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.
Lighthouse is Google's open-source auditing tool. It's built into Chrome DevTools and PageSpeed Insights, and runs a curated bundle of axe-core rules to produce a 0–100 accessibility score. The score sits alongside Performance, Best Practices, and SEO in the same report.
Right-click → Inspect → Lighthouse. Free, on whatever page you currently have open.
Public URL form. Runs the same audit, no install needed.
Open-source. Schedule per-PR runs and store the JSON yourself. Dashboards are DIY.
Why teams switch to A11y Pulse
Lighthouse is excellent for one URL on demand. Production accessibility needs the things it isn't trying to be.
Coverage
Lighthouse audits the page in front of you. A11y Pulse audits every page on your sitemap, so issues isolated to checkout, search results, or article templates surface without anyone remembering to check.
Every page, every day
Continuity
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
Triage
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
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 your CI pipeline isn't designed to provide.
Side by side
Lighthouse data reflects the version shipped with Chrome and the Lighthouse Node CLI as of May 2026. Lighthouse CI is a separate Google project for running Lighthouse inside a build pipeline.
A note on the score
Both tools produce a 0–100 score, and the numbers can disagree. The Lighthouse score is a weighted average of binary pass/fail audits. A single button without an accessible name fails the "Buttons have an accessible name" audit outright regardless of how many other buttons pass, and that failure is weighted against the other audits. The result is sensitive to which axe-core rules a page hits but relatively insensitive to how many violations of each rule live on the page.
The A11y Pulse score takes a different shape. Every page starts at 100, and every violation deducts points by severity: 20 for a Critical, 15 for a Serious, 5 for a Moderate, 2 for a Minor. The page score floors at 0; the site score averages across all tracked pages. A page with thirty colour-contrast failures scores visibly lower than a page with one. Scores fall into Good (90–100), Needs Improvement (70–89), and Poor (0–69) bands.
Neither algorithm is "correct". Lighthouse's weighting reflects axe-core's per-audit user-impact assessment. A11y Pulse's deduction model reflects the actual count of violations a developer will work through. For a stakeholder slide, the A11y Pulse score plus the monthly delta is the version that holds up best, because it answers both "where are we" and "are we improving".
The verdict
Choose
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Yes. Lighthouse's accessibility category is a thin wrapper around axe-core, with Google's own scoring weights applied on top. A11y Pulse runs axe-core directly. The underlying issue list for a given page should be substantially the same in both tools; the difference is everything around the engine, including scheduling, history, multi-page coverage, alerting, and reporting.
Both tools produce a 0-100 score, but the methodology is different. Lighthouse rolls roughly fifty axe-core audits into a weighted average where each audit is binary pass or fail with no partial credit, so a single button without an accessible name fails the entire "Buttons have an accessible name" audit regardless of how many other buttons pass. A11y Pulse's score starts every page at 100 and deducts points per individual violation, with 20 deducted for a Critical, 15 for a Serious, 5 for a Moderate, and 2 for a Minor. The two algorithms can produce noticeably different numbers for the same page, and neither is wrong. The A11y Pulse approach scales more naturally with the actual count of issues on the page.
The primary use case for A11y Pulse is scheduled production monitoring. A common pattern is keeping Lighthouse CI as a per-commit gate inside the build pipeline and using A11y Pulse for the always-on coverage of the live site. The two slot together comfortably. If you have a specific CI integration in mind, please get in touch.
It is reliable for what it measures, which is whether a curated subset of axe-core rules pass or fail on a single page at the moment of the run. It does not catch issues axe-core cannot catch automatically (a manual list of about ten checks lives alongside the score), it does not see pages you did not run it against, and it gives no signal when something regresses tomorrow. Treat it as a snapshot rather than a guarantee.
Yes. A11y Pulse supports a scripted authentication flow that logs into your site or steps through a multi-page journey before running the scan. Lighthouse can also test authenticated pages, but you have to invoke it manually through DevTools or wire up a custom Puppeteer script for each scenario.
Lighthouse is free. A11y Pulse Starter is $19 USD/month for 50 pages, Growth is $49 USD/month for 200 pages across three sites, and Comprehensive is $159 USD/month for 1,000 pages with unlimited users and websites. The cost reflects the hosted dashboard, daily scheduling, history, and the alerting that Lighthouse does not provide.
Yes. A11y Pulse produces a 0-100 accessibility score for every page and a site-wide score that averages those, with Good (90-100), Needs Improvement (70-89), and Poor (0-69) bands shown alongside the number. The monthly stakeholder report layers the score on top of a 30-day trend, so the slide-ready version is the score and its delta from a month earlier, not just the headline.
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.
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