Alfa vs Ariada
Alfa
github.com
Ariada
ariada.orgSide by side
| Figure | Alfa | Ariada |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Accessibility Testing Software | 9.0 (#8) | 8.2 (#58) |
| Automated scans | Yes | Yes |
| CI/CD integration | Yes | Yes |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Headquarters | Copenhagen, Denmark | Sweden |
| Integrations | The integrations repository lists packages for Angular, Chai, Cheerio, Cypress, Jasmine, Jest, jQuery, Playwright, Puppeteer, React, Selenium, Unexpected, Vitest, Vue, and WebdriverIO. | The package catalog lists test adapters for Jest, Vitest, Mocha, Playwright, and Cypress. |
| License | Alfa is released under the MIT license. | The modules are free and distributed under the EUPL-1.2 license. |
| Maker | The repository identifies Siteimprove A/S as the copyright holder, and Siteimprove says it was founded in Denmark in 2003. | The site identifies Alexander Brichkin of Agonist Development AB in Sweden as lead maintainer. |
| Purpose | Alfa is an open, standards-based accessibility conformance testing engine for websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. | Ariada publishes open-source accessibility rule packs and tools for scanning websites against WCAG 2.2 AA and European Accessibility Act requirements. |
| Remediation guidance | Yes | Yes |
Plans
In their own words
Alfa
Alfa is a free, open accessibility testing engine for websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It checks pages against accessibility standards such as WCAG, using included rules or pluggable rules in the ACT Rules Format. Developers can add custom rules and filter results by conformance level or WCAG version. Audit output follows the Evaluation and Report Language schema as JSON-LD, and the command-line interface can audit a single page and save results as JSON. Scraper and crawler tools create page representations and discover pages across a site or subdomain. Ready-made integrations cover frameworks and test tools including Angular, React, Vue, Cypress, Jest, Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, and WebdriverIO. Alfa is distributed as separate npm packages under the MIT license. It runs in ECMAScript 2022-compatible JavaScript environments, including recent Node.js and browser versions. Building from source requires Node.js 20 or later and Yarn. The project says most integrations are experimental and may change; older environments may be targetable from source but are not explicitly supported.