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testcritic

WAVE 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.

WAVEAccessibility
axe-coreAccessibility

Entry price

From $0.04 per credit (one basic page scan), falling to $0.025 at 10k+

Free tier

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free for interactive use. The API is bought in credits — one credit per basic page scan, 2-3 for advanced requests — at $0.04 each up to 999, $0.03 to 9,999 and $0.025 beyond. Minimum purchase is 250 credits ($10), and new accounts get 100 free.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free tier

Browser extension and single-page online checker are free.

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MPL-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Codeless
JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaPythonC#Ruby

Platforms

Web
Web

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

WebAIM (Utah State University) · since 2001

Category standard

Deque Systems · since 2015

Strengths

  • The in-page visual overlay teaches non-specialists what is wrong far better than a list.
  • Free for everyday developer and designer use.
  • WebAIM's guidance behind each rule is authoritative and clear.
  • 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

  • Manual, page-by-page — not a CI tool.
  • Alerts require human judgement, so counts are not directly comparable between pages.
  • No issue tracking or programme management.
  • 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

Designers and developers learning accessibility, and quick manual spot checks.

Any team that wants accessibility checks inside their existing automated tests.

Full review
Full review

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