If you've searched for "Aligno" and landed here, this is the Aligno you're looking for.

Aligno (aligno.io) is a design feedback and client approval tool built for freelancers and agencies. It is not aligno.be, the Belgian consulting firm, and it is not AlignoAI. The Aligno described on this page is a purpose-built product for collecting structured client feedback on designs and getting clear, documented sign-off.

This post explains what Aligno does, who it's built for, how a typical review actually plays out from upload to approval, and how the tool compares to other options in the design review market.

What Aligno Does

At its core, the Aligno design feedback workflow has five steps:

Upload your design. Drop in an image file (PNG, JPG, WebP, or GIF), a PDF, a video (MP4, MOV, WebM), or paste a live webpage URL. The Aligno app supports all four asset types in a single project, so mixed-format reviews work without switching tools.
Share a link with your client. Aligno generates a unique, shareable review link for each asset. You copy it and send it however you already reach that client, most often email or Slack. No special invite flow is required.
Clients leave pinned comments and markup. Clients click anywhere on the design to drop a comment pin, or draw a box, arrow, or freehand mark. The mark is anchored to that exact spot, so "top-left logo feels too big" is attached to the top-left logo, not floating in a text thread somewhere. Clients need no Aligno account to do this.
Clients approve or request changes. At the end of the review, clients click Approve or Request Changes. This creates an explicit, timestamped record of the decision. There