Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I recently upgraded from ChessBase 10 to Chessbase 11 and use both on a Windows 7 laptop. CB 11 has a new interface, but the same functionality is still there. I don't believe the new interface is much of an improvement. It hasn't affected how I use the product, and I can't say it's any faster or even easier to use than the CB 10 interface.
If you are expecting any significant new features you will probably be disappointed. This product hasn't had any major features added since they came out with Chessbase 8 about 10 years ago. CB 11 is also not as stable as CB 10. I've had to go back to using CB 10, because CB 11 crashes almost without fail when I try to exit the program now. I wind up having to respond to about 6 or 7 crash messages before the job ends. I don't have this problem with CB 10. If I didn't have CB 10, I could live with the program crashing like this, since it mainly happens when exiting the program. It just takes an extra minute or so to respond to the crash messages when I do exit the program.
I don't believe there is any significant competition for this product. The closest competing product would be Chess Assistant, but the Chessbase program has some significant advantages over it. With Chess Assistant each board has to be opened within the environment window. With Chessbase each board can be opened outside the environment window. This makes for better utilization of desktop space if you have several chess games opened at once. Chess Assistant has many features not related to researching and analyzing games and, perhaps because of this, seemed more difficult to use too me. Chess Assistant has probably improved somewhat since I last used it. The last version I used was Chess Assistant 7 and they are up to version 10 or 11 now. There's also a couple of free chess database products called SCID and Chessdb. I tried SCID when it first came out many years ago, and it had some serious issues back then. Databases were severely limited in size, for example. I'm sure it's improved over the years, but I can't say much about it now as I haven't tried the newer versions of this program. Chessdb has been developed from the same source code as SCID, with enhancements added. I haven't tried using Chessdb, so can't say much one way or the other about it either.
If you are interested in researching chess games and openings, the Chessbase product is almost a necessity. If you already have version 8 or better of the chessbase product, I'm not convinced it's worth the money to upgrade to this newest version. I've spent the money upgrading to each version as they came out anyway. If I knew what I know now, upgrading from version 8 to 10 would have been the only step I'd have taken, mainly because of windows 7 compatibility and better compatibility with the newer chess engines.
Edit: Jan 5, 2011 - I recently updated to service pack 2 of CB 11 and the program no longer crashes on exit. So, I'm back to using CB 11 instead of CB 10.
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