Free vs Paid Accessibility Scanners: What You Actually Get
Comparing free WCAG scanners against paid audits. When the free tool is enough, and when you actually need to pay a human auditor.
Free vs Paid Accessibility Scanners: What You Actually Get
A quick search for "accessibility scanner" returns about 30 free tools and 200 paid services. The differences are not always obvious. Here is what each tier actually does, and when you need which.
Free automated scanners
Tools like our EAA Scanner, axe DevTools, Lighthouse, and Wave all run the same underlying engine — typically axe-core, an open-source library maintained by Deque Systems.
What they catch:
- Missing alt text
- Low color contrast
- Form fields without labels
- Empty links and buttons
- Missing document language
- Heading structure issues
- ARIA misuse
- Image map problems
What they do not catch:
- Whether your alt text actually describes the image meaningfully
- Whether your color choices work for color-blind users (only ratio is checked)
- Whether your keyboard focus order matches the visual reading order
- Whether your screen-reader announcements make sense in context
- Whether your video content has proper audio description
- Whether your CAPTCHA is accessible
A free scanner catches roughly 30–40% of all WCAG 2.1 AA violations. The rest require human judgment.
Paid automated scanners
Tools like Accessibility Insights, Siteimprove, and Level Access add:
- Continuous monitoring (run every day, alert on regressions)
- Multi-page crawling (not just one URL)
- Role-based reporting (developer view vs executive view)
- Trend tracking over time
- Integration with CI/CD pipelines
These are useful for large enterprises with hundreds of pages and dedicated accessibility teams. For a small business with a 5–10 page marketing site, they are overkill.
Human audits
A certified accessibility consultant will:
- Run automated scans to catch the easy stuff
- Manually test with screen readers (NVDA, VoiceOver, JAWS)
- Test keyboard navigation end-to-end
- Review your content for cognitive accessibility
- Interview users with disabilities (sometimes)
- Produce a VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) or ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report)
- Sign off on a remediation plan with prioritized fixes
This is what you need if:
- You are responding to an EAA complaint or fine
- You are bidding on public-sector contracts (most require VPAT)
- Your site has complex user flows (checkout, booking, dashboards)
- You are in a high-risk industry (banking, healthcare, government)
Cost: €1,500–€8,000 for a small business site. We currently run a founding-client rate of €197 through Q3 2026 for qualifying businesses.
When the free tool is enough
If your site is a simple marketing site (under 30 pages), no checkout flow, no complex forms, and you just want to make sure you are not going to get hit with a complaint — the free tool is enough.
Run it today. Fix what it flags. Re-run it in a month. You will catch 70%+ of the stuff that triggers complaints.
When you need to pay
If you have any of the following, you need a paid audit:
- A complex user flow (multi-step checkout, account creation, booking)
- Public-sector clients requiring VPAT
- A complaint or letter from a regulator already
- A site in a regulated industry (banking, healthcare, education, government)
- More than 50 pages
In those cases, the free tool is a good first pass to find obvious issues, but you will need a human sign-off.
The honest answer
Most businesses should start with the free scanner, fix what it finds, and only pay for a human audit if they need the VPAT, are responding to a complaint, or have a complex flow.
The free tool at [growifysupport.online/compliance/scan](https://growifysupport.online/compliance/scan/) gives you a WCAG 2.1 AA score plus a fix list in 30 seconds. No signup. Try it before you spend anything.
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