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testcritic

axe DevTools vs axe-core

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.

axe DevToolsAccessibility
axe-coreAccessibility

Entry price

Free tier available

Free tier

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

The free extension covers a lot. Deque no longer publishes a price for Pro or the axe DevTools for Web bundle — both route through sales or a no-card trial, so budget from a quote rather than a list price.

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

Free tier

Free browser extension with the core axe-core rule set.

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MPL-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptJavaPythonC#Codeless
JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaPythonC#Ruby

Platforms

WebiOSAndroid
Web

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Deque Systems · since 2015

Category standard

Deque Systems · since 2015

Strengths

  • Guided manual testing addresses the two thirds of WCAG that scanners cannot.
  • Findings come with concrete code-level remediation advice.
  • Deque's accessibility expertise is the deepest in the industry.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • Per-seat pricing adds up across a large engineering organisation.
  • The free extension is good enough for many teams, blurring the upgrade case.
  • Enterprise deployment needs process design, not just a licence.
  • 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.

Best for

Organisations with a formal accessibility programme and compliance obligations.

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

Full review
Full review

All of these integrate with: Playwright, Cypress, Selenium.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.