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A11y Pulse vs Google Lighthouse

A Lighthouse score is a snapshot.
A11y Pulse is the time-lapse.

Lighthouse gives you a single accessibility score for a single page, on demand. A11y Pulse scores every page on your site, every day, and tells you the moment that score slips.
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What is Lighthouse?

Lighthouse is Google's open-source auditing tool, built into Chrome DevTools and PageSpeed Insights. It runs a curated bundle of axe-core rules to produce a 0–100 accessibility score alongside Performance, Best Practices, and SEO in the same report.

Chrome DevTools Built into the browser
Right-click → Inspect → Lighthouse. Free, on whatever page you currently have open.
PageSpeed Insights pagespeed.web.dev
Public URL form. Runs the same audit, no install required.
Lighthouse CI GitHub Action or CLI
Open-source. Schedule per-PR runs and store the JSON yourself. Dashboards are DIY.

Side by side

A11y Pulse vs Lighthouse

Pricing
Testing engine
Score methodology
Score bands
Scope
Scheduling
Page discovery
History and trends
Regression alerts
Authenticated pages
Stakeholder reporting
Best for
A11y Pulse Continuous, site-wide
Recommended
$19, $49, $159 / month Hosted, monthly billing
axe-core
Per-violation deduction by severity Critical −20, Serious −15, Moderate −5, Minor −2
Good 90–100, Needs Improvement 70–89, Poor 0–69
Whole site, daily Up to 1,000 pages
Daily, with unlimited rescans
Sitemap, crawl, or URL list
30-day deltas + monthly reports
Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams
Scripted login flow
Monthly email with delta vs prior month
Continuous monitoring across whole sites
Lighthouse DevTools audit score
For comparison
Free Open source
axe-core With Google scoring weights
Weighted average of binary pass/fail audits Sensitive to which rules hit, not how many
0–49 poor, 50–89 needs improvement, 90–100 good
One page, on demand
None Manual runs
Single URL only
None Save the JSON yourself
Not included
Manual via DevTools or custom Puppeteer
Not included
Developer spot checks during a build

Lighthouse and A11y Pulse both produce 0–100 scores, but the methodology differs. Lighthouse weights binary pass/fail audits; A11y Pulse deducts points per violation by severity. The two numbers can legitimately disagree for the same page.

Why teams switch to A11y Pulse

Three things a single Lighthouse score won't tell you

Lighthouse is excellent for the page you have open. Production accessibility needs the things it isn't trying to be.

1

Coverage

Whole site, not one page

Lighthouse audits the page in front of you. A11y Pulse audits every page on your sitemap, so issues isolated to checkout, search results, or an article template surface without anyone remembering to check.

Every page, every day

2

Continuity

Yesterday vs today, automatically

A score with no history can't answer "did this CMS edit make it worse?" A11y Pulse keeps a 30-day trend per page and alerts you within hours when something regresses.

Regression alerts in 24h

3

Triage

Tickets, not just numbers

An 88 is interesting; "three new contrast failures on the checkout template" is actionable. A11y Pulse groups issues by template and rule so a single fix clears every instance.

Grouped by template

Where we fit

The dashboard Lighthouse never shipped

Lighthouse gives you a score and a JSON file. A11y Pulse turns the same axe-core findings into a continuous, filterable workspace your team actually opens on Monday morning — with scheduling, history, and alerts that DevTools and CI both stop short of.

  • axe-core daily across your full sitemap, in real Chrome
  • Issues grouped by template so one fix clears every page
  • Score trend per page, kept for the life of your account
  • Regression alerts via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams
The A11y Pulse site overview showing a site-wide accessibility score, a 30-day scan history chart, and per-page scores across every tracked URL.

The verdict

When each tool is the right call

Choose

A11y Pulse

  • You're shipping to production and need to keep accessibility scores up
  • You want regression alerts before users notice
  • You're managing accessibility across more than one or two pages
  • You want a site-wide score plus per-page scores, with history
  • You need pages behind a login tested without writing a Puppeteer script
  • You want a stakeholder report that shows the trend, not just the headline

Choose

Lighthouse

  • You're a developer doing a quick check on a page you have open
  • You want a free tool that runs locally inside Chrome DevTools
  • Your priority is the broader Lighthouse score across performance, SEO, and accessibility together
  • You want a CI gate via Lighthouse CI that fails a build on score regression
  • You only have one or two pages to keep an eye on

The information presented here about A11y Pulse and Lighthouse is provided for comparison purposes and may change over time. Pricing and feature claims about Lighthouse should be verified on their own website before making a purchasing decision.

From one score to one watching brief

30-day free trial, no credit card. We score every page nightly. First report by morning.
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