Level Access 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
Quote on request
Quote onlyFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Enterprise contracts combining platform licence with audit and advisory services.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
No free tier.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Level Access · since 1997
Category standard
Google · since 2016
Strengths
- Human expert audits and assistive-technology user testing alongside the tooling.
- Legal and VPAT support for organisations under compliance pressure.
- Covers web, mobile and desktop applications.
- 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
- Expensive, services-heavy engagement model.
- The UserWay overlay heritage is contentious — automated overlays are widely criticised by accessibility practitioners.
- Not a self-serve developer tool.
- 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
Organisations facing accessibility litigation or formal procurement requirements.
Every web team as a first, free quality baseline.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.