axe-core vs Level Access

Free and open source

Quote on request

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Enterprise contracts combining platform licence with audit and advisory services.

Everything, self-hosted

No free tier.

Category standard

Deque Systems · since 2015

Established

Level Access · since 1997

• Effectively zero false positives, which is why it became the industry default.
• Integrates into any existing test suite in a few lines.
• Free, actively maintained, and aligned with WCAG updates.

• Human expert audits and assistive-technology user testing alongside the tooling.
• Legal and VPAT support for organisations under compliance pressure.
• Covers web, mobile and desktop applications.

• Automated rules detect roughly a third of WCAG issues — the rest need human testing.
• A library, not a workflow: no dashboards, tracking or reporting.
• Only evaluates the DOM state it is given, so dynamic states need explicit test coverage.

• Expensive, services-heavy engagement model.
• The UserWay overlay heritage is contentious — automated overlays are widely criticised by accessibility practitioners.
• Not a self-serve developer tool.

Any team that wants accessibility checks inside their existing automated tests.

Organisations facing accessibility litigation or formal procurement requirements.