Three audit engines · every WCAG 2.1 AA criterion has an evaluation path
53 features. One honest audit.
Three engines look at your site at once — the axe-core 4.11.4 rules engine, twelve wcagcheckr DOM analyzers, and AI that walks the criteria no rules engine can. Most tools run axe alone and stop there. We don’t. Free gives you 26 of the 53, and it genuinely finds your issues and shows the fixes — not crippleware, not a teaser for the paid thing.
Here’s the whole thing, laid out plainly — every feature, and exactly which side of the line it sits on. No “contact us to find out,” no fine print. The capped rows tell you where Free stops and Paid keeps going.
Prefer to see it? Walk through every feature with real screenshots from the live extension in the visual tutorials — Free and Paid.
Always-on core
In every tier, Free included — the capabilities that make people switch to us. No competitor ships these at any price.
| Feature | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-state matrix audit Your bugs hide in the states a single scan never reaches — hover, focus, disabled, dark mode, every breakpoint. axe-core (and every scanner) evaluates the DOM as served — one snapshot, one state. We drive each component through 30+ of them and run axe-core at every one. | configurable preset | full matrix |
| Delta-only reporting Audit twice and most tools hand you the same 400 problems again. We baseline every component and show you only what’s new — fix forward, not in circles. | 3 baselines / component | unlimited |
| Per-component scorecard Every component graded on its own, plus your site’s posture at a glance. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full WCAG 2.1 Level AA coverage Every WCAG 2.1 Level AA criterion — the standard US courts and the EU’s EAA actually use — has an evaluation path: axe-core 4.11.4 (pinned) plus twelve analyzers we built ourselves (reading-order, tab-order, typography, reflow, tokens, theme-awareness, pixel-contrast, ARIA APG, consent banners, screen-reader emulation, APCA contrast). | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audit modes Pick one element, scan the whole page, or get a ~1-second markup-only read. | ✓ | ✓ |
| 3-layer verdict taxonomy Automation, AI, and human grading roll into one honest grade — a single C knocks you off an A. | ✓ | ✓ |
Site owner & lawfare
Exposure, not WCAG jargon. A grade and a fix list.
| Feature | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Lawsuit-target safety grade One letter — A to F — tells you whether you’re on the demand-letter scanners’ radar. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Risk dashboard Your exposure, posture, and trend across every page you’ve checked, in one view. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Status badge An embeddable badge that shows your grade — a public commitment, not a sticker. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Owner report export A report you can actually read — plain language, no WCAG jargon. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-page site crawl Audit your whole site in one pass, not page by page. | 35 pages | unlimited |
| Scheduled audits Set it and forget it — recurring audits that catch problems the day they appear. | 2 schedules | unlimited |
| Email alerts An email the moment something new breaks. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Webhook alerts Pipe new-violation events into Slack, your tooling, anywhere. | ✓ | ✓ |
Developer & agency
Real audit power, automation, and exportable deliverables.
| Feature | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Visualizer overlays (8) Eight overlays — outline, reading-order, tab-order, target-size, badges, heatmap, highlighter, and a 12-mode vision simulator. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Flow recorder + player Record a click-path once, replay it to audit the same flow every release. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Intelligent Guided Tests Guided steps for the manual checks no scanner can do for you. | ✓ | ✓ |
| AX-tree viewer See exactly what assistive tech sees, live. | ✓ | ✓ |
| WCAG 3 readiness preview See where you’ll stand when WCAG 3 lands. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Storybook auto-iterate One click audits every story in your design system, across states. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Issue trackers File straight to GitHub, GitLab, Jira, or Azure DevOps in one click. | ✓ | ✓ |
| CLI runner (@wcag-checkr/ci) Drop it in CI — SARIF + JUnit output, fails the build on the threshold you set. | ✓ | ✓ |
| VS Code extension Audit URLs and verify forensic logs without leaving the editor. | ✓ | ✓ |
| DevTools custom panel Inspect findings without leaving DevTools. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cloud sync Baselines and dismissals follow you across devices — team-shared on Paid. | your devices | team-shared |
| Parallel scan Runs the state matrix across hidden tabs at once — big sites, far faster. | — | ✓ |
| All-frames audit Audits every iframe on the page, not just the top one. | — | ✓ |
| Design-system / token audit Token-aware grouping — fix a design-system violation once, not on every page it touches. | — | ✓ |
| Custom rules DSL Write your own axe rules to enforce your design system. | — | ✓ |
| MCP server (@wcag-checkr/mcp) Hand your audit to Claude or Cursor — JSON-RPC tools for LLM IDEs. | — | ✓ |
| Auto-export after audit Every scheduled audit exports itself, in the format you pick. | — | ✓ |
AI suite
Paid-only. All AI features use your own Anthropic API key — you pay only for the calls you make.
