Programs listed here can read and write Shogi records available through various internet sources (Kif, KIFU, KI2, CSA, PSN etc.,)

You can also create your own board situation and output board graphics to share your games with others.

All of them come bundled with a Shogi engine or two.

In recent years, most shogi playing applications are made up of two parts. Namely, "GUI part" and "Engine part."

This makes it easy for a backend (Engine) developer to focus on developing engine part only while a frontend (GUI) developer can polish up the user experience.

This also means, although each GUI part comes with a select Shogi Engine(s), you can pick any other engine and pair with your choice of GUI program. This is made possible with a standardized communication protocol called USI.

There are Four notable Shogi GUI programs. There may be more, but those are the ones you can quickly find on the Internet.

ShogiDokoro menu system will default to English in a Non-Japanese system.

ShogiGUI language settings can be changed from a Tools menu and then by restarting the program.

BCM games default to system settings for its language.

ShogiHome currently supports Japanese, English, Chines and Vietnamese

ShogiHome is a *new Kid on the block*. You can download an executable file from their website

The GUI is written on an Electron framework and is open source. Source code is available on their GitHub repository

It comes with beginners level shogi engines built in. It also has a nice interface to manage additional Shogi Engines.

Since it is Electron, you can install it on Windows, Mac or Linux.

It also supports a touch display interface.

Currently, this is my recommended Shogi GUI among the four programs listed.

Shogi Engines

Links to Various Shogi Engines is available at Shogidokoro site

There are additional resources in ShogiHome wiki's  links page . These are Japanese pages, so keep one of the translation extensions of your browser handy.

There are many engines listed on the page, ShogiHome's references also list engines that are behind the paywall.

For beginners to play against, Shogidokoro's LesserKai or ShogiHome's built-in engines give you a gentle introduction to Shogi.
Once you are comfortable with it, you can replace the engine with stronger engines, such as Bonanza.

Bonanza is a standalone program, and its GUI is rather primitive.

Bonadapter middleware makes Bonanza USI compatible. All you need is to add Bonadapater in the Bonanza folder and select Bonadapter from GUI's engine manager. Once setup, set Bonanza's strength to the weakest by adjusting its evaluation depth to 1.  Work it up to more challenging settings as you progress.

For BCM games, a bundled engine is Spear. The strength level is set to 10 (the strongest), and this is too strong for someone who just started playing. You can adjust the level by opening the engines_0 configuration file (which is for Engine 1) and finding the "SpearLevel Value 10" line for an [Engines: Spear2008v1.4(included)] section. Change the value of 10 to the lesser value of your choice. Now the game will be more reasonable when you start a game against Spear from Engine 1.

You can use Spear in other GUIs.  Download the "spear for Shogidokoro" zip file. Despite the name, this file works for all programs. Extract all files to a new folder.  In ShogiHome, for example, all you need to do is to go to engine management, select the Add button and point to the executable file. The level settings become much easier through its engine management dialog.  The next time you hit the play button, the engine should be listed in the selection box.

Yaneuraou

If you are looking for  a free and "Most formidable" engine as of 2025, It is  either Suishou5(水匠5) or Hao, but  these are only half of the engine ("eval" binary). For another half of the engine ("search" executable), you need to download Yaneuraou. I know it's confusing, so we added another page to explain the detail of this setup. Please see the link below. (or you can take a look at Yaneuraou's installation instruction page and solicit AI translation to forge ahead)

Installing Yaneuraou engine

If your PC is a top of the line (powerful CPU and powerful graphics card), then consider Deep Learning Shogi (DLShogi)   The latest dlshogi version isn't publicly available and can only be used through 棋神アナリティクス (Kishin Analytics) which is a service of Shogiwars app.  Public version (2022 seems the latest) is in their GitHub release page.    According to the release note, it uses TensorRT. This suggests you will need Graphics card with Nvidia GPU. Cards  with other manufacturers GPU might work but performance is most likely be worse. Because of this limited applicability, we mention the availability but will not  cover dl type engines on this site. (including dl version of aforementioned Yaneuraou called FukauraOu)