Level Access 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.
Entry price
Quote on request
Quote onlyFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Enterprise contracts combining platform licence with audit and advisory services.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
No free tier.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Level Access · since 1997
Category standard
Deque Systems · since 2015
Strengths
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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 facing accessibility litigation or formal procurement requirements.
Any team that wants accessibility checks inside their existing automated tests.
All of these integrate with: Selenium.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.