axe-core vs Lighthouse

Free and open source

Free and open source

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Deque Systems · since 2015

Category standard

Google · since 2016

• Effectively zero false positives, which is why it became the industry default.
• Integrates into any existing test suite in a few lines.
• Free, actively maintained, and aligned with WCAG updates.

• Already installed in every Chrome browser — zero adoption cost.
• Covers performance, accessibility and SEO in one report.
• Lighthouse CI turns scores into enforceable build assertions.

• Automated rules detect roughly a third of WCAG issues — the rest need human testing.
• A library, not a workflow: no dashboards, tracking or reporting.
• Only evaluates the DOM state it is given, so dynamic states need explicit test coverage.

• Lab data from a synthetic environment, not what real users experience.
• Scores vary run to run, which makes strict thresholds frustrating.
• Accessibility coverage is the axe-core subset, not a full audit.

Any team that wants accessibility checks inside their existing automated tests.

Every web team as a first, free quality baseline.