Poki and CrazyGames now run the two biggest portals for free games online, and the gap between them is smaller than most players assume. Poki describes itself as a web-gaming platform with more than 100 million monthly active users. CrazyGames told the trade press in October 2026 that it has more than 60 million monthly users and 3 billion gameplays in 2026, and it used the same announcement to unveil a full rebrand built around a mascot called Ziggy.
itch.io plays a different game. It is an open marketplace for independent creators that hosts browser titles next to downloads, tools, books and soundtracks. That makes it a rival to Poki and CrazyGames for developers and curious players, but not for the five-minute casual session. This comparison puts all three side by side as of 8 November 2026, using only figures we could confirm on the platforms’ own pages and in recent trade coverage.
All three cost nothing to start, which matters in Ireland, where recurring bills from subscription services such as Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus add up fast. If you want to play something on a school laptop, a work machine or an old phone without installing anything, a browser portal is the quickest route. Below we cover audience size, catalogue, performance testing, pricing, privacy, real 2026 examples, a migration guide for developers, pros and cons, and a verdict.
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Free Games Online: The Short Answer
Pick Poki if you want the biggest reported audience and a tightly curated catalogue. Pick CrazyGames if you want a browser portal with a companion app on iOS and Android and a fresh rebrand that signals heavy investment. Pick itch.io if you want experimental, offbeat and paid indie games, or if you plan to sell your own work. That is the whole decision in three sentences, and the rest of this piece shows the evidence behind each line.
Here is the quick scorecard before we dig in:
- Largest reported audience: Poki, at 100 million monthly active users against more than 60 million for CrazyGames. itch.io has no confirmed figure.
- Best for casual instant play: Poki and CrazyGames, both free and ad-supported.
- Best for indie discovery and paid games: itch.io, which supports free, paid and pay-what-you-want listings.
- Best for mobile app users: CrazyGames, which lists a CrazyGames App for iOS and Android.
- Best for developers who want reach fast: Poki or CrazyGames. Best for developers who want control: itch.io.
One caveat runs through the whole article. Monthly active user counts come from the platforms themselves, and each company defines an active user in its own way. Treat the 100 million and 60 million figures as marketing-grade benchmarks rather than audited traffic. We flag every number that rests on a single company’s claim.
How Poki, CrazyGames and itch.io Actually Work
The three services look similar from the outside because all of them let you click a thumbnail and play. Underneath, they run on three different business models, and those models shape everything from which games you see to how developers get paid.
Poki: the curated portal
Poki’s own site says a 65-person team in Amsterdam has built the service since 2014 with one goal: make playing games online as easy and fast as possible. A recent report in The Game Business newsletter put the catalogue at roughly 1,500 to 1,900 games at any one time, which suggests Poki prunes hard. The company’s rise from a niche portal to a platform above 100 million monthly users is now a trade-press story in its own right.
Poki is also an EU-based company, which matters for readers in Ireland who care about where their data goes. Developers reach the catalogue through Poki for Developers and a documentation site titled Working with Poki. A catalogue that small implies a gatekeeper, so expect a review step rather than an open upload button.
CrazyGames: the engagement-ranked portal
CrazyGames describes itself as a free browser gaming platform founded in 2014 by Raf Mertens. Its developer portal invites teams to publish Unity and HTML5 games and earn revenue. Its game pages list the supported platforms in plain text: browser on desktop, mobile and tablet, plus the CrazyGames App on iOS and Android for many titles. One recent listing names Unity 6 as the engine, which shows the portal accepts more than basic HTML5 builds.
On 14 October 2026 the company announced a rebrand with the agency DixonBaxi and introduced Ziggy as its new mascot. The announcement is a rebrand, not a rename, a sale or a shutdown. For players the practical effect is a new look. For developers it signals that CrazyGames plans to keep spending to win the web game rush its press release describes.
itch.io: the open marketplace
itch.io is an independent marketplace where anyone can upload a game for free. Creators choose whether to charge, give the game away or ask players to pay what they want. Browser-playable HTML5 games sit beside downloadable builds, tools and other creator content, and the platform also ships a desktop itch app and a build-publishing tool called butler. The newest confirmed app release, v26.22.0 on 6 October 2026, added Collections and Steam shortcut support through Proton on Linux.
