Level Access vs Pa11y

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

Established

OSS community · since 2013

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

Organisations facing accessibility litigation or formal procurement requirements.

Teams wanting free automated accessibility gates across many pages.