head to head · open source
lighthouse vs wallace-cli
lighthouse has 30,785 GitHub stars, 9,765 forks, 470 open issues and last shipped yesterday. wallace-cli has 643 stars, 15 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. lighthouse leads on adoption by 4,688% (30,785 vs 643 stars). lighthouse is written in JavaScript under Apache-2.0; wallace-cli is written in TypeScript under MIT. lighthouse has attracted 32% as many forks as stars, wallace-cli 2%. lighthouse was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (audit), 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 | wallace-cli | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 643 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 15 |
| 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 wallace-cli if
- You want the wallace-cli feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and wallace-cli 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 wallace-cli
Wallace CLI is a command line tool that prints pretty CSS analytics — metrics, statistics and complexity data about a stylesheet — directly in the terminal, and it is aimed at front end developers, auditors and teams who want to inspect the health of their CSS without leaving the shell.
read the full wallace-cli overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lighthouse or wallace-cli more popular?
lighthouse has 30,785 GitHub stars and wallace-cli has 643. lighthouse has the larger community by that measure.
Are lighthouse and wallace-cli free?
Both are open source. lighthouse is licensed under Apache-2.0 and wallace-cli under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lighthouse and wallace-cli?
lighthouse is written in JavaScript and wallace-cli in TypeScript. 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 wallace-cli?
Choose lighthouse if you want the larger community (30,785 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose wallace-cli if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.