Comparison
Accessibility audit tools, compared honestly
For a one-off check of a page, use a free tool. WAVE, Lighthouse and axe DevTools are good, they cost nothing, and they will tell you today what is wrong with the page you are looking at. That is the recommendation, and it is the first thing on the page because it is true.
We sell a paid product, so read this the way you should read any vendor comparison: check whether it admits where it loses. Ours loses in most of the rows below, and the section naming exactly which ones is further down.
Side by side
Six tools and what each is for
| Tool | What it is | Cost | Best at | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WAVE | A browser extension and web tool from WebAIM | Free | Seeing problems marked up on the page itself | One page at a time, no history |
| Lighthouse | Built into Chrome DevTools; its accessibility checks use the axe-core rules | Free | A quick score alongside performance and SEO | One page at a time, and the score flatters |
| axe DevTools | A browser extension from Deque, with paid tiers on their own site | Free tier | Precise rule detail for a developer fixing things | One page at a time in the free tier |
| axe-core in your CI | The open source engine underneath several of these | Free, plus your time | Catching regressions before they ship | Needs a build pipeline and someone to maintain it |
| Manual audit by a specialist | People testing your site with assistive technology | Quoted per site | Everything software cannot judge | Point in time, and the most expensive row |
| AccessLedger | Scheduled axe-core scanning that keeps a dated record | $49 to $249 a month, or $149 once | History: what was found, what was fixed, when | Same 30 to 40% detection as the free tools |
Features and pricing for other people's products change, and we do not track them. Check each vendor's own site before you decide. We have no affiliate arrangement with any of them and earn nothing if you pick one.
The ceiling every automated tool shares
Automated testing reliably evaluates roughly 30 to 40 percent of WCAG success criteria. That figure is not a property of any one product. It is a property of what a machine can decide. A machine can tell that an image has no alt attribute. It cannot tell whether the alt text you wrote describes the image, whether your page makes sense read aloud in order, or whether an error message explains how to fix the error.
Several of the tools above run the same open source engine, so the practical difference between them on a single page is smaller than the marketing suggests. Choosing between automated tools mostly means choosing an interface, a workflow, and a price. It does not mean choosing how much of WCAG gets checked.
One consequence worth stating plainly: a green score in any of these tools, including ours, is not a clean site. It means nothing was found in the part that can be checked automatically.
Where each of these beats us
WAVE, Lighthouse and axe DevTools
They are free. They need no account, no email address and no card. They run in your own browser, so no third party ever sees the page you are testing, which matters if you are checking something behind a login or before launch. They give an answer in seconds rather than in the time it takes us to queue a job. On a single page today, they find what we find.
axe-core in a build pipeline
Running the engine yourself in continuous integration is strictly better than our scheduling if you have a pipeline and someone to look after it, because it catches a regression before it reaches production rather than the next morning. It is free. The only reason not to do it is that many small businesses have no pipeline and nobody to maintain one.
Manual auditors and larger accessibility firms
They cover the 60 to 70 percent that no software reaches. They test with real screen readers and, in the better engagements, with disabled users. They can produce the conformance documentation that procurement asks for, they can remediate the code, and they have been doing it for years with clients who will speak to you. Everything in that list is beyond us.
What we are
A small operation with no manual audit team, no remediation service, no support line and no SLA. Our detection is axe-core, so we do not find more than the free tools find. What we add is that it runs on a schedule and keeps a dated, hash-chained record of every finding and every fix that a third party can verify without us. If you are looking for the most capable accessibility supplier in the market, it is not us and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The one thing we do that the free tools do not
A free scanner tells you the state of a page right now. It does not remember. If a demand letter arrives in October, what helps is being able to show that you found 40 issues in March, fixed 34 by May, and have been scanning weekly since, with a date against every line. That record only exists if something was writing it down the whole time, and it cannot be produced afterwards.
So the product is: the same scan on a schedule, every finding stamped with the date it was first seen, every fix stamped with the date it was confirmed gone, a line when a deploy brings something back, and a dated PDF export of the whole history. Whether that is worth $49 a month depends entirely on whether anyone is ever going to ask you to prove it.
If nobody is going to ask, the honest answer is that you should use a free tool and spend the money elsewhere.
How to choose in thirty seconds
- Checking one page once: WAVE or Lighthouse. Free, now, done.
- A developer fixing things: axe DevTools, and axe-core in your pipeline if you have one.
- You need to know whether the site is genuinely usable: pay a specialist for a manual audit. Nothing automated substitutes for it.
- Somebody is going to ask you to prove what you have done: that is the gap we fill, and it is the only one.
Try ours against whatever you are using
One page, no account, no card. Run the same page through WAVE or Lighthouse and compare the findings. If they disagree with us we would genuinely like to know, because our engine is open source and the disagreement will be a real one rather than a marketing one.
Scan any page, free
Questions
Things people ask when choosing a tool
Which free accessibility checker is best?
For most people, WAVE, because it draws the problems onto the page so you can see what it is talking about. Lighthouse is convenient because it is already in your browser. axe DevTools gives the most precise rule detail once you are actually fixing code. All three are free and there is no reason to pick only one.
My Lighthouse accessibility score is 100. Am I done?
No. A perfect automated score means nothing was found in the 30 to 40 percent of WCAG criteria that automated testing can evaluate. Reading order, alt text quality, error messages, custom widget behaviour and dozens of other criteria are simply not in scope for any automated tool.
Google's own documentation says the automated checks are a subset and that manual testing is still required. It is worth taking that at face value.
Do you find things the free tools miss?
On a single page, no, and we are not going to claim otherwise. We run axe-core, which is the same open source engine several of the free tools use. Where we differ is coverage over time and over pages: we scan on a schedule across the site rather than whenever somebody remembers, and we keep the result.
Why would I pay for something built on a free engine?
For the schedule and the record, or for nothing. The engine is free and you can run it yourself; that is a genuine option and we have said so above. What you are paying for is that it runs without you, that the history is kept in a form you can hand to somebody, and that a regression shows up as a dated line rather than as a surprise.
Can any of these tools tell me if I am compliant?
None of them, including ours. Compliance is a legal judgement about your whole site, made by people, against how real users with disabilities experience it. The FTC imposed a $1,000,000 penalty in April 2025 over a claim that software could deliver it. That is the clearest available answer to this question.
The limits of this
Automated testing detects roughly 30-40% of WCAG success criteria. It cannot determine whether a site is legally compliant, and it is not a substitute for manual review and assistive-technology testing. This report is a record of what automated checks found on the date shown - nothing more, and nothing less.
Descriptions of other people's products here are general and based on what those vendors publish about themselves. They change their tools without telling us, so check their own pages before deciding. Nothing here is legal advice and we are not a law firm.