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 onlyFree tier available
Free tierWhat 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
Platforms
Fits teams
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.