Because itch.io lets almost anyone publish, its catalogue is wide, strange and uneven. That is its strength and its weakness. You will find experimental one-person projects there that no curated portal would approve, and you will also wade through unfinished work.
Specs and Features Compared Side by Side
The table below collects every comparable fact we could confirm. Where a platform has not published a number or we could not verify one, the cell says so rather than guessing.
| Feature | Poki | CrazyGames | itch.io |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core model | Curated browser portal | Browser portal with companion app | Open indie marketplace |
| Player price | Free, ad-supported | Free, ad-supported | Free, paid or pay what you want |
| Reported audience | 100M monthly active users (May 2026) | More than 60M monthly users (Oct 2026) | No figure confirmed |
| Catalogue size | About 1,500 to 1,900 games at a time | No official count confirmed | No official count confirmed |
| Gameplays reported | Not confirmed | 3 billion in 2026 | Not confirmed |
| Engines on the platform | HTML5 | HTML5 and Unity 6 | HTML5 plus downloadable builds |
| Native app | None confirmed | CrazyGames App (iOS, Android) | itch app v26.22.0 (desktop) |
| Developer entry | Poki for Developers | Developer Portal | Free uploads, open to all |
| Based in / founded by | Amsterdam, 65-person team | Founded by Raf Mertens | Run by itch corp |
| Operating since | 2014 | 2014 | Not confirmed here |
| Latest notable change | Not listed | Rebrand with Ziggy (14 Oct 2026) | itch app v26.22.0 (6 Oct 2026) |
| Seasonal sales | Not applicable | Not applicable | Summer Sale and Halloween Sale 2026 |
| Steam and Linux tie-in | None confirmed | None confirmed | Steam shortcuts with Proton support |
| Best fit | Casual, curated play | Casual play on web and phone | Indie discovery and selling |
Two patterns jump out. First, Poki and CrazyGames match each other almost row for row on the player side, so the real differences hide in audience scale, apps and developer terms. Second, itch.io fills nearly every empty cell the other two leave, because it behaves like a store with a library client rather than a single website.
We left out one tempting row on purpose. Reports suggest Poki’s preferred developer deal is web-exclusive with a default five-year term, but that claim rests on secondary sources rather than an official Poki page, so we treat it as an unconfirmed report. Developers should read the signed agreement, not a forum summary.
Audience Benchmarks From Four Sources
Hard performance benchmarks for browser portals do not exist in public form. No independent lab publishes frame-time or load-time scores for Poki, CrazyGames and itch.io under identical conditions, and we refuse to invent them. What we can benchmark is audience scale, using separate sources that were live and dated in 2026.
| Source | Platform | Metric reported | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poki announcement | Poki | 100 million monthly active users | Not listed |
| The Game Business | Poki | More than 100 million monthly active users, about 1,500 to 1,900 games at a time | Not listed |
| Games Press (CrazyGames release) | CrazyGames | More than 60 million monthly active users, 3 billion gameplays in 2026 | 14 Oct 2026 |
| CrazyGames site | CrazyGames | Over 60 million monthly users | Checked 8 Nov 2026 |
| Poki State of Web Gaming study | Web gaming overall | 2,000 players and 400 developers surveyed in the US and UK | 25 Jun 2026 |
Poki’s reported number is larger than CrazyGames’ number on paper (100 million against 60 million). That comparison flatters Poki because more than 60 million is a floor, not an exact count. The honest reading is that both platforms sit in the same league, with Poki reporting the larger audience and CrazyGames reporting the stronger momentum through its rebrand and app.
