Pa11y vs axe DevTools

Free and open source

From $40 per user/month (indicative, Pro)

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

Free extension covers a lot. Pro adds guided manual testing; enterprise plans are quote-based.

Everything, self-hosted

Free browser extension with the core axe-core rule set.

Established

OSS community · since 2013

Widely used

Deque Systems · since 2015

• 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.

• Guided manual testing addresses the two thirds of WCAG that scanners cannot.
• Findings come with concrete code-level remediation advice.
• Deque's accessibility expertise is the deepest in the industry.

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

• Per-seat pricing adds up across a large engineering organisation.
• The free extension is good enough for many teams, blurring the upgrade case.
• Enterprise deployment needs process design, not just a licence.

Teams wanting free automated accessibility gates across many pages.

Organisations with a formal accessibility programme and compliance obligations.