IBM Equal Access Toolkit vs Siteimprove
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 annual contracts priced by pages crawled and modules.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free browser extension for single-page checks.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Emerging
IBM · since 2020
Widely used
Siteimprove · since 2003
Strengths
- 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.
- 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.
Limitations
- 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.
- 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.
Best for
Teams wanting a free, well-documented alternative or complement to axe.
Universities, government and large content organisations with legal accessibility obligations.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.