The Poki study adds context on why the audience keeps growing. Of the respondents, 71 percent said the time they spend on web games relative to social media is either stable (43 percent) or rising (28 percent). That is a self-reported figure from a platform that sells web gaming, so weigh it accordingly. It also covers only the United States and the United Kingdom, not Ireland, though the UK is the closest large English-language market to Irish habits. Still, it matches what both portals say about demand.
itch.io publishes no equivalent headline figure that we could confirm. That does not mean its audience is small. It means the platform sells itself on creators and catalogue breadth rather than on a monthly-user boast, and any claim about its traffic would be a guess.
Catalogue and Discovery: Who Picks What You Play
Discovery works differently on each service, and it changes the kind of game you end up playing. On a curated portal the staff and the engagement data decide what rises. On an open marketplace, the creator’s own promotion, tags and sales decide.
Poki trims its catalogue to around 1,500 to 1,900 titles at a time, so the front page rarely feels cluttered. The trade-off is that fewer games means fewer niches. If you want a deep strategy sim or a visual novel, you will usually look elsewhere.
CrazyGames leans on player behaviour. Its release pages carry visible like and dislike counts, and several of its late-2026 titles show hundreds of likes. Recent additions include Smash and Heirs, Streamer Rise, Glow Up Gym, Rising Star, Crust Crusher and Doorman Story, all listed as released in October or November 2026. Frequent updates tell you the portal rotates content constantly.
What the CrazyGames founder says about ranking
Founder Raf Mertens explained the ranking philosophy in a Google for Publishers profile of CrazyGames. He summed up the editorial stance in one line: “We say that the players know best.” He then spelled out the mechanics: “The games we show on the homepage are driven by user engagement above anything else.”
Mertens, the founder of CrazyGames, also described the target audience in the same Google for Publishers profile: “We’ve always been focused on casual games that are super accessible.” On the free model he gave a direct business reason: “As such, a paywall would add friction and turn off users.”
Read together, those four statements describe a portal that ranks by engagement, serves casual players and refuses to charge them. For a developer, that means a game with strong first-minute retention can climb quickly, while a slow-starting masterpiece may never surface. For a player, it means the top shelf reflects what other people actually keep playing.
Titles you will find this week
Poki’s front page currently mixes long-running staples with seasonal pushes. Official page listings show names such as Subway Surfers, Drive Mad, Blockpost 2.0, Penalty Shooters, Slice Master, TNT Sandbox and 4th and Goal 2026. Recent additions include Match Rivals (26 October), Blob and Build (30 October), The Line (28 October), Rope Pals (15 October) and Anomaly Company (9 October), according to the pages we fetched. The mix leans toward sports, arcade and sandbox titles.
CrazyGames leans more toward simulators, idle games and puzzle fare. Its recent listings include Cryptograms, Beacon Bay, Honeyworks and Sports Store Supermarket Simulator. Mecha War, a battle royale built in HTML5, shows the portal also hosts competitive multiplayer. A game can play in the browser or inside the CrazyGames App, so you can start a session on a laptop and continue on a phone, as long as the game supports both.
itch.io’s front page is the opposite of a ranked shelf. It surfaces sales, free games, demos and creator-curated lists, and it even carries tycoon-style browser games such as a free ski resort tycoon announced in late October. If you want a surprise, itch.io delivers more of them. If you want a safe bet, the portals do.
Discovery tools on itch.io
itch.io gives players filters such as free games, games with a demo, top sellers and price caps, and it organises content around sales, jams and creator collections. Since July 2026 the app treats bundle pages as first-class library objects, and the October release added in-app collection editing and bulk collection management. If you enjoy curating your own shelf, itch.io rewards that habit far more than the other two do.
Performance and Load Times: Run Your Own Test
Because no public benchmark covers these three sites, the fairest advice is to measure them on your own connection. That matters more in Ireland than in a dense urban market. Rural broadband, mobile data caps and a shared household connection all change how a large browser game feels. A test that takes ten minutes will tell you more than any reviewer’s anecdote.
