Most people have acknowledged him as the best ever, with everybody else jockeying to try to match his achievements.
The problem is that the game has changed so much as to be unrecognisable from the days he was competing in, so you can't make a realistic comparison of the two, it's like comparing Pogačar and Vingegaard to Coppi and Bartali, or today's F1 drivers to those who competed in the age when death was a constant spectre. The record keeping from back then is less reliable, the Brazilian teams made a lot of their money with European invitational tours, there was no unified Brazilian national championship for much of his career, there were fewer World Cup matches, but fewer competitive teams at said World Cups, and also the balls they used, the boots they had to wear, the pitches they played on and what the defenders were allowed to do were simply incomparable to today. Simultaneously the loyalties in terms of the national leagues were far stronger and the amount of times you truly saw the best compete against the best in the kind of globetrotting superteams that make up the elite levels today was far lower in those days, such that to be honest, I think that helps Pelé retain an aura that many subsequent stars can't - and likely never will - quite replicate, because with the spread of coverage and the concentration of almost all the biggest stars into a small number of teams and leagues, you can see them do their thing week in, week out which, unless you lived in or around Santos, was never possible with Pelé. The opportunity of seeing Messi play doesn't seem special, doesn't seem exciting, because he's been playing La Liga - broadcast worldwide weekly, especially the biggest teams - and the Champions' League every season for the last fifteen years.
The other thing is the fact that Pelé came along at a time when football was still experimenting; the traditional W-M formation was just starting to change, different styles in different nations were still much more broadly differentiated from one another than today, and of course, you can only be the first one once. Back in those days, players just got their jerseys, #1 to #11, based on their position, and it was only later with World Cup squad numbers that you saw any iconic players with a number above that (Johan Cruyff with #14 is probably the first); to this day these jerseys come with a greater level of prestige and desirability due to the immediate implication of being in the first team.
The world has seen many iconic stars who have become synonymous with the #10 jersey - and with Maradona and Messi you named two of them - but coming at the start of the televised World Cup age and being the biggest star and the main attraction within the team regarded as the unmissable greatest show on earth, Pelé is the largest part of why that particular jersey has such prestige, and no amount of veneration or stat-watching built around a collection of more recent club trophies that Pelé never had available to him will ever be able to change that.
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