Siteimprove vs IBM Equal Access Toolkit

Quote on request

Free and open source

Enterprise annual contracts priced by pages crawled and modules.

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

Free browser extension for single-page checks.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Siteimprove · since 2003

Emerging

IBM · since 2020

• Scans entire large sites and assigns findings to content owners, not just developers.
• Combines accessibility with SEO and content quality in one governance view.
• Reporting suited to demonstrating compliance progress to executives and regulators.

• 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.

• Expensive and aimed at organisations with a governance function.
• Weak fit for application testing as opposed to content sites.
• Limited shift-left developer tooling compared to Deque.

• 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.

Universities, government and large content organisations with legal accessibility obligations.

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