Run the same game genre on each platform and compare three things: how long the first playable frame takes, how much data the page downloads, and how many ad breaks interrupt the first five minutes. Here is a repeatable method:
- Open a private window in Chrome so extensions and cached files do not skew the result.
- Open DevTools, switch to the Network tab and tick the Disable cache box.
- Set throttling to the Fast 4G preset to mimic a mid-range mobile connection, then repeat once on your normal home connection.
- Load a puzzle or runner game on each platform and time the gap between clicking Play and the first input you can use.
- Read the transferred size at the bottom of the Network tab and write it down.
- Count the video or banner ads in the first five minutes of play.
- Repeat on your phone browser, then on the CrazyGames App if you use iOS or Android.
| Metric | How to measure it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first input | Stopwatch from Play click to usable controls | Shows how fast a portal feels on weak broadband |
| Data transferred | DevTools Network tab, bottom bar | Matters on capped mobile plans |
| Ad interruptions | Count breaks in five minutes | Shows how hard the free model pushes |
| Frame stability | DevTools Performance panel, one minute of play | Reveals weak laptops and Chromebooks |
| Offline behaviour | Switch the network off after load | Shows whether the game needs a live connection |
Expect results to vary by game more than by platform. A heavy Unity 6 title on CrazyGames will load slower than a tiny HTML5 puzzle on Poki, and the reverse holds just as well. Compare like with like, and treat any single run as one data point rather than a verdict.
Hardware changes the picture as well. A modern laptop shrugs off most HTML5 games, but an old Chromebook or a budget phone struggles with 3D titles and long ad scripts. If you share a family device, run the frame stability check on the weakest machine in the house and pick the platform that holds up there.
Pricing and Developer Revenue
For players, the price comparison is short. Poki and CrazyGames charge nothing and earn money from advertising. itch.io lets each creator pick a price, so a game can cost nothing, a few euro or whatever you choose to pay. No paid consumer subscription exists on any of the three that we could confirm.
| Cost item | Poki | CrazyGames | itch.io |
|---|---|---|---|
| Player access | €0, ad-supported | €0, ad-supported | €0 for free games, creator-set price otherwise |
| Player subscription | None confirmed | None confirmed | None confirmed |
| Developer upload fee | No paid tier confirmed | No public fee schedule confirmed | Free to upload |
| Developer revenue model | Revenue share on traffic | Earn revenue from published games | Sales, pay what you want, donations |
| Indicative split | 50/50 on Poki-driven traffic, 100% on developer-driven traffic | Not confirmed publicly | Creator Day waives the platform fee for 24 hours |
Poki’s developer documentation describes traffic that Poki or its marketing brings as split roughly 50/50, while traffic a developer brings can earn 100 percent of revenue. The same source stresses that these terms are indicative and that the signed agreement controls. Treat the split as a starting point for negotiation, not a contract.
itch.io works differently. Uploads are free, sales use creator-chosen prices, and the platform has run Creator Day events when it waives its fee on all sales for 24 hours, leaving creators with 100 percent after taxes and payment processor charges. A community thread dated 25 October 2026 mentions creator commissions of 25 to 40 percent for streamers, but that is a private arrangement between individuals, not an itch.io fee schedule.
If you want free full-length PC games rather than browser games, the store giveaways are a separate world. Our breakdown of Epic, Prime Gaming, GOG and Steam free games shows how those schemes compare, and they pair well with a browser portal for quick sessions.
What the audience gap means for developers
Audience size drives ad revenue, so a developer weighing Poki against CrazyGames should look past the 100 million versus 60 million headline. A bigger portal sends more players, but it also lists more competing games and, if the reported default holds, may ask for web exclusivity. A smaller portal with a hungrier ranking system can lift a new game faster.
