+ against 5.0 for ChessLab. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 2 and 1 respectively.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Chess Premium+ ships an update every 2 days, ChessLab weekly. The most recent releases landed on November 15, 2026 and November 13, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard2 real differences · 7 level
Chess Premium+ versus ChessLab: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterChess Premium+ChessLab
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (2 ratings)5.0 (1 ratings)
Number of ratings2 — better1
Update frequencyEvery 2 days — betterWeekly
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationFree—
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad
Requires iOS26.218.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size133 MB194 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperYusuf OZCANThierry Maeder

In-app purchases

None

Chess Premium+

No in-app purchases

None

ChessLab

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Chess Premium+ free?
Chess Premium+ is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is ChessLab free?
ChessLab is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Which has better reviews, Chess Premium+ or ChessLab?
Chess Premium+ and ChessLab are both rated 5.0 out of 5 on the App Store, from 2 and 1 ratings respectively.
Do Chess Premium+ or ChessLab have ads?
Neither Chess Premium+ nor ChessLab shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Chess Premium+ or ChessLab?
Chess Premium+ ships an update every 2 days, and ChessLab weekly. Most recently, Chess Premium+ was updated on November 15, 2026 and ChessLab on November 13, 2026.

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