Why VibeCheck/vs Lighthouse
VibeCheck vs Google Lighthouse
Lighthouse is the gold standard for performance auditing. VibeCheck is what you run when you also need to know whether your AI keys are safe and your auth flow is not broken on mobile.
Where Lighthouse wins
Google Lighthouse is unmatched for Core Web Vitals. Its LCP, CLS, FID, and INP metrics are deeply integrated with how Google ranks pages, and no other free tool measures them as accurately. If you care about SEO or page speed scores, Lighthouse is the tool. Run it in Chrome DevTools, as a CI step with the Lighthouse CLI, or via PageSpeed Insights. It is built into every modern browser.
What Lighthouse does not check
Lighthouse does not know what stack you built on. It does not scan your JavaScript bundles for exposed API keys. It does not probe your /api/chat route to see if it has rate limiting. It does not check if your Supabase database has Row Level Security enabled. It does not test whether your Stripe webhook verifies the signature. These are the mistakes that kill vibe-coded apps after launch — not slow LCP.
The honest comparison
These tools solve different problems. If you are launching a vibe-coded app, you should run both: Lighthouse for performance and Core Web Vitals, VibeCheck for everything else that makes a launch risky. They take about the same amount of time — Lighthouse runs in seconds in your browser, VibeCheck takes three minutes on your staging URL — and the two result sets do not overlap much.
The one case where you only need VibeCheck
If you are time-constrained the night before launch and can only run one tool: run VibeCheck. It includes the most launch-critical performance checks (LCP, bundle size, image optimization) and adds the security, AI safety, legal, and auth checks that Lighthouse does not cover at all.
Side by side
| Feature | VibeCheck | Lighthouse |
|---|---|---|
| Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) | Partial | ✓ |
| Bundle size analysis | ✓ | Partial |
| AI key exposure detection | ✓ | ✗ |
| AI endpoint rate limiting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Auth flow checks | ✓ | ✗ |
| Supabase / database checks | ✓ | ✗ |
| Stripe / payment checks | ✓ | ✗ |
| SEO basics (title, OG, canonical) | ✓ | Partial |
| Legal signals (privacy, ToS) | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mobile responsiveness | ✓ | Partial |
| Fix prompt generation | ✓ | ✗ |
| Runs on staging URL (no install) | ✓ | Partial |
Run both. Start with VibeCheck.
Free, no account required, results in under 3 minutes.