The practical advice is to run a small test. Submit one polished game to both portals, track retention in the first week and let the numbers decide where your next three games go. A game that holds players past the first minute will win a place on either portal.
itch.io suits a different strategy. It rewards developers who build a following, run sales and use bundles, and it keeps the creator in charge of price. Many developers use it as a portfolio and paid-build shop alongside a portal listing, and that hybrid approach protects you if any single platform changes its terms.
Ads, Privacy, Devices and the Irish Angle
Free means advertising, and advertising means trackers, consent banners and the odd video break. Both Poki and CrazyGames fund their catalogues this way, which is exactly why Mertens argues a paywall would turn users off. On itch.io, ads are far less central because the money comes from direct sales and donations, so a typical itch.io game page feels quieter.
For Irish players, three practical points follow. First, check the cookie and consent settings the first time you visit each site, because EU rules give you the right to refuse non-essential tracking. Second, Poki’s Amsterdam base puts it inside the EU, which some readers find reassuring. Third, supervise younger children, since ad-supported portals show content you do not control, and itch.io hosts adult material alongside family-friendly games.
On the last point, itch.io’s own blog records that in July 2025 it deindexed adult NSFW content from its browse and search pages. Adult projects still exist on the site, and a No AI filter reportedly arrived in November 2026. If you manage a device for a child, create a restricted profile and test the filters before handing over the laptop.
Devices matter too. Browser games run on almost anything with a modern browser, including school Chromebooks and old laptops. However, many schools and workplaces block gaming domains, so a portal that works at home may fail on a managed network. Test before you plan a lunch-break session around it.
On phones, CrazyGames has the clearest answer. Its game pages list the CrazyGames App for iOS and Android as a play option, and some titles also appear in the app stores. Poki supports phones and tablets in the browser for many games, while itch.io is mostly a desktop and laptop experience, apart from the browser games that scale down to mobile screens.
Seven Real-World Examples From 2026
Specs only tell half the story. These seven 2026 cases show how each platform behaves when real games and real events hit it.
2. World Cup football games on Poki. Soccer Skills 2 World Cup arrived in April 2026 and A Small World Cup 2 followed in June 2026. Poki clearly times football releases around the tournament, a classic example of a curated portal chasing a seasonal search spike.
5. The CrazyGames rebrand (14 October 2026). With DixonBaxi as the agency and Ziggy as the mascot, CrazyGames used its 60 million monthly users and 3 billion gameplays as the headline numbers. The announcement frames the company as a leader in the web game rush and confirms it is investing, not retreating.
6. A fast November release cycle on CrazyGames. Smash and Heirs landed in November 2026. Streamer Rise carries an update dated 3 November, and Glow Up Gym and Rising Star both updated in the first days of the month. Four titles released or refreshed in early November show how quickly the portal turns content around.
7. The itch.io Halloween Sale 2026. It started on 25 October at 10:00 am Pacific Time and ran until 4 November at 10:00 am. Creators across the site discounted work at once, which is the itch.io equivalent of a portal’s front-page rotation. The sale has now ended, and itch.io had not confirmed a winter sale date in the sources we checked.
AI Content, Moderation and Trust on itch.io
Open platforms invite spam, and 2026 has tested itch.io on that front. According to PC Gamer’s report on the clean-up, the team deleted a couple of terabytes of AI-generated spam. Other coverage from early November 2026 says the platform also widened its mandatory generative-AI disclosures to tabletop games, books, comics and soundtracks, and added a No AI search filter.
We label these details as reported rather than confirmed, because they rest on news coverage of a 3 November announcement and we could not fetch the original post. The direction is still clear. itch.io is tightening moderation as generative tools flood storefronts everywhere, and it lets players opt out of AI content with a filter.
A separate community discussion dated 17 October 2026 floated ideas such as fees, deposits, identity checks or submission limits to cut low-effort uploads. That is a proposal from users, not an itch.io policy, and nothing in our sources shows the company adopting it.
