head to head · open source
lighthouse vs licensee
lighthouse has 30,842 GitHub stars, 9,760 forks, 470 open issues and last shipped yesterday. licensee has 912 stars, 347 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lighthouse leads on adoption by 3,282% (30,842 vs 912 stars). lighthouse is written in JavaScript under Apache-2.0; licensee is written in Ruby under MIT. lighthouse has attracted 32% as many forks as stars, licensee 38%. licensee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| lighthouse | licensee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 912 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-30 | 2026-09-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 347 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lighthouse if
- You weight community size — 31K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick licensee if
- You want the licensee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and licensee fits your workflow better
About lighthouse
Lighthouse is an open source, automated auditing tool for web applications and web pages. It analyzes a target URL and collects modern performance metrics alongside insights into developer best practices, producing a structured report that scores and explains what it finds. The project lives in the JavaScript ecosystem, is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, and is maintained under the GoogleChrome organization. It has been developed for roughly eleven years and is published to npm as the lighthouse package.
read the full lighthouse overview →
About licensee
Licensee is a Ruby gem and command line tool that automatically determines which open source license a project is distributed under, aimed at developers, compliance teams, and maintainers who need to know what they can and cannot do with a codebase.
read the full licensee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lighthouse or licensee more popular?
lighthouse has 30,842 GitHub stars and licensee has 912. lighthouse has the larger community by that measure.
Are lighthouse and licensee free?
Both are open source. lighthouse is licensed under Apache-2.0 and licensee under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lighthouse and licensee?
lighthouse is written in JavaScript and licensee in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, lighthouse or licensee?
Choose lighthouse if you want the larger community (30,842 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose licensee if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.