Solitaire is the most played card game in the world, and almost every version of it online is free.
That is exactly the problem. Search for a table and you get a wall of near identical sites, half of them wrapping a single Klondike board in video ads, the rest asking for an account before you can finish a deal.
The sites below are the ones worth bookmarking. They were compared on the things that decide whether you keep playing: how many variants are on offer, whether the deals are winnable, how honest the site is about win rates, what it costs you in ads and sign-ups, and whether it behaves on a phone. Every one of them is genuinely free to play in a browser with no download.
| Site | Games | Sign-Up | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| PlaySolitaire.io | 20 games across 5 families | None | Players who want measured win rates and a clean table |
| Solitaired | 100+ variants | Optional | Working through a very large variant library |
| Solitaire Bliss | 30+ variants | Optional | Daily challenges and personal records |
| World of Solitaire | 100+ variants | Optional | Obscure variants and deck customisation |
| Green Felt | Around 20 games and puzzles | Optional | Keyboard players and long time regulars |
| CardGames.io | Solitaire plus a full card room | None | Switching between solitaire and other card games |
| Solitaire.io | 14+ variants | None | Playing without disruptive video ads |
| Solitr.com | Klondike, Spider and a few extras | None | The fastest possible single game of Klondike |
| Online-Solitaire.com | Hundreds of deals, plus downloads | None | Playing offline or embedding a board on your own site |
| 247 Solitaire | Klondike plus a network of sister sites | None | Instant play with zero setup |
PlaySolitaire is the rare solitaire site that treats the numbers as content rather than decoration. Every game in its catalogue carries a stated win rate, and it separates two figures most sites blur together: what solvers prove is theoretically winnable, and what real players here actually finish. Draw 1 Klondike shows a 31% player win rate against a solver ceiling of roughly 79 to 82%. Spider one suit sits at 60.1%, FreeCell at 11.1%, Scorpion at 12.8% winnable. Whether you find that humbling or motivating, it is honest in a way the category usually is not.
The catalogue runs to twenty tables grouped into classics, the Spider family, quick games, open and skill games, and hard challenges, which is where the deep cuts live: Scorpion, Wasp, Eight Off, Yukon, Russian, Alaska, Forty Thieves, Crescent and Canfield. The daily challenge deals a new board at midnight UTC and every one is winnable, so a lost streak is a you problem, not a shuffle problem.
Practically, it does the basics right. No download, no account, full screen on any device, hints, unlimited undo and autosave per game, so Draw 1 and Draw 3 keep separate saved boards. There is a two minute video walkthrough on the homepage, a written beginner guide with live practice boards, a strategy guide and a glossary, plus versions in more than ten languages. It is published by NM Media with a named editorial team behind the guides, which is more provenance than most free game sites bother with.
Solitaired is the site to open when you want breadth. It offers over 100 games, covering Klondike Turn 1 and Turn 3, FreeCell, Spider and a long tail of variants, all playable free on phone, desktop or in full screen with no cap on how many games you start.
The presentation is plain and the boards are large, which matters more than it sounds when you are dragging cards on a phone. Alongside the games it publishes rules and strategy explainers for the individual variants, so it doubles as a reference when you meet a layout you have not played before. If your habit is to work through a list rather than replay one board, this is the deepest catalogue on the list next to World of Solitaire.
Solitaire Bliss runs more than 30 games including Klondike, FreeCell and Spider, with no download and no registration needed to start. What sets it apart is the record keeping: it tracks scores and personal bests, and posts daily challenges that give you a reason to come back to the same board rather than shuffling endlessly.
The site also carries clear written rules for the classic game, terminology and setup included, which makes it a reasonable place to send someone who has never dealt a tableau. Accounts are optional, but creating one is what keeps your stats across devices, so decide early whether you care about that.
World of Solitaire has been running since 2007 and remains one of the largest single collections anywhere: over 100 games including Spider, Klondike, FreeCell, Pyramid, Yukon and Seahaven Towers. It is entirely free, with undo support, multiple deck designs, custom backgrounds and stats, built in HTML5 and JavaScript so it works on tablets without any plugin nonsense.
It is also a one person operation, which cuts both ways. The variant coverage is unmatched and the site has no interest in upselling you, but logins, stats and challenges have gone down for maintenance at times, and there is a separate legacy edition still online for people who prefer the older interface. If your priority is finding a variant nobody else hosts, start here.
Green Felt is the connoisseur pick. The game list covers Klondike one and three turn, FreeCell, Spider, Pyramid, Forty Thieves, Seahaven Towers, Addiction and a set of puzzle games, all in the browser with nothing to install.
Its real advantage is the interaction model. Super moves let you click or drag a buried card and the site works out the sequence of moves needed to free it, undoing cleanly if the move is not legal. Keyboard shortcuts highlight cards by rank, suit or colour, so an experienced player can clear a board far faster here than on a drag only site. There is a forum and a blog with actual humans on them, which is why the same regulars have been playing here for years.
