Pa11y vs IBM Equal Access Toolkit

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

Established

OSS community · since 2013

Emerging

IBM · since 2020

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

Teams wanting free automated accessibility gates across many pages.

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