Stockfish 18 is Now Live on Chessify Cloud
2026-02-12
We’ve added Stockfish 18 to Chessify Cloud. This major release delivers both a clear strength increase and important improvements for modern cloud environments.
Compared to Stockfish 17, the new version achieves an Elo gain of up to 46 points, winning roughly four times more game pairs than it loses. The improvements are consistent across different types of positions, including Fischer Random Chess.
The Highlights of Stockfish 18
Optimized for cloud analysis
One of the key highlights of Stockfish 18 is the introduction of "Shared Memory." This allows the engine to operate more efficiently in cloud setups by reducing memory overhead when running multiple engine processes. Combined with further hardware-level optimizations and improved thread handling, Stockfish 18 is the most cloud-efficient version of the engine to date.
Next-generation evaluation
With the introduction of the SFNNv10 neural network architecture, Stockfish’s evaluation has taken another step forward. The network’s input layer has been enhanced with Threat Inputs, enabling the engine to recognize threatened pieces more naturally, and consequently, give more accurate evaluations.
Search improvements and better fortress detection
Under the hood, the search has been heavily refined. A new mechanism called Correction History allows the engine to dynamically adjust evaluations during the search itself. This leads to noticeably better handling of fortresses, stalemates, and rare edge cases such as complex threefold repetition scenarios.
Refactored Training Workflow
On the training side, Stockfish’s neural network workflow has been fully refactored into an automated and reproducible system, enabling training on over 100 billion positions derived from Lc0 evaluations.
Analyze with Stockfish 18 on Chessify
You can start analyzing with Stockfish 18 right away on the Chessify Analysis page. No login is required to use it at the free cloud speed. When logged in, you unlock additional features such as unlimited analysis, evaluation bar, best-move arrows, etc.
All engines on Chessify are automatically updated to their latest versions, so Stockfish 18 is available without any setup or downloads. You'll have different speed options for Stockfish depending on your subscription plan and coin balance.
Subscription-based (unlimited) servers
• 1 MN/s — Free
• 10 MN/s — Amateur plan
• 25–100 MN/s — Master & GM plans
Coin-based (dedicated-speed) servers
• 130 MN/s — 10 coins / minute
• 300 MN/s — 20 coins / minute
• 700 MN/s — 60 coins / minute
• 1000 MN/s — 80 coins / minute
Server names indicate approximate nodes per second (NPS). Actual performance may vary depending on the position and engine version.
Newer Stockfish versions, including Stockfish 18, use larger neural networks and more advanced evaluation. While this can result in lower raw NPS compared to older versions, it produces stronger and more reliable analysis. The previous two version of Stockfish (17 and 17.1) will also be available on Chessify for more flexibility.