CardGames.io built its Klondike as one game among many, and that context is the point. The solitaire board is clean, counts your moves, times your game and gives unlimited undos, so you can compete against your own previous best without any scoring system getting in the way. There is deliberately no Windows style scoring, a choice the developers explain openly on the page.
The reason to bookmark it is everything around the board: hearts, spades, gin rummy, crazy eights and the rest of the catalogue sit one click away. If your evening drifts from solitaire to something with more going on, you do not have to leave the site.
Solitaire.io is explicit about the two things that ruin free solitaire, and it avoids both: everything is 100% free with no premium tier or paywall, and it runs no disruptive video ads. Nothing installs, nothing needs registering, and the whole thing runs in a normal browser tab.
The catalogue is smaller than the giants at 14 or so games, but it is well chosen: Klondike, Golf, Pyramid, TriPeaks, Memory, Sum of 10, plus double deck versions of Golf and Pyramid for people who want a longer sitting. Every game is built for smooth play on desktop, tablet and phone. If the deep variant lists feel like clutter, this is the tidier alternative.
Solitr has been serving the same fast, uncluttered Klondike board since November 2011, and its refusal to grow into a portal is exactly why people keep it in their bookmarks bar. No download, no registration, no account prompt: the page loads and the cards are dealt.
It uses a vector rendering of Grimaud’s nineteenth century Paris pattern deck, which looks noticeably better than the generic card art most free sites ship with. Spider, Mahjong and Sudoku sit alongside the main game for variety. The site is now operated by a UK company rather than its original solo creator, but the product has stayed mercifully unchanged.
Online-Solitaire covers a case the others do not: playing when you are offline. Alongside the full screen browser game with no signup, it offers free downloadable builds for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android, plus Kindle and Chrome versions. There is no iOS app, but the web version runs fine on an iPhone or iPad.
In the browser you get hundreds of deals, a daily challenge, guaranteed winnable deals, hints, undo, seven card designs and adjustable backgrounds, with traditional Windows style scoring for anyone chasing the old numbers. It also publishes an ad free, cookie free HTML embed of its board, which makes it the obvious choice if you want a playable solitaire widget on your own site without dragging a GDPR banner along with it.
247 Solitaire is the definition of low friction. Click play and the deal is done: 100% free, fully online, no download and no login. The board carries a timer, your best time, a new game button, an undo, and settings for autoplay, sound and statistics.
It belongs to the wider 247 Games family, so dedicated sister sites handle Spider, Klondike, FreeCell and more, with seasonal editions appearing through the year. The network runs on advertising and it shows, so expect a busier page than Solitr or Solitaire.io. Worth noting for anyone who worries about where free card games shade into gambling: 247 states plainly that all its games use play money and pay out nothing.
Two complaints come up more than any others with free solitaire. The first is full screen video ads dropped between deals, which turn a two minute game into a five minute one. The second is a site that lets you start a board and then pushes an app install before you can finish it. Every site on this list plays in a browser with nothing to install, but they differ sharply on how much advertising you have to sit through.
If free solitaire without ads is the whole requirement, start with Solitaire.io, which states an explicit policy against disruptive video advertising, and Solitr.com, which has stayed a single uncluttered Klondike board since 2011. PlaySolitaire.io and Green Felt both keep advertising to static placements around the table rather than interrupting play. At the other end, the 247 network runs on advertising revenue and the page density reflects it.
On no download specifically, the distinction worth understanding is that a browser game and an app are different products with different economics. Browser solitaire is generally funded by display ads and stays free. App store solitaire is frequently funded by video ads, timed lives or in-app purchases, which is why the ad free experience is so much easier to find on the web than in an app store. Spider solitaire and FreeCell in particular run perfectly well in a browser, so there is rarely a reason to install anything.
If a child is the one playing, the ad load matters for a second reason: free game sites serve programmatic advertising that is not always age appropriate. Our guides to the best parental control apps for Android and how to set up parental controls cover the filtering side of that.
No. This is the single most common misconception about the game, and it matters when you are picking a site, because some sites deal only boards that can be won and others deal at random without telling you which you are getting.
For Draw 1 Klondike, the figure most often cited is that roughly 79 to 82% of random deals are solvable with perfect information, meaning a player who could see every face down card and never made a mistake would win about four boards in five. Around one deal in five is lost before anyone touches it. Draw 3 is meaningfully harder again, because the restricted access to the stock takes winnable positions off the table. What percentage of solitaire games are winnable in practice is a different and much lower number: real players cannot see the face down cards, so measured human win rates on Draw 1 land closer to 30%, which is roughly what PlaySolitaire reports from its own players.
Other variants sit in very different places. FreeCell is the famous outlier, because every card is visible from the start and almost every deal is solvable. Of the original 32,000 numbered Microsoft FreeCell deals, exactly one, deal 11982, is known to be unsolvable. Spider at one suit is forgiving, Spider at four suits is brutal, and layouts like Scorpion and Forty Thieves are hard by design.
