Level Access vs axe-core

Quote on request

Free and open source

Enterprise contracts combining platform licence with audit and advisory services.

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

No free tier.

Everything, self-hosted

Established

Level Access · since 1997

Category standard

Deque Systems · since 2015

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Organisations facing accessibility litigation or formal procurement requirements.

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