Level Access vs Pa11y
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
LGPL-3.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Level Access · since 1997
Established
OSS community · since 2013
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.
- 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.
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.
- No guided manual testing or remediation workflow.
- Testing authenticated or interactive states requires scripting actions.
- Maintenance activity has been intermittent.
Best for
Organisations facing accessibility litigation or formal procurement requirements.
Teams wanting free automated accessibility gates across many pages.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.