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