Alfa vs Axe Developer Hub
Alfa
github.com
Axe Developer Hub
deque.comSide by side
| Figure | Alfa | Axe Developer Hub |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · Accessibility Testing Software | 9.0 (#8) | 8.8 (#16) |
| Automated scans | Yes | Yes |
| CI/CD integration | Yes | Yes |
| Company | Siteimprove says it was founded in Denmark in 2003 and lists Copenhagen among its locations. | Deque Systems is headquartered at 13800 Coppermine Road, Herndon, Virginia 20171, and its founder says he started the company in 1999. |
| Founded | 2003 | 1999 |
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Headquarters | Copenhagen, Denmark | Herndon, Virginia, United States |
| Integrations | The integrations repository lists packages for Angular, Chai, Cheerio, Cypress, Jasmine, Jest, jQuery, Playwright, Puppeteer, React, Selenium, Unexpected, Vitest, Vue, and WebdriverIO. | Test results can be sent from Axe Watcher, Axe DevTools for Web APIs or CLI, and Axe DevTools for Mobile; GitHub Actions can show results in pull requests. |
| Purpose | Alfa is an open, standards-based accessibility conformance testing engine for websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. | Axe Developer Hub collects and reports accessibility test results from websites and apps so teams can review issues and track results over time. |
| Remediation guidance | Yes | Yes |
Plans
Axe Developer Hub
- FreeFree
- Paid (Axe DevTools for Web subscription)Priced on request
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.
Axe Developer Hub
Axe Developer Hub adds automated accessibility checks to end-to-end tests and produces reports with deduplicated findings, remediation guidance, and progress tracking. It covers WCAG 2.2 and supports Selenium-based Java tests as well as JavaScript or TypeScript frameworks including Cypress, Playwright, Puppeteer, and WebdriverIO. Teams can standardize rules and selectively enable or pause checks. In CI/CD workflows, checks can identify new issues and block pull requests when problems arise. Integrations include GitHub Actions, GitLab, CircleCI, Jenkins, and Bitbucket. The Hub is available as SaaS or on premises; the on-premise option keeps data on customer servers, but the website, user management, and Axe Watcher are not supported there. Projects have member and admin roles. The product is included in the Axe DevTools for Web bundle and is not sold separately. Its free plan is free with one API key; the paid bundle’s pricing is on request and includes unlimited API keys per licensed subscriber.