Alfa vs PDFUA.io Validator
Alfa
github.comPDFUA.io Validator
pdfua.ioSide by side
| Figure | Alfa | PDFUA.io Validator |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 5 |
| Spec score · Accessibility Testing Software | 9.0 (#8) | 7.7 (#113) |
| Company | Siteimprove says it was founded in Denmark in 2003 and lists Copenhagen among its locations. | The site footer says PDFUA.io is built in Canada; the Validator page says it was built by the team behind the PDFUA.io generation engine. |
| Headquarters | Copenhagen, Denmark | Canada |
| Integrations | The integrations repository lists packages for Angular, Chai, Cheerio, Cypress, Jasmine, Jest, jQuery, Playwright, Puppeteer, React, Selenium, Unexpected, Vitest, Vue, and WebdriverIO. | The site names CI pipelines, document-management systems, and users' own apps as API use cases; it does not name specific third-party integrations. |
| Purpose | Alfa is an open, standards-based accessibility conformance testing engine for websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. | The Validator checks PDFs against WCAG 2.1 AA or strict PDF/UA-1 (ISO 14289-1) and keeps audit-ready evidence. |
Plans
PDFUA.io Validator
- Cloud · FreeFree
- Cloud · Starter$19 a month
- Cloud · Growth$49 a month
- Cloud · Pro$249 a month
- Enterprise · On-premise · AgenciesPriced 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.
PDFUA.io Validator
PDFUA.io Validator has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.