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SPECIFICTION
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Alfa vs elio

Alfa

github.com

elio

elio-fm.github.io

Side by side

FigureAlfaelio
Price fromFreeFree
Free planYesYes
Free trial——
Open source——
WebYes—
WindowsYesYes
macOSYesYes
LinuxYesYes
APIYes—
Self-hostedYesYes
Plans published11
Spec score · Terminal File Managers9.1 (#1)8.5 (#5)
Spec score · File managers8.2 (#15)8.2 (#13)
PurposeAlfa is an open, standards-based accessibility conformance testing engine for websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.elio is a terminal file manager with rich previews, inline images, bulk actions, and trash support.

Plans

Alfa

  • AlfaFree

Alfa pricing →

elio

  • elioFree

elio pricing →

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.

Visit github.com

elio

elio is a free, open-source terminal file manager for Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted use. Its Places, Files, and Preview panes offer grid and list views, with keyboard and mouse navigation. It previews text, code, documents, archives, media, and other file types; supported terminals can display images inline. File operations include creating and extracting common archives, finding duplicates, and trashing, restoring, or permanently deleting items. Remote file access is supported. Shell wrappers for bash, zsh, fish, and Nushell can return the shell to the browsed directory when elio closes, and an optional zoxide integration opens a picker using recorded directory history. It works without extra preview tools; optional Poppler, FFmpeg, resvg, and 7-Zip tools add preview and archive capabilities. Installation methods are listed for several Linux distributions, macOS through Homebrew, FreeBSD, and Cargo. elio can be configured as a file chooser on Linux and FreeBSD.

Visit elio-fm.github.io