CARA

Chess Analysis and Review Application

Free & open source Windows macOS Linux

Version 2.7.6

A full-featured desktop application for analyzing and reviewing chess games. CARA helps you understand your games, identify mistakes, recognize patterns, and improve your chess understanding.

CARA application overview in the light theme
CARA application overview in the default theme

A few highlights

Some distinctive features of CARA are:

Multi UCI Engine support
Use any UCI-compatible engine(s) and assign them per task—evaluation, game analysis, manual analysis, and brilliancy detection.
Extensive game summary, highlight rules, and player statistics
Get a condensed overview with evaluation graph, key moments, detected highlights and per-player performance and trends.
Manual analysis with piece trajectory exploration
Visualize the engine’s plan by tracing piece paths from principal variations.
AI summary (OpenAI, Anthropic, custom endpoints)
Discuss positions with an LLM that can reference engine analysis and game context—pick your provider.
Tagging + auto-tagging
Organize your games with colored tags, including Auto-Tagging based on analysis results.
Moves List “data workbench”
A comprehensive, customizable moves table centralizes all per-move information in one place.
More: Highly customizable • Online import (Chess.com/Lichess) • Manage multiple databases • Theme support • Bulk analysis • Bulk PGN header management • Deduplication • Powerful search • Move classification icons • Annotations • Notes

Download as App Bundle

Pre-built bundles include all dependencies and run without a separate Python install. Download availability is checked automatically when you load this page.

macOS
Apple Silicon (arm64)

macOS users: If you see a security warning when opening the app, see the installation instructions in the manual for steps to allow it to run. For background and troubleshooting details, see this Q&A post.

Linux
x86_64 · aarch64

Linux bundles are published as .tar.gz per architecture when available. For manual installation from source, see the README.

For manual installation or other platforms, see the README.

Resources

Access the source code, contribute to the project, read the user manual, or watch video tutorials to learn more about CARA's features and capabilities.