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testcritic

axe-core vs Lighthouse vs axe DevTools

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

axe-coreAccessibility
LighthouseAccessibility
axe DevToolsAccessibility

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

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

The free extension covers a lot. Deque no longer publishes a price for Pro or the axe DevTools for Web bundle — both route through sales or a no-card trial, so budget from a quote rather than a list price.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Free browser extension with the core axe-core rule set.

Open source

MPL-2.0

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaPythonC#Ruby
JavaScript
JavaScriptJavaPythonC#Codeless

Platforms

Web
Web
WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Deque Systems · since 2015

Category standard

Google · since 2016

Widely used

Deque Systems · since 2015

Strengths

  • 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.
  • Guided manual testing addresses the two thirds of WCAG that scanners cannot.
  • Findings come with concrete code-level remediation advice.
  • Deque's accessibility expertise is the deepest in the industry.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • Per-seat pricing adds up across a large engineering organisation.
  • The free extension is good enough for many teams, blurring the upgrade case.
  • Enterprise deployment needs process design, not just a licence.

Best for

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

Every web team as a first, free quality baseline.

Organisations with a formal accessibility programme and compliance obligations.

Full review
Full review
Full review

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.