MarkLayer has no sign-up, which is the whole point, but it also means there is no inbox of past work to fall back on. This guide answers the questions that come up in the first five minutes: where your marks are stored, what survives closing the tab, and how to find the link again.
I make one of the tools in this table, so read the table before you read me. Twenty-one tools that let someone comment on a live webpage, compared on four things: what the cheapest paid plan costs, whether the reviewer needs an account, whether the reviewer needs a browser extension, and what happens to the comments afterwards. Every figure was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 29 August 2026.
To annotate a website you have four options: mark up a capture using tools already on your computer, install a browser extension that draws on the live page, open the page through a web annotator and send someone the link, or use your browser's developer tools. Which one is right turns almost entirely on whether anyone else has to reply. I make one of the tools mentioned below, and it is named as one option inside one method rather than as the answer.
Most "free website annotation tool" lists are padded with free trials. This one audits what each free tier actually includes, checked against the vendors' own pricing pages in August 2026.
The fastest way to lose a review round is to put a signup form in front of the reviewer. Most feedback tools solved half of this: the reviewer gets guest access, while the person running the review still needs an account, a workspace, and a plan. Here is who requires what, audited in August 2026.
Markup.io ran one of the best-known free tiers in visual feedback until early 2025, when the free plan was discontinued and Pro rose from $29 to $79 per month. This page tracks the current published pricing and the practical options for teams the change displaced, verified against markup.io's pricing page in August 2026.
An MCP server lets an AI coding agent read your bug reports and annotations directly, instead of you pasting screenshots into a chat. Five visual-feedback tools ship one as of August 2026. They differ on the question that matters: can the agent only read the feedback, or can it work the feedback?
An AI coding agent cannot see your screen, so the usual workaround is a paragraph describing which element is wrong, or a screenshot it reads imprecisely. Connecting it to a MarkLayer room instead gives it the actual annotation: the instruction, the CSS selector, and the element context, plus a way to mark its own progress that the human reviewer sees update live on the page. Claude Code has the shortest path in (one CLI command); Codex, Cursor, and Windsurf take the same server through their own config file.
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