Alfa vs Total Validator

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.

Total Validator is a freemium tool for checking website accessibility, HTML, CSS, broken links and spelling. Automated accessibility checks cover WCAG 2.2, 2.1 and 2.0, US Section 508 and ARIA standards. It validates HTML and XHTML against W3C and WHATWG standards, and CSS against W3C standards. The product runs through web, Windows, macOS, Linux, an API and a browser extension, with CI/CD integration. Jenkins, Team City and Selenium can call the CI version, which also provides a Web API. Remediation guidance is included. Pro can test authenticated pages, intranets, private websites and JavaScript-generated DOMs through browser extensions, while returning results locally for security. The free Test version shows only a one-page issue summary. Basic handles one page at a time; whole-site and multiple-site validation are Pro features. Manual review tools and mobile testing are not provided.