| Feature | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| AI per-finding judges (9) Nine judges catch what axe can’t — empty alt text, vague headings, color-only meaning, generic links, walls of text, and more. | — | ✓ |
| AI walkthroughs (6 criteria) AI walks the six criteria no rules engine can test — focus order, keyboard traps, reading order, and the rest. | — | ✓ |
| AI Copilot Ask questions about your own audit — chat grounded in your real findings. | — | ✓ |
| AI color-fix suggester Replacement colors that hit WCAG 2.1 AA contrast and still look like your brand. | — | ✓ |
| AI compliance summary Executive-ready prose, written from your audit — no blank page. | — | ✓ |
| AI incomplete-element resolver Clears the “needs review” pile — AI adjudicates the calls axe can’t. | — | ✓ |
| AI consistency suppression Learns your false positives once and stops flagging them site-wide. | — | ✓ |
PDF accessibility
Paid-only. Nobody else does PDF accessibility in a Chrome extension at all.
| Feature | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| PDF accessibility audit (PDF/UA-1) The accessibility your PDFs are missing — 11 rules across structure, visual, and AI quality. | — | ✓ |
Legal, forensic & compliance evidence
Court-defensible evidence and regulator-ready documents — the deliverables that used to mean a four-figure outsourced VPAT.
| Feature | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Local forensic audit log An append-only, SHA-256-hashed history — tamper-evident proof of what you checked, and when. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Court-grade evidence anchor An RFC-3161 timestamp and ed25519 receipt on every audit — proof a third party can verify. | — | ✓ |
| WCAG-EM formal conformance report A formal conformance report in the W3C’s own methodology. | — | ✓ |
| Anchored WCAG-EM report The same formal report, sealed with a verifiable server receipt. | — | ✓ |
| VPAT export The conformance document procurement asks for — generated, not outsourced. | — | ✓ |
| Defense bundle export A litigation-ready dossier of your audit. | — | ✓ |
| Evidence bundle export A plain-evidence package for pre-litigation review. | — | ✓ |
| Deposition packet export A chain-of-custody packet, forensic-anchored, ready for deposition. | — | ✓ |
| Methodology doc export The expert-witness “here’s how we audited” document. | — | ✓ |
| Conformance crosswalk Maps your results across WCAG, EN 301 549, Section 508, ADA, EAA, and AODA. | — | ✓ |
| EAA / WAD statement generator The EU-compliant accessibility statement the EAA now requires. | — | ✓ |
| Pre-litigation report A forensic summary across audits — what your attorney hands the other side. | — | ✓ |
| Executive report A single-page PDF for the people who sign off. | — | ✓ |
| AI prompt-bundle exports (3) Ready-to-paste prompts that tell ChatGPT or Claude exactly what to fix. | — | ✓ |
Standard exports
Drop into any CI pipeline or report — all free.
| Feature | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| JSON export Every finding, raw. | ✓ | ✓ |
| SARIF export Annotates your GitHub pull requests. | ✓ | ✓ |
| JUnit XML export Shows up as CI test results. | ✓ | ✓ |
| HTML print export A clean, printable report. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Developer remediation letter A plain-language letter your dev team will actually act on. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ticket bundle Markdown tickets, ready to paste into Linear or Jira. | ✓ | ✓ |
A few things worth saying plainly: AI features use your Anthropic API key, so you pay only for the calls you actually make — no metered markup from us. axe-core is pinned at 4.11.4 so every audit is reproducible. And the JetBrains and CMS plugins you may have seen mentioned elsewhere aren’t shipping yet — so they’re not on this list. We only sell what’s built.
That’s the whole product. Nothing behind a curtain.
No locked door you can’t see behind, no surprise at checkout — because there is no checkout. Install it free, run it on your real pages, and unlock the rest from inside the app if and when the evidence is worth it to you.