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Hot Topic (More than 10 Replies) Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026 (Read 1150 times)
Vladimir
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #15 - 03/06/26 at 14:15:42
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an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 03/05/26 at 01:51:30:
Not to imply that the forked-from Scid is not undergoing active development:

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This branch is 455 commits ahead of and 34 commits behind benini/scid:github.


Indeed. Almost on cue, Fulvio Benini just released Scid 5.2 with:
  • Engine evaluation graph and automated analysis
  • Higher-performance tree statistics through multi-threading
  • Better keyboard navigation
  • Various UI polishing and cleanup changes, such as with the dark theme
  • Faster startup and snappier menus
This update seems to hit all the points we've mentioned in this thread, amazingly. We're really spoiled for choice these days.
  
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an ordinary chessplayer
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #14 - 03/05/26 at 02:33:48
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TonyRo wrote on 03/03/26 at 13:33:40:
I think you'd be in the minority in thinking the SCID UI is better than modern options

CUA was backed by a lot of research. Developers tossed it because they want to work from one codebase for multiple targets, and mobile is the least common denominator. The only thing I will grant to current majority preference is that modern options work better on mobile. Seeing that players at the club use chess.com and/or lichess.org for all their chess analysis and research, I'm sure developers think they are on the right track.

As far as looks go, my basic objection is everything is too low contrast. Buttons don't have edges or shadows, boxes don't have borders, text is dark gray on a light gray background (or dark mode with purple text or something, same problem). I know why it needs to be that way on mobile, but my database is not on mobile.

One word that gets misused a lot in UI circles is "intuitive". Because intuition is based on experience, and not everybody has the same history there. If you grew up on mobile and discovered things by clicking (sometimes randomly) on different things on the screen, then yes, CUA is "unintuitive" and modern is "intuitive". But if you grew up with an unforgiving command line and don't want to click randomly because you are afraid of trashing your data in some non-recoverable way, then it's the other way around.

Here's a clicky-clicky intuition example from 2014. At work we got a new "pretty" web-based reporting tool and I had to extract data from it. I did get training but it was aimed at developing new reports, not at an end user consuming reports. I could filter and get the dataset I wanted, and I could select a single row and export that one via a button. But I couldn't figure out how to export the entire filter. I struggled for a while with the menu, with the help, with the wiki, and with google, then I asked my manager (half my age, naturally). The answer: clicking on the separator between any two records selects the entire dataset. Oh, yeah. That's intuitive. I didn't ask him how he figured that out, because I had seen him working in Excel already....
  
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an ordinary chessplayer
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #13 - 03/05/26 at 01:51:30
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Thanks for posting that here. I suppose TonyRo will be requesting a modern UI soon.  Wink

Joking aside, this illustrates both the strength and weakness of the open source model. If you don't like the direction of a project, you can do what you want with the code (within the limits of the license). On the other hand, forking increases entropy alongside the useful work.

Vladimir wrote on 03/03/26 at 18:44:39:
Also, it seems like a lot of the new features are user requested, which is an encouraging sign from a project undergoing active development.


Not to imply that the forked-from Scid is not undergoing active development:

Quote:
This branch is 455 commits ahead of and 34 commits behind benini/scid:github.
  
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Vladimir
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #12 - 03/03/26 at 18:44:39
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Just learned about scidCommunity, another fork of Scid. 

The main highlights seem to be tighter integration with Chess.com and Lichess:
  • Importing the games played from your account
  • Uploading games to either website
  • Lichess tablebase lookup and engine evaluations
  • Watching Lichess game broadcasts
Among many other changes. The addition to the tree window of showing move sequences looks really nifty since I use it so often.

Also, it seems like a lot of the new features are user requested, which is an encouraging sign from a project undergoing active development.
  
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TonyRo
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #11 - 03/03/26 at 13:33:40
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I think you'd be in the minority in thinking the SCID UI is better than modern options (to me anything built with Chessground looks great and feels snappy - "revolting" seems like a stretch!  Wink), but I definitely understand the desire to use keyboard shortcuts. Not exclusively, that seems absurd to me, but having a large suite of keyboard shortcuts for basic tasks helps a lot.
  
