head to head · open source
lighthouse vs polaris
lighthouse has 30,785 GitHub stars, 9,765 forks, 470 open issues and last shipped yesterday. polaris has 3,387 stars, 231 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. lighthouse leads on adoption by 809% (30,785 vs 3,387 stars). lighthouse is written in JavaScript under Apache-2.0; polaris is written in Go under Apache-2.0. lighthouse has attracted 32% as many forks as stars, polaris 7%. lighthouse was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (audit, best-practices), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | polaris | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 3.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 231 |
| 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 polaris if
- You want the polaris feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and polaris 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 polaris
Polaris is an open source policy engine for Kubernetes, written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem and supports cluster auditing, best practice validation, and a dashboard.
read the full polaris overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lighthouse or polaris more popular?
lighthouse has 30,785 GitHub stars and polaris has 3,387. lighthouse has the larger community by that measure.
Are lighthouse and polaris free?
Both are open source. lighthouse is licensed under Apache-2.0 and polaris under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lighthouse and polaris?
lighthouse is written in JavaScript and polaris in Go. 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 polaris?
Choose lighthouse if you want the larger community (30,785 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose polaris if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.