WAVE 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
From $0.04 per credit (one basic page scan), falling to $0.025 at 10k+
Free tierFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free for interactive use. The API is bought in credits — one credit per basic page scan, 2-3 for advanced requests — at $0.04 each up to 999, $0.03 to 9,999 and $0.025 beyond. Minimum purchase is 250 credits ($10), and new accounts get 100 free.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Browser extension and single-page online checker are free.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
WebAIM (Utah State University) · since 2001
Category standard
Google · since 2016
Strengths
- The in-page visual overlay teaches non-specialists what is wrong far better than a list.
- Free for everyday developer and designer use.
- WebAIM's guidance behind each rule is authoritative and clear.
- 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
- Manual, page-by-page — not a CI tool.
- Alerts require human judgement, so counts are not directly comparable between pages.
- No issue tracking or programme management.
- 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
Designers and developers learning accessibility, and quick manual spot checks.
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.