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an ordinary chessplayer
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #10 - 02/26/26 at 20:07:39
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TonyRo wrote on 02/24/26 at 16:20:19:
Someone needs to take the SCID code, eliminate like...50% of the stuff that's in there, give the UI a facelift, and call it a day.  Grin

No to removing features. No to UI facelift.

I looked at Pawn Appétit ...
https://github.com/Pawn-Appetit/pawn-appetit/blob/main/screenshots/analyze-game....
... and, like all the other "modern" apps, find the UI revolting. Not usable for me because I want to use the keyboard and avoid the mouse as much as possible. A proper menu responds to the keyboard and all the functions are discoverable there. But that's not the way web apps work.

Bring back CUA, what Scid is (or was, initially) based on. And where is Jakob Nielsen these days? Ah, found him.
https://www.uxtigers.com/
But despite the "UX" in the website name, his writing seems to be 1% UX and 99% AI these days.
  
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an ordinary chessplayer
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #9 - 02/26/26 at 19:34:54
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Vladimir wrote on 02/25/26 at 07:07:33:
I've had the chance to work with a 10 year old version of Aquarium as well as the 2025 version, and I honestly cannot tell an appreciable difference between them at all. 

Surely by 2026 Aquarium is 64-bit? Or maybe not. Information on chessok.com is skimpy.

Vladimir wrote on 02/25/26 at 07:07:33:
For example, trying to create a Lichess Elite database by importing many PGN files into a new database is trivially easy in Scid, its progress bar chugging along reassuringly. 

This can be done on the commandline with sc_import, and is so fast that I sometimes use it for additional PGN error-checking. pgn-extract, Scid, and ChessX each catch different errors that the others miss.
  
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TonyRo
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #8 - 02/25/26 at 13:18:01
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I did some testing on Pawn Appetit yesterday and was sort of disappointed. Obviously this project is pretty new and it's primarily a few developers working in their free time so I get that there will be issues and bugs, but it was arduous. My DB is about 11 million games and it was struggling mightily to compute the stats every move for the opening explorer. Then it just randomly crashed. So not off to a great start.  Grin
  
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Vladimir
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #7 - 02/25/26 at 07:07:33
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I've had the chance to work with a 10 year old version of Aquarium as well as the 2025 version, and I honestly cannot tell an appreciable difference between them at all. 

The database of games may have been updated and the pre-bundled chess engine may be a recent version of Stockfish, but some of the bugs are still the same. 

Given that neither Aquarium nor Chess Assistant seem to have any changelogs with their new version releases on the company's website, my concern would be that CA is similarly stagnating and being re-packaged. That's not to say that a new user wouldn't find what's already there usable and useful, of course. 

Meanwhile, ChessBase hypes up their latest innovations with every release, even if some of them are completely pointless and fall very flat. While each new version of ChessBase may have a notable new feature, some of its basic functionality could be languishing. 

For example, trying to create a Lichess Elite database by importing many PGN files into a new database is trivially easy in Scid, its progress bar chugging along reassuringly. 

In ChessBase, figuring out how to attempt the same thing was a total nightmare in comparison, and the program became completely unresponsive for 36 hours straight. The only reason I didn't halt the process was that I noticed the database's filesize was slowly increasing. 

Another thing that Scid does glaringly better than ChessBase is its ECO classification. 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.

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.

TonyRo wrote on 02/24/26 at 17:03:27:
BTW, there is also En Croissant/Pawn Appetite, which are both in development and work across all major platforms. Pawn Appetite is a fork of En Croissant, as development on the former stopped and the developer went dark for a while.


Now that you mention it, En Croissant seems to have had a major new release in the last few days with the added ability to create and train opening repertoires. Could be worth a look.
  
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #6 - 02/24/26 at 20:42:12
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I use Chess Assintant for data storage, search, editing, and find using somewhat more intuitive for more to use this way. I do however  like the new Monte Carlo function in CB26 and the fact that  engine use  has finally been added as a function so I might try out more. I basically have both because I find some openings have more games in one database vs the other sometimes
  
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TonyRo
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #5 - 02/24/26 at 17:03:27
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BTW, there is also En Croissant/Pawn Appetite, which are both in development and work across all major platforms. Pawn Appetite is a fork of En Croissant, as development on the former stopped and the developer went dark for a while.
  
