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A11y PulsevsGoogle Lighthouse

Lighthouse scores the page in front of you.
A11y Pulse keeps score of the whole site.

Lighthouse answers a question every developer has: how does this page score right now? A11y Pulse is for the questions that follow, like whether the rest of the site scores as well and whether last week's release made anything worse.
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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 subset of axe-core's rules to produce a 0–100 accessibility score alongside Performance, Best Practices, and SEO in the same report.

Chrome DevToolsBuilt into the browser
Right-click → Inspect → Lighthouse. Free, on whatever page you currently have open.
PageSpeed Insightspagespeed.web.dev
Public URL form. Runs the same audit, no install required.
Lighthouse CIGitHub Action or CLI
Open-source. Schedules per-PR runs, with the JSON storage and dashboards left for you to build.

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 PulseContinuous, site-wide
Recommended
$19, $49, $159 / monthHosted, monthly billing
axe-core
Per-violation deduction by severityCritical −20, Serious −15, Moderate −5, Minor −2
Good 90–100, Needs Improvement 70–89, Poor 0–69
Whole site, dailyUp 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
LighthouseDevTools audit score
For comparison
FreeOpen source
axe-coreWith Google scoring weights
Weighted average of binary pass/fail auditsA rule failing on 50 elements counts once
Good 90–100, Needs Improvement 50–89, Poor 0–49Green, orange, and red in the report
One page, on demand
NoneManual runs
Single URL only
NoneSave 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, but it was never meant to keep watch over a whole site in production.

1

Coverage

The pages nobody thinks to check

Lighthouse audits whichever page you point it at, so coverage depends on someone deciding to look. A11y Pulse reads your sitemap and audits all of it, which is how problems on search results or a forgotten article template surface long before a complaint does.

Every page, every day

2

Continuity

A score with a memory

A single Lighthouse run can't tell you whether yesterday's CMS edit did any damage, because there's no yesterday to compare it against. A11y Pulse keeps a 30-day trend for every page and alerts you within a day of a score dropping.

Regression alerts in 24h

3

Triage

From a number to a fix

A score of 88 doesn't tell anyone what to fix on Monday. A11y Pulse groups the issues behind that number by rule and template, so three contrast failures on the checkout template show up as one fix that clears every affected page.

Grouped by template

Where we fit

The dashboard Lighthouse never shipped

A Lighthouse run ends with a number and a JSON file, and everything that happens next is left to you. A11y Pulse gives the same axe-core findings somewhere to live, so each morning there's a dashboard with fresh scores on a 30-day trend and issues grouped by template, ready to be turned into fixes.

  • axe-core daily across your full sitemap, in real Chrome
  • Issues grouped by template so one fix clears every page
  • A 30-day score trend for every page on the site
  • 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 your accessibility score 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 monthly stakeholder report that shows the trend

Choose

Lighthouse

  • You're a developer doing a quick check on the page you're building
  • 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.

Stop running Lighthouse by hand

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