Comparison
CommonLook alternative: throughput instead of certification
| CommonLook (Allyant) | Taggart | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Allyant (USA) | Codama |
| Platforms | Windows (Acrobat plug-in) | Any modern browser; macOS, Windows and Linux |
| Price | On request quoted per seat; historically in the USD 1,000+ range | USD 29/mo or 290/yr Solo, single seat; validation free and unlimited |
| Free checking | No | Yes — unlimited, no page cap, no account |
| Hebrew / Arabic reading order | Not handled | Detects visual-order storage and repairs it to logical order |
| Appearance guarantee | Not published | Every fix re-rendered and compared at SSIM ≥ 0.999 |
| Remediation report | Yes, certification-oriented | PDF and JSON, with a timestamped log of every human decision |
What CommonLook (Allyant) does well
- The name procurement officers recognise, with a long Section 508 track record
- Rigorous, checklist-driven workflow that produces defensible evidence
- Backed by a services arm for overflow work
Where it leaves you
- Requires Acrobat Pro, so you pay for two products
- Windows only
- The workflow is thorough but slow; it is built around certification, not throughput
Rigour and throughput are different products
CommonLook is a checklist made into software. It walks every checkpoint, requires an answer, and produces a record. Organisations whose primary risk is an audit — federal contractors, large universities, anyone with a VPAT obligation — are buying exactly that, and they are right to.
The cost is speed. The workflow is designed so you cannot go fast, because going fast is how certifications become wrong.
Taggart optimises the other end. Find everything mechanically, fix the mechanical majority in one pass with a diff and an undo, and put only the genuine judgement calls in front of the person — with the page region highlighted and the decision recorded. The output is the same kind of evidence; the path there is shorter.
Where CommonLook wins
Name recognition in procurement. If your buyer has heard of one PDF accessibility tool, it is this one. That is worth something real.
Process discipline. The forced-march checklist genuinely catches things a faster workflow misses, particularly on the human-judgement conditions that a validator cannot decide at all.
A services arm. Allyant will take the overflow. Taggart is software; when you run out of hours, you run out of hours.
Where Taggart wins
Platform and price. Browser-based, no Acrobat dependency, a published price you can read without a sales call.
Right-to-left. CommonLook has no visual-order detection for Hebrew or Arabic. Why that matters →
The appearance guarantee. Every remediated file is re-rendered and compared to the original at SSIM ≥ 0.999. Nobody else publishes this, and once you have had a tool reflow a client’s document you will understand why it is on every page of this site.
The honest summary
CommonLook is built for organisations whose primary risk is an audit. Taggart is built for the person who has to get through the backlog before the audit happens — and produces a report they can hand over afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
Does Taggart produce Section 508 certification?
No tool certifies anything; certification is a statement a person or an organisation makes. What Taggart produces is the evidence behind such a statement: every finding, every fix, every accepted item with its justification, every human decision with a timestamp and an actor, and the SHA-256 of the input and output files.
Our procurement specifies CommonLook by name. What do we do?
Buy CommonLook. A named requirement in a contract is not something a comparison page should talk you out of. Where Taggart may still help is upstream — the free validator will tell you how much work each document needs before it enters the process.
Does CommonLook need Acrobat?
The main product is an Acrobat plug-in, so yes: you pay for Acrobat Pro and CommonLook. Taggart runs in a browser and does not require Acrobat, though you will keep Acrobat for everything else a PDF needs.
Is CommonLook more rigorous?
Its workflow is more rigorous — it walks you through a checklist and will not let you skip. That is exactly right for a certification process and exactly wrong when you have 400 documents and a deadline. Different tools for different weeks.
Try it against the same file. Taggart's validator is free and unlimited, so you can run your own document through both and compare the findings before deciding anything.
Prices are as published by each vendor and were last checked on . Where a vendor does not publish a price we say so rather than guess. Taggart is not affiliated with Allyant (USA).