How to use Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights beside Crawlwise

You might already live in Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights. That is a good sign. It means you care enough about the site to use a serious tool. This guide is here so you can keep that tool and still know, calmly, where Crawlwise fits beside it. An open-source automated tool with audits for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. It runs from the Chrome DevTools panel, from the command line, or as part of PageSpeed Insights, and audits one URL per run.

Give Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights the credit it has earned

A comparison that only praises us is marketing, and you would feel it by the second paragraph. Here is where Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights is the stronger product, in plain language:

• It is free and open source, with no account and no limit on runs.
• It loads the page in Chrome, so its performance audit measures how the page actually renders and runs JavaScript. We read the HTML the server returns.
• Its accessibility and best-practice audits are deeper than ours, and the scores are what many teams already report on.
• It runs in CI through the CLI, so a regression can fail a build.

If that list describes your actual week, stay. You will be happier, and you will do better work. We would rather you trust the next section because this one was fair.

Keep the tool that matches the job. Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights has jobs it wins. Crawlwise has a different one, and it is a good one.

Adnan Arodiya, Crawlwise

Where a Crawlwise sitting feels different

Our job is narrower, and we like it that way. You paste a URL. We show the evidence. We say when a check could not run. And we fetch the page as the answer-engine crawlers, so you know whether they can read it.

• Lighthouse checks the page as a browser sees it. We also fetch it as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and 14 other AI crawlers, so a crawler blocked by a firewall shows up.
• We crawl the whole site on paid plans and add canonicals, hreflang, structured data and duplicate checks across pages, where Lighthouse reports one URL at a time.
• Paid plans add rank tracking, backlinks and Search Console data in one account. Starter is $4.99 a month.

That is the whole invitation. You can try the free tools with no account, then run a full audit when you want the checks together. A single page is about 1.25 credits, quoted before you click.

What we will not pretend

• A free, single-page browser audit against a site audit with AI crawler tests. Use Lighthouse for performance and accessibility; it costs nothing.

Hold both products to that standard. If a page implies we replace their index, their desktop crawl, or their keyword history, it is wrong. Send people here instead.

A kind way to decide this week

Pick the URL a customer actually uses. Run the overlapping check in Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights if you already have it open, and run the same URL through a Crawlwise tool or a full audit. Put the two results side by side. Keep every finding you can verify. Discard the rest. You will leave with a shorter list and a better mood, which is the point of a good afternoon.

Then fix one thing on staging and check it again. The second run is how you know the fix landed. Save the Crawlwise report if you want next month to remember what you did. History is a small kindness you can give your future self.

What a plan actually costs

The free tools stay free. You can open them, run them, and leave without an account. A plan is for the moment you want the report saved, a few sites watched, or the same checks from the API. The price on this table is the price at checkout. A yearly plan is ten months of the monthly price, so two months are on us.

A single-page audit is about 1.25 credits, and that includes the live probe of answer-engine crawlers. You see the estimate before anything runs. If a hold is not used, it comes back to your balance. Extra credits, when you already subscribe, are $9.99 for 20.

You can root for both

Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights can stay in your toolkit. Crawlwise can sit beside it for the page-level questions, the crawler probe, and a price you can see. You do not have to pick a side to do good work. Open the URL, read the evidence, and ship the fix you can explain. That is a win, and you are close to it.