Alfa vs BAAT
Alfa
github.com
BAAT
tools.caat.reportSide by side
| Figure | Alfa | BAAT |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Accessibility Testing Software | 9.0 (#8) | 7.1 (#157) |
| Automated scans | Yes | Yes |
| CI/CD integration | Yes | No |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Headquarters | Copenhagen, Denmark | The maker's legal notice lists mindscreen GmbH at Nymphenburger Straße 147, 80634 München. |
| License | Alfa is released under the MIT license. | The BAAT GitHub repository identifies its license as MIT. |
| Maker | The repository identifies Siteimprove A/S as the copyright holder, and Siteimprove says it was founded in Denmark in 2003. | The BAAT page says it is developed by mindscreen. |
| Purpose | Alfa is an open, standards-based accessibility conformance testing engine for websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. | BAAT runs automated accessibility tests on websites directly in the browser. |
| Results | Alfa produces audit results in the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) Schema encoded as JSON-LD. | BAAT describes errors with short descriptions and tags them by severity. |
| Rules | Alfa accepts pluggable rule implementations in the ACT Rules Format and includes a set of WCAG-based rules. | BAAT uses axe-core and supports custom rulesets based on axe-core. |
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.