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testcritic

Siteimprove vs axe DevTools

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 only

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Enterprise annual contracts priced by pages crawled and modules.

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 tier

Free browser extension for single-page checks.

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

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Codeless
JavaScriptJavaPythonC#Codeless

Platforms

Web
WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Enterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Siteimprove · since 2003

Widely used

Deque Systems · since 2015

Strengths

  • 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.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • 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.

Best for

Universities, government and large content organisations with legal accessibility obligations.

Organisations with a formal accessibility programme and compliance obligations.

All of these integrate with: Jira.

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