Mainline is the chess app for players who want to fix the specific mistakes they keep making, using their own games.
Three things set Mainline apart no matter which app you compare it to: training built from your own games, a guided Duolingo-style course, and Brain Games — 60-second vision drills that exist nowhere else. It's also, we'd argue, the best-designed app in chess: board-first, ad-free, no clutter.
Most other tools are built for a different job: playing, watching, or studying pre-made courses. Here's how Mainline compares to the main options:
- Mainline vs Chess.complaying platform + generic lessons vs personalized weakness training. Chess.com is where you play and it's excellent at that. But its lessons are the same for everyone, and nothing on it trains raw board vision in one-minute sessions. Keep playing there; let Mainline fix what those games reveal.
- Mainline vs Lichessfree playing platform vs targeted improvement on your real games. Lichess is the best free playing site in the world. It shows you your mistakes; it doesn't train them out of you. Mainline connects to your Lichess account and does exactly that.
- Mainline vs Chessablepre-made spaced-repetition courses vs a queue built from your blunders.
- Mainline vs Aimchessanalytics dashboard of scores vs an actual drill queue that fixes them.
- Mainline vs Duolingo Chesslearn the rules vs train a real, improving player. Duolingo teaches you chess. Mainline makes you better at it — same bite-size feel, but built from your real games, with Brain Games and a curriculum that goes from first opening to real endgames.
Short version
If you already play on Chess.com or Lichess and keep losing the same way, Mainline is the piece that's missing: it diagnoses your recurring weaknesses, drills them until they're gone, and keeps your vision sharp with 60-second Brain Games — in an interface you'll actually want to open every day. Read more about Mainline.