IBM Equal Access Toolkit vs Pa11y

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Emerging

IBM · since 2020

Established

OSS community · since 2013

• Completely free including CI integration and reporting.
• Guidance is written for developers with concrete code examples.
• Includes design and content guidance beyond the code checker.

• Free, scriptable and trivially added as a CI gate.
• Tests a sitemap of URLs in one run, unlike page-by-page extensions.
• Self-hosted dashboard for tracking without a vendor.

• Smaller community than axe-core, so fewer worked examples.
• Reporting is basic compared with commercial platforms.
• Rule set differs slightly from axe, which can confuse cross-tool comparisons.

• No guided manual testing or remediation workflow.
• Testing authenticated or interactive states requires scripting actions.
• Maintenance activity has been intermittent.

Teams wanting a free, well-documented alternative or complement to axe.

Teams wanting free automated accessibility gates across many pages.