Curated portals face the same pressure from the opposite side. Poki and CrazyGames filter at the door, so floods of low-grade submissions hit their review queues rather than their public pages. Anyone building with the help of a chatbot should note that generative tools speed up prototyping but do not lift a weak game over a portal’s quality bar. Our guide to free and paid AI chatbot plans shows what each tier gives you if you want to prototype faster.
Seven Use-Case Recommendations
1. A five-minute break at work or college. Choose Poki or CrazyGames. Both load in a browser tab with no install, which suits managed machines where you cannot add software. Poki’s tighter catalogue makes it faster to pick something, while CrazyGames’ like counts help you spot what other players enjoy.
2. Games for children. Start with Poki or CrazyGames, then sit with your child for the first session. Both focus on casual, accessible games, and CrazyGames’ founder says as much. Avoid unsupervised itch.io browsing for young children because the open catalogue includes adult material.
3. Playing on a phone. CrazyGames wins here thanks to its iOS and Android app. Poki also works in a mobile browser for many titles, so try both and keep whichever feels smoother on your handset and data plan.
4. Hunting for unusual indie games. Use itch.io. Its filters for free, demo and top-seller games, plus collections and jams, surface experimental work that curated portals skip. Budget a little time for sifting, and use the No AI filter if you want human-made projects only.
5. Steam Deck or Linux players. The itch app’s Steam shortcuts and Proton support, added in the v26.22.0 update, make itch.io the only one of the three that fits a handheld workflow. If you already run emulation front ends, our look at Switch Online, RetroArch and EmuDeck covers the same living-room-to-handheld setup.
6. A solo developer wanting maximum reach. Submit to Poki and CrazyGames first, because their audiences are far larger than a typical indie page, and keep an itch.io page as your portfolio and paid-build shop. Check the exclusivity clause in any Poki agreement before you sign.
7. A game jam team or student project. Use itch.io for hosting the jam entry, since uploads are free and the platform is built around jams. Then pitch the best entries to Poki or CrazyGames once the team has polished them.
Migration Guide: Moving a Browser Game Between Platforms
Developers often ask how to move a game from itch.io to Poki or CrazyGames, or the other way round. The work is smaller than it looks if you plan the build around a thin platform layer from day one. Follow these steps:
- Freeze a clean HTML5 build. Export a single folder with the entry file at the root and all assets in relative paths.
- Remove hard-coded absolute URLs. Portals serve your game from their own domains, so absolute links to your site will break.
- Wrap platform calls in one adapter file. Keep every SDK call for ads, save data and gameplay events in a single module so you can swap it per portal.
- Read each platform’s current documentation. Take the exact SDK calls from the Poki and CrazyGames developer docs, not from old blog posts.
- Test on a throttled connection. Use the DevTools method above and trim assets until the first input arrives quickly.
- Submit to the portal and wait for review. Expect a review step on the curated portals and plan for a delay.
- Upload the itch.io version last. Zip the build, upload it as an HTML5 project and tick the option to play it in the browser.
A typical itch.io HTML5 upload is a zip file with the entry page at the top level:
my-game.zip
index.html
game.js
assets/
sprites.png
music.oggThe adapter below shows the pattern. It stays platform-neutral on purpose, so you fill each method with the real SDK calls from the current docs:
const adapters = {
poki: {
async init() { /* Poki SDK init, per its docs */ },
gameplayStart() { /* Poki gameplay start */ },
gameplayStop() { /* Poki gameplay stop */ },
async showAd() { /* Poki ad break */ }
},
crazygames: {
async init() { /* CrazyGames SDK init, per its docs */ },
gameplayStart() { /* CrazyGames gameplay start */ },
gameplayStop() { /* CrazyGames gameplay stop */ },
async showAd() { /* CrazyGames ad call */ }
},
itch: {
async init() {},
gameplayStart() {},
gameplayStop() {},
async showAd() {}
}
}
const target = window.GAME_PLATFORM || "itch"
export const platform = adapters[target]Set GAME_PLATFORM in a small bootstrap script per build and the rest of your game code never needs to know where it runs. Treat save data with care. Portals handle storage differently, so test that a reload keeps progress on each one before you submit.
