IBM Equal Access Toolkit vs Lighthouse
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.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceFree and open source
Open sourceWhat 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.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Emerging
IBM · since 2020
Category standard
Google · since 2016
Strengths
- Completely free including CI integration and reporting.
- Guidance is written for developers with concrete code examples.
- Includes design and content guidance beyond the code checker.
- 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.
Limitations
- Smaller community than axe-core, so fewer worked examples.
- Reporting is basic compared with commercial platforms.
- Rule set differs slightly from axe, which can confuse cross-tool comparisons.
- 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.
Best for
Teams wanting a free, well-documented alternative or complement to axe.
Every web team as a first, free quality baseline.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.