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.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
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
Free browser extension with the core axe-core rule set.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Google · since 2016
Widely used
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.
- 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
- 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
Every web team as a first, free quality baseline.
Organisations with a formal accessibility programme and compliance obligations.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.