Lighthouse vs axe-core
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
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Google · since 2016
Category standard
Deque Systems · since 2015
Strengths
- 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.
- 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.
Limitations
- 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.
- 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.
Best for
Every web team as a first, free quality baseline.
Any team that wants accessibility checks inside their existing automated tests.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.