axe-core vs Pa11y

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

Category standard

Deque Systems · since 2015

Established

OSS community · since 2013

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

Any team that wants accessibility checks inside their existing automated tests.

Teams wanting free automated accessibility gates across many pages.