Picked by use case, not by marketing budget.
Lighthouse is excellent and free. For one-off page audits during development, nothing beats it. But it's a tool, not a service — to use it across many sites or in agent / CI workflows you have to assemble a lot. Alternatives below depending on how much assembly you want to do.
If you spend most of your Lighthouse time on site audits and you'd rather get JSON your code can act on, SEO Score API is the cheapest, fastest path. If you rely on Lighthouse for backlinks, keyword research, or rank tracking, no API-first tool will fully replace it.
Different scope. Lighthouse is best-in-class for performance and accessibility on a single page during local development. SEO Score API has broader SEO and AI-readiness checks (82 vs ~14), runs as a hosted API from anywhere, and works in CI without runner setup. Many users run both — Lighthouse during dev, SEO Score API in CI and monitoring.
We include performance checks (response time, HTML size, DOM size, render path) but we don't run a full Lighthouse trace. If you need the full Performance breakdown, run Lighthouse alongside us.
You aren't paying for the audits — you're paying to skip building the rest of the stack: hosted runners, batch processing, history, monitors, alerts, multi-site dashboards, and the scoring layer. The free tier exists if you want to confirm the trade-off before paying.
Yes. The most common pattern: Lighthouse via LHCI for performance gates, SEO Score API for SEO + AI readability gates. They cover different surfaces.
Run an audit before you commit to anything.