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TonyRo
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #4 - 02/24/26 at 16:20:19
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Someone needs to take the SCID code, eliminate like...50% of the stuff that's in there, give the UI a facelift, and call it a day.  Grin
  
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an ordinary chessplayer
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #3 - 02/20/26 at 10:24:04
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Scid works on Windows and costs only your time, so you could give it a try while still using ChessBase.
  
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #2 - 02/20/26 at 05:07:39
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Thanks.  It sounds like I should just stick to my old version of Chessbase unless I replace my PC with a Mac or Linux laptop.  This probably falls in the “if it ain’t broke” … category!
  
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an ordinary chessplayer
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Re: Chessbase vs. Chess Assistant (and others) in 2026
Reply #1 - 02/16/26 at 20:51:06
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MaxJudd wrote on 02/16/26 at 17:16:00:
considering an upgrade from a very old version of Chessbase

How old is very old? Smiley I tried ChessBase14 for a while but didn't like it. Before that I was on 8. Then I bought a used copy of 10 and it's fine for my one purpose -- converting .cbh files to .pgn.

For about ten years I used both ChessBase and Chess Assistant every day. I preferred Chess Assistant for my personal working database because of their tree. The ChessBase .ctg tree is a pale shadow. But I haven't used Chess Assistant for a long time because of reasons. Maybe the latest versions solved my problem, but I've moved on.

Let's talk others.
  1. Hiarcs Chess Explorer (now Pro)
    - Very good value for money. It does everything I need. This is what I used for a few years when I was on a Mac. Hiarcs has a fabulous opening book, constantly updated, you need to pay for it but in my opinion worth it. It's very well supported with a manual, email, forum, etc. Unfortunately Linux is not supported, so I was forced to move on....
  2. Scid
    - specifically "main line" Scid, not the Scid-vs-PC fork. Fulvio Benini ( https://sourceforge.net/u/fulvioscid/profile/ ) is doing stellar work.  Moving on from Hiarcs was a good thing because Scid also does everything I need, for zero dollars. 
    In particular, 
    (a) Scid has an excellent tree ; 
    (b) Available data is out of control, the version-5 database format handles up to 4 billion games and on the good laptop Scid is blazingly fast with 17 million games ; 
    (c) When searching for a board, Scid can "Look in variations" (as a supplement to the tree, which only looks at the top-level game).
    On the negative side, it's like an old-school hardware store which is packed to the rafters with sometimes dusty merchandise. For sure they have what you are looking for, but good luck finding it. I had known about Scid for ages but never used it much because of that. But now that I've learned my way around I'm happy with it.
  3. online
    - Not for me. I've been around the block and online you are at the mercy of their terms of service, change of ownership, botched updates, or simply turning off their server. I will use online tools when they are available, but I would not consider putting my database there. Another negative is I personally find the user interface to be horrible compared to even the worst desktop software. (Unless the desktop software is a "web app", in which case they are equally horrible.) Oh and by the way, I'm not a robot.

And what exactly is this "everything I need"? From the database, not much.
  • Small (38K games) personal database of any games I have played, read in a book, found online, analyzed, etc. This is the main database. Of course I have a bazillion tiny special purpose databases blowing through town like tumbleweeds.
  • Reference database. Various options exist. I use different ones but also maintain a ChessBase subscription that gives access to their live database, and occasionally purchase the Big Database for local access.
  • A tree, so when I am analyzing a game in the small database I can instantly see the statistics from the big database. I also use a tree just on the small database, to see if I have analyzed a move there or not.
  • A search feature. Filtering is the raison d'etre of any database. But my search needs are exceedingly simple: names and exact positions cover 99.9 percent of the cases.
  • An engine goes without saying.

For any specialist needs I don't use the database but choose from a long list of other software, e.g. Shredder, xboard, Tarrasch Chess GUI, ChessX (also a database but not how I use it), pgn-extract, polyglot, etc.
  
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