Pa11y vs Level Access

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

Enterprise contracts combining platform licence with audit and advisory services.

Everything, self-hosted

No free tier.

Established

OSS community · since 2013

Established

Level Access · since 1997

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

Teams wanting free automated accessibility gates across many pages.

Organisations facing accessibility litigation or formal procurement requirements.