axe-core vs Level Access
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Enterprise contracts combining platform licence with audit and advisory services.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
No free tier.
Open source
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Deque Systems · since 2015
Established
Level Access · since 1997
Strengths
- Effectively zero false positives, which is why it became the industry default.
- Integrates into any existing test suite in a few lines.
- Free, actively maintained, and aligned with WCAG updates.
- 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.
Limitations
- Automated rules detect roughly a third of WCAG issues — the rest need human testing.
- A library, not a workflow: no dashboards, tracking or reporting.
- Only evaluates the DOM state it is given, so dynamic states need explicit test coverage.
- 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.
Best for
Any team that wants accessibility checks inside their existing automated tests.
Organisations facing accessibility litigation or formal procurement requirements.
All of these integrate with: Selenium.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.