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. For a direct feature-by-feature breakdown, see SEO Score API vs Lighthouse.
Run an audit before you commit to anything.