Crawlwise vs Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights

What it is

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.

Where Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights is better

This section is the reason to read the page. A comparison that only lists our wins is marketing, and you would know it was.

• 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.

Where we differ

• 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.

What cannot be compared

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

Judge it yourself without paying either of us

Run the free core web vitals checker on your own site — no account, no credit, no email. Then audit one page, which the trial credit covers, and read the limits page to see what it will not tell you before you spend anything.