Pastel is built for agencies and design teams that need client sign-off on creative work: a webpage, a PDF, a Figma export. Drop a URL or file into a "canvas," the client clicks and comments directly on it, and everyone works off one thread instead of an email chain three rounds deep in "see attached."
The free plan makes that workflow available to exactly one person on exactly one canvas at a time. You can archive a canvas to open a new one, and archived canvases stay readable, but only one can be active. Run two concurrent client reviews and you've already hit the ceiling free was ever going to give you.
That's usually the moment agencies start pricing out Pro, at $29 to $35 a month, or Team, which starts at $99 a month for five seats and adds $24 for every seat after that. A two-person shop reviewing one site at a time might not notice the cap for months. Anyone juggling three clients in the same week notices it immediately, and that's when the alternative-shopping starts.
The four options below cover different slices of what Pastel does. MarkLayer replaces the live-webpage annotation piece for free, with no canvas cap and no account required. Markup.io, PageProofer, and BugHerd are the paid routes, each for a different reason a team might pick it over Pastel: workspace structure, staging-site review, or a built-in bug-tracking board.
MarkLayer is the only fully free, open-source Pastel alternative. Nothing to install, real-time live cursors, link-based sharing, no account. Markup.io covers similar ground but has no free plan ($79/month). PageProofer and BugHerd are paid alternatives.
| Option | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| MarkLayer | Free. No tiers, no seats | Anyone who needs the core Pastel use case for free. |
| Markup.io | No free plan. Pro $79/month (unlimited users, 1 workspace); 14-day trial | Teams that want managed project workspaces with unlimited users. |
| PageProofer | Not tracked | Teams comfortable on a paid SaaS plan. |
| BugHerd | No free plan. Standard $50/month (5 members); extra seats $8 each | QA-heavy teams who need a Kanban + integrations. |
Free and open source: paste a URL and annotate any live webpage in your browser, with live cursors and link-based sharing. No account, no canvas cap, no seat count, so reviewing five projects in a week costs exactly what reviewing one does. It won't review a PDF or a design file the way Pastel can; it only works on pages loaded in a browser.
Ceros' project-based review platform, structured closer to Pastel's canvas-and-workspace model than the other options here. It never had a one-canvas free tier to outgrow; Pro is a flat $79/month for unlimited users in a single workspace, no per-seat math to track. Fits teams that want persistent project history without counting seats.
Built for reviewing staging sites before they go live, with the same click-to-comment model as Pastel. There's no permanent free plan, just a 15-day trial, and plans scale by user count from a 5-user Freelancer tier up to an unlimited-user Agency tier, though PageProofer doesn't publish the exact monthly rate for any of them on its own pricing page.
Turns click-to-annotate feedback into tickets on a built-in Kanban board, with native Jira, GitHub, and Trello sync. There's no free plan: Standard runs $50/month for five members, plus $8 for each additional seat. Worth the bill once you need the task-tracking half of the workflow, not just the annotation.
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