accessiBe vs UserWay vs AudioEye: An Honest Head-to-Head

Here’s the short version: accessiBe, UserWay, and AudioEye differ in price, packaging, and track record — but none of the three makes your website ADA compliant, because all three are JavaScript layers that patch your page at load time instead of fixing the code underneath. The differences that actually matter are the ones the vendors’ own comparison pages skip: one of the three is under a $1 million FTC order, and all three showed up in 2025’s lawsuit data.

One more thing before the scorecard. Search this keyword and several of the top results are written by the vendors about each other. Curbcut sells none of these products — we do manual remediation, which competes with the whole overlay category, not any one brand. So treat us as a referee with a declared interest, and check every source we link.

What do accessiBe, UserWay, and AudioEye actually do?

All three are accessibility overlays: you paste one script tag into your site, and it injects a user-facing toolbar plus automated “fixes” — guessed alt text, relabeled buttons, contrast toggles — applied in the browser after the page loads. We cover the mechanics in why overlays don’t work; the one-line summary is that assistive technology reads your real code, and an overlay can only patch what its automation recognizes.

Within that shared architecture, the three position differently:

• accessiBe leans hardest on AI automation. Its flagship accessWidget promises automated remediation driven by machine learning, with pricing tied to your site’s traffic (accessiBe pricing).
• UserWay is the volume player, and since March 2024 it hasn’t been independent: Level Access completed its acquisition of UserWay on March 20, 2024, folding the widget into a larger accessibility-services company.
• AudioEye is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: AEYE) selling a hybrid: automation at the entry tier, human “expert fixes” at higher tiers. Notably, AudioEye’s own plans page describes its automated tier as addressing roughly 50% of accessibility issues — the most honest framing any of the three puts on automation.

The head-to-head comparison

The fourth column is the option every vendor comparison leaves out.

Sources for every row are linked in the sections below.

What does each one cost?

We pulled these from the vendors’ live pricing pages in July 2026; tiers change, so verify before you buy.

accessiBe’s accessWidget runs $490 per year for sites with up to 5,000 monthly visits, $1,490 for up to 30,000, and $3,990 for up to 100,000, with custom enterprise pricing above that — and it measures your traffic using Similarweb data, so you don’t pick your own tier.

UserWay’s widget plans cover sites up to 100,000 page views per month at $490 per year (Pro), $1,190 (Pro Plus), and $2,490 (Ultimate). The tiers differ mainly in support level and how many pages get monitored — 10, 50, or 100 — and every annual plan bundles a “Litigation Support Program,” which tells you something about what buyers are actually worried about.

AudioEye publishes no dollar figures on its plans page — you get three tiers (Basic, Self-Serviced, and Maximum Protection) and a quote form. Third-party trackers like GetApp list AudioEye starting around $49 per month, with managed tiers costing several times that. Opaque pricing on a product sold as a money-saver is worth noticing.

For scale: our ADA compliance cost guide breaks down what one-time manual remediation runs for a typical small-business site. Three years of overlay subscriptions often lands in the same range — without ever fixing the code.

Which vendor has the cleanest legal record?

This is where the three genuinely separate, and it’s the section vendor comparisons omit entirely.

accessiBe is the only one under a federal order. The FTC charged that accessiBe falsely claimed its accessWidget “can make any website compliant with WCAG” and that it dressed up paid reviews as independent opinions (FTC press release, January 2025). The Commission approved the final order in April 2025, requiring accessiBe to pay $1 million and barring the unsupported compliance claims — EcomBack’s summary dates the approval to April 22, 2025. If you’re evaluating the product on the vendor’s marketing, know that a regulator has formally prohibited the central claim.

UserWay has no comparable regulatory action. Its notable event is corporate: the widget business now belongs to Level Access, a large accessibility firm whose core business is audits and human testing. Read that how you like — we read it as the industry’s biggest services company agreeing that widgets alone aren’t the product.

AudioEye has no regulatory action either, and its marketing is measurably more careful — again, its own page caps the automation claim near 50%. But its custom, expert-written fixes are “delivered via AudioEye’s JavaScript that runs in live code,” per AudioEye’s platform page, with deeper source-code issues handed back to your developers as reports. You’re renting the fixes, not owning them.

Do any of them stop ADA lawsuits?

No — and this is measured, not rhetorical. EcomBack’s 2025 annual lawsuit report counted 983 lawsuits filed against websites with an accessibility widget installed — 24.90% of all 3,948 ADA website suits it tracked that year, up from 722 the year before. Its per-vendor breakdown: 424 suits against sites running accessiBe, 273 running UserWay, and 88 running AudioEye.

Before you read that as “AudioEye is five times safer,” a caution: raw counts reflect install base and customer mix, not just product quality. What the data does support is the categorical claim — UsableNet’s analysis of 2025 filings found monthly suits against widget-equipped sites ran steady between 95 and 155 all year, and concluded plainly that “widgets do not materially reduce legal risk.” We unpack the litigation mechanics in our overlay lawsuit breakdown.

The disability community’s verdict matches the docket. The Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by more than 1,000 accessibility professionals, opposes overlay-as-compliance across all brands, and in WebAIM’s practitioner survey, 72% of respondents with disabilities rated overlays “not at all” or “not very” effective. We’ve also tested widgets against a real screen reader ourselves — the patches miss what actual users hit.

So which one should you pick?

If you’re choosing purely among the three: AudioEye is the least-worst option, because it’s the only one whose marketing admits automation’s limits and whose upper tiers put humans on your actual issues. UserWay beats accessiBe on track record at identical entry pricing. accessiBe carries the FTC order and the largest share of 2025’s widget-site lawsuits.

But that’s ranking umbrellas in a house with a leaking roof. All three leave your code exactly as broken as they found it, all three stop “working” the moment you stop paying, and none produces the conformance evidence that helps when a demand letter arrives. Whether overlays work at all has a documented answer, and it doesn’t change with the logo on the widget.

The fourth column is the real answer

The honest comparison isn’t accessiBe vs UserWay vs AudioEye — it’s overlay vs manual remediation. Fixing the actual HTML, ARIA, and components against WCAG 2.1 AA is the one option in the table where the money buys a durable asset: a site that works in a screen reader, passes a plaintiff-style test, and stays yours after the last invoice.

That’s the work Curbcut does — audit, fix the source, document conformance. If you’re deciding between these three widgets right now, spend ten minutes first seeing what any of them would be papering over: run a free accessibility scan and look at your code’s actual state before you subscribe to anything.