Looking for a free Markup.io alternative? Markup.io discontinued its free tier in early 2025 and moved Pro from $29 to $79 per month, and a lot of teams went shopping after that change landed. Below are the strongest options as of September 2026, ranked by how cleanly they replace the core Markup.io workflow: visual feedback on live websites with link-based sharing.
That pricing move is worth sitting with for a second, because it's the whole reason this page exists. A team that built its review process around Markup.io's free plan didn't choose to start paying $79 a month; the plan they were on simply stopped existing. That's a different kind of risk than a price increase, and it's part of why MarkLayer has no paid tier at all to eventually discontinue a free one into.
The five options below split into two groups. MarkLayer is the direct free replacement for Markup.io's core job: annotate a live page, share a link, no account on either side. PageProofer, BugHerd, and Pastel are the paid routes, each replacing a different piece of what a project-based platform like Markup.io offered beyond plain annotation, staging-site workflows, ticket tracking, or agency-grade client review. Hypothesis sits outside both groups entirely, since it annotates text in documents rather than a page's visual layout.
MarkLayer is the closest free, no-sign-up replacement for Markup.io if all you need is visual feedback on live pages. PageProofer, BugHerd, and Pastel are paid options that add agency workflow features. Hypothesis is free but text-only.
| Option | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| MarkLayer | Free. No tiers, no seats | Anyone who wants the core Markup.io use case (live webpage feedback) without sign-up or fees. |
| PageProofer | Not tracked | Teams already comfortable with a paid SaaS workflow. |
| BugHerd | No free plan. Standard $50/month (5 members); extra seats $8 each | Teams that need full bug-tracking workflow, not just feedback. |
| Pastel | Free plan (1 user, 1 canvas); Pro $29–35/month; Team from $99/month + $24 per extra seat | Agencies running structured client review cycles. |
| Hypothesis | Free | Scholarly or text-heavy annotation, not UI feedback. |
Free and open source, with nothing to install: paste any URL at marklayer.app, annotate the live page with drawings, comments, arrows, and highlights, then share a link. Recipients need no install and no account, and real-time live cursors show reviewers working the page at the same time instead of leaving comments async. There is no paid tier to upgrade to, ever. Annotations are cleaned up 90 days after their last activity, and any comment or view resets that clock.
Visual feedback on staging sites with sticky-note style comments, closer to Markup.io's own project-review shape than the other options here. There's no permanent free plan, just a 15-day trial, and pricing scales by user count rather than a flat rate.
A visual bug tracker built around a Kanban board and integrations into Jira, GitHub, Trello, and Asana, so a piece of feedback becomes a tracked task rather than a comment thread. No free plan; Standard runs $50/month for 5 members.
A polished visual-feedback platform built for agency client review, with branded canvases and version tracking. The free plan is limited to 1 user and 1 canvas; paid plans start at $29/month for Pro.
A free, open-source W3C-standard text annotation layer for highlighting and commenting on articles and PDFs, not for drawing on a live page's UI. Genuinely free, but the wrong shape if what you need is visual feedback on a webpage's layout.
Paste any URL at marklayer.app and annotate the live page in your browser. No install, no account, no sign-up. Recipients of your share links don't need to install anything either.
Annotate a page