Players can migrate too. Browser saves usually live in local storage tied to one site, so progress on Poki will not follow you to CrazyGames. If you care about a long-running game, stay on one platform or look for an in-game export option.
Pros and Cons of Each Platform
Poki
- Pro: largest reported audience at 100 million monthly active users.
- Pro: curated catalogue of roughly 1,500 to 1,900 games keeps the front page clean.
- Pro: EU-based company that published its own 2026 State of Web Gaming study.
- Con: selective catalogue and, reportedly, a web-exclusive default deal.
- Con: no native app confirmed in our sources.
CrazyGames
- Pro: companion app on iOS and Android and support for both HTML5 and Unity titles.
- Pro: 3 billion gameplays reported in 2026 and a fast release cycle.
- Pro: engagement-based ranking gives strong games a fair route to the top.
- Con: smaller reported audience than Poki, and no public developer fee schedule that we could confirm.
- Con: engagement ranking can bury slow-burn games.
itch.io
- Pro: free uploads, flexible pricing and pay-what-you-want options.
- Pro: desktop app with Collections, bundles and Steam shortcut support.
- Pro: the widest creative range of the three.
- Con: uneven quality, with moderation under pressure from AI-generated uploads.
- Con: no confirmed audience figure and a weaker fit for casual drop-in play.
Verdict: Which Platform Wins in 2026
For most readers searching for free games online, Poki wins on scale. A reported 100 million monthly active users against more than 60 million for CrazyGames, plus a curated 1,500 to 1,900 game catalogue, gives it the strongest claim on casual play. It is the safest first bookmark.
CrazyGames takes the prize for phone users and for anyone who wants a portal that is actively reinventing itself. Its 3 billion gameplays in 2026, new mascot and iOS and Android app show a company pushing forward. If you play mostly on a phone, start there.
itch.io wins on range and on respect for creators. It is the right home for paid indie games, game jam entries and anything too odd for a mass-market portal. Its Steam shortcut and Proton support also make it the only one of the three that belongs on a handheld.
The data points to a simple routine. Use Poki or CrazyGames for quick sessions, use itch.io for depth and discovery, and keep your saves in mind because none of them share progress. For more on picking where to spend your play time, browse our wider gaming coverage. We will refresh this comparison when any of the three publishes new audience figures or developer terms.
FAQ: Free Games Online, Poki, CrazyGames and itch.io
Is Poki or CrazyGames bigger?
Poki reports the larger audience at 100 million monthly active users, while CrazyGames reports more than 60 million monthly users and 3 billion gameplays in 2026. Both figures come from the companies themselves.
Are Poki games and CrazyGames really free?
Yes. Both are free for players and earn money from advertising. We found no paid consumer subscription on either one.
Is itch.io only for browser games?
No. itch.io hosts browser-playable games, but it also distributes downloadable games, tools, books and soundtracks. Creators can price work at zero, a fixed amount or pay what you want.
Which platform suits my phone best?
CrazyGames lists a companion app for iOS and Android on its game pages, so it has the clearest phone story. Poki also runs in mobile browsers for many games.
Did CrazyGames change its name in 2026?
No. On 14 October 2026 CrazyGames announced a rebrand with the agency DixonBaxi and a new mascot called Ziggy. The name, the service and the company stayed the same.
How do developers earn money on Poki?
Poki’s documentation describes revenue sharing, reportedly funded by advertising. It gives an indicative split of 50/50 on traffic Poki brings and 100 percent for traffic the developer brings, and it says the signed agreement controls the final terms.
Is it safe for children to use these sites?
Poki and CrazyGames focus on casual games, but both show ads, so supervise younger children. itch.io hosts adult content in its open catalogue, so it suits older players with filters switched on.
