Docket vs Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse is free, open source, built into a browser you already have, and made by the company whose search engine you are trying to rank in. On page speed it is the instrument, and nothing here argues for turning it off. What it is not is a site audit: Lighthouse scores one URL at a time, and its SEO category is ten scored checks that Google's own description of it calls basic.

What Lighthouse does better, said first

Performance, and it is not close. Lighthouse drives a real Chrome, records a trace, and reports Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift and Total Blocking Time from that run, with a filmstrip of the load and a treemap of where the bytes went. Docket has nothing of the kind and is not building it.

Three more, briefly. It scores accessibility and best practices, two entire categories Docket does not attempt. It costs nothing at any volume, from Chrome DevTools, the command line, a Node module for continuous integration, or PageSpeed Insights in a browser tab with no install at all. And it is Google's, which settles arguments: when a client asks whether Google cares about a thing, the tool and the search engine came from the same building.

The SEO category, in full

Here is the entire list, read from the config file that ships in the Lighthouse repository rather than from anybody's summary of it: is-crawlable, document-title, meta-description, http-status-code, link-text, crawlable-anchors, robots-txt, image-alt, hreflang and canonical. Ten scored audits, plus a manual eleventh — structured-data — which carries a weight of zero and asks you to go and validate your schema somewhere else.

is-crawlable is weighted so heavily that failing it fails the category on its own, and the comment beside it in the config says that is deliberate. Which is the right call. An accidental noindex is the most expensive mistake in technical SEO, and Lighthouse finds it in ten seconds for nothing.

The shallowness is stated, not hidden. The description at the top of the category says the checks follow basic search engine optimisation advice, and that there are many additional factors Lighthouse does not score which may affect your ranking. That is Google marking the edge of its own tool, and the useful question is what sits outside the line.

One URL is the unit

You give Lighthouse a URL and it reports on that page. Run it against your homepage and you have audited your homepage.

Most of what quietly breaks a site is not a property of a page. It is a relationship between pages, and a single-page run cannot see a relationship by construction:

• hreflang return tags. Lighthouse checks that the hreflang on this page is valid. Whether the page it names points back is a two-page question, and Google discards the whole cluster when the answer is no.
• Canonical clusters. A well-formed rel=canonical passes. Forty pages all canonicalising to the same URL also passes, forty separate times.
• Duplicate and templated titles. document-title asks whether a title exists, not whether it is the same title as three hundred other pages.
• Click depth and internal link equity. Both are properties of the link graph, and there is no graph in one page load.

What Docket cannot tell you about speed

Read this before buying, because you are arriving from a speed tool and the assumption is natural. Docket does not measure Core Web Vitals. It has seven speed checks and every one of them is a cause rather than a vital: time to first byte, compression and caching headers, page weight, render-blocking resources, image formats, redirect latency, and layout-shift risk inferred from the markup.

Those are the things you change to fix a bad LCP or CLS. They are not the LCP or the CLS. Those are field metrics, measured on real users on real connections, which is why Search Console's Core Web Vitals report is built from the Chrome UX Report rather than from a lab run — and why PageSpeed Insights shows two panels, Lighthouse in a simulated environment on one side and CrUX field data on the other.

Docket has one optional check that fetches those field values from the PageSpeed Insights API, which is the same CrUX data Search Console shows. It is one of four checks that reach off your machine, --offline turns them off, and the scope page of every PDF names Core Web Vitals field values among the things that were not measured. If you are trying to move LCP: change what Docket points at, measure it in Lighthouse, confirm it in Search Console. Docket will tell you which markup is costing you. It will not tell you whether the fix landed.

What each one hands you

The order that wastes least time

1. Lighthouse first, on the page that matters most. It is free and it takes ten seconds, and it catches the three faults that stop a page dead: a stray noindex, a canonical pointing at the wrong URL, a status code that is not 200.
2. Docket across the whole site. The cross-page checks, the areas Lighthouse leaves unscored, and the ordering — findings ranked by impact against effort and sorted into four phases, each carrying the exact markup to paste.
3. Search Console once the fix is live. Field vitals move over a 28-day window, so the answer to whether it worked is there and nowhere else.

These are complementary rather than competing, and the difference fits in a sentence: Lighthouse grades a page, Docket sequences the work on a site.

When Lighthouse on its own is enough

If you run a single landing page, Lighthouse plus a careful read of your own title tags gets you most of the way, and Docket is a purchase you do not need. If your problem is speed, Lighthouse is the better tool and this is the wrong page. If you want a score gated in continuous integration, Lighthouse ships as a Node module built for that and Docket has no equivalent. And if you are not on an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 12 or later, Docket will not run at all.

Docket costs $199 once, runs 96 checks on your own machine with no account, no licence check and no telemetry, and keeps everything under ~/.docket. activation is a licence key you paste in once. It earns that money against a free tool from Google in one situation only: when the question has stopped being how fast is this page and become which of forty things do I do first.

Checked 10 August 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: the SEO category declares ten scored audits — is-crawlable, document-title, meta-description, http-status-code, link-text, crawlable-anchors, robots-txt, image-alt, hreflang and canonical — plus one manual entry, structured-data, carrying a weight of zero; is-crawlable is weighted so that failing it alone fails the category (source); the category describes itself as "basic search engine optimization advice", adding that "there are many additional factors Lighthouse does not score here that may affect your search ranking" (source); it is "an open-source, automated tool" run from Chrome DevTools, the command line, a Node module or PageSpeed Insights; you give it a URL to audit, and the categories are performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO (source); PageSpeed Insights "uses Lighthouse to analyze the given URL in a simulated environment" for its lab data, while its field data is "powered by the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) dataset" (source); the data behind Search Console's Core Web Vitals report "comes from the CrUX report", which gathers metrics "from actual users visiting your URL (called field data)" (source). Products change and pricing changes; if something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected. Everything else on this page is a comparison of approach, not a claim about their roadmap.

Common questions

Does Docket measure Core Web Vitals?

Not itself. Docket measures the causes — server response time, compression and caching headers, page weight, render-blocking resources, image formats, redirect latency and layout-shift risk in the markup — and one optional check fetches the field values from Google's PageSpeed Insights API, the same Chrome UX Report data Search Console shows. LCP, INP and CLS come from real users, so confirm them in Search Console rather than in any lab tool, Docket included.

How many SEO checks does Lighthouse run?

Ten scored audits, plus a manual eleventh that reminds you to validate structured data somewhere else and counts for zero. Lighthouse's own category description calls this basic search engine optimisation advice and says there are many additional factors it does not score.

Can Lighthouse audit a whole site?

Not on its own. You give Lighthouse one URL and it reports on that page. Much of what breaks a site is a relationship between pages — hreflang return tags, canonical clusters, duplicate titles, click depth — and a single-page run cannot see a relationship by construction.

Should I stop running Lighthouse if I buy Docket?

No, and this page would be dishonest if it said otherwise. Lighthouse is free, it is the authority on lab performance metrics, and it scores accessibility and best practices, which Docket does not. Run Lighthouse on the page you care about, Docket across the site, and Search Console after you ship.