This is why the winnable question should influence which site you use. If you want your results to be a clean measure of your own play, choose a site that either guarantees winnable deals, as PlaySolitaire does on its daily challenge and Online-Solitaire does on its deals, or publishes its real player win rates so you know what you are being measured against. A site that deals at random and says nothing is not doing anything wrong, but it does mean a losing streak tells you very little.
Most sites that keep score copy one of the two systems Microsoft popularised, and knowing which one you are looking at is the difference between a score that means something and a number on a screen.
Standard scoring rewards progress. You earn points for moving a card to a foundation, for bringing a card up from the waste pile, and for turning over a face down tableau card, and you lose points for pulling a card back off a foundation or for recycling the waste pile repeatedly. A completed game under standard scoring generally lands somewhere above a thousand points once the timed bonus is added, so that is a reasonable line for what a good solitaire score looks like.
Vegas scoring treats the deal as a wager. You pay a notional stake for the deck and earn a fixed amount for each card you get to a foundation, which means most games end negative and a positive result is a genuinely good outcome. It is the harsher and more honest of the two systems, and it is the one to use if you want the numbers to reflect skill rather than persistence.
Timed play sits on top of either system, adding a bonus that decays the longer you take. CardGames.io deliberately skips scoring altogether and tracks moves and time instead, which some players prefer because it removes the temptation to farm points with pointless foundation shuffling.
A hundred game catalogue sounds better than a fourteen game one, but most people play two or three layouts forever. If Klondike and Spider are your whole world, a smaller site with a better board will serve you better than an encyclopaedia. Go for breadth only if you actually intend to learn Yukon, Canfield or Forty Thieves.
Every site on this list lets you play without an account. The difference is what you lose by staying anonymous. Sites that track stats, streaks and leaderboards generally need a login to carry your record across devices, while sites that save to the browser lose everything when you clear your cache or switch phones. Decide whether your win rate matters to you before you invest fifty games in it.
Free means advertising, but the formats vary enormously. Banner ads around a board are tolerable. Full screen video ads between deals are the reason people stop playing. Ad supported networks tend toward the heavier end; independent sites and those that state an anti video ad policy tend toward the lighter end. Play three or four games before you commit a bookmark.
Roughly 79 to 82% of Draw 1 Klondike deals are solvable with perfect information, which means a fifth of random boards were lost before you touched them. Some sites deal only verified winnable boards, some deal at random, and most say nothing either way. If you want a clean measure of your own skill, choose a site that either guarantees winnable deals or publishes its actual player win rates, so you know which side of the coin you are looking at.
Most solitaire is played on a phone now, and the older sites were not designed for it. Look for large cards, tap to move as well as drag, a layout that fills the screen properly, and autosave so an interrupted game survives a phone call. A site that looks fine on a desktop can be unplayable on a small screen, so test on the device you actually use.
Solitaire exercises short term memory, planning and sequencing, and it has the useful property of being absorbing without being stressful, which is why it is a common recommendation for a mental break rather than a mental workout. What it is not is a proven treatment for cognitive decline. The research on brain training games generally finds that people get better at the game they practise, with limited transfer to unrelated tasks. Play it because it is calming and mildly demanding, not because a site promises it will sharpen your mind.
Genuinely ad free apps are rare, because an app with no advertising and no purchases has no revenue. The practical answer for most people is to skip the app store and play in a mobile browser, where sites like Solitaire.io, Solitr and PlaySolitaire.io run full screen with no install and far lighter advertising. If you specifically need an installed app for offline play, Online-Solitaire publishes free downloadable builds for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.
No. Every site on this list runs in a standard browser with no plugin, no install and, in most cases, no account. That holds for Spider solitaire and FreeCell as well as Klondike. A site that requires a download before you can play a single hand is asking for something it does not need.
Google has never published a guarantee that the solitaire game built into its search results deals only solvable boards, and in practice it behaves like a random deal, which means some games cannot be won no matter how well you play. If a guaranteed winnable board matters to you, use a site that states the guarantee explicitly rather than assuming it.
Yes, on all ten sites here. Several offer optional accounts, and the only thing an account buys you is stats and streaks that follow you between devices. If you never play on more than one device, you lose nothing by staying signed out.
There is no single best free solitaire site, only the one that matches how you play. PlaySolitaire.io leads this list because it pairs a well made, sign up free table with published win rates and a genuinely varied twenty game catalogue, which covers both the casual player and the one who wants to know whether the board was ever winnable. Solitaired and World of Solitaire win on sheer variant count, Green Felt on interaction speed, Solitaire.io and Solitr on quiet, and Online-Solitaire on offline and embeddable play. All ten are free, all ten run in a browser, and none of them need a download, so the only real cost of trying a few is the time it takes to lose a couple of deals.
Bookmark this guide to make a well-informed decision. If you want to add your company to this list, drop us a line or submit a form in the Top Choices section. After a thorough review, we’ll decide whether it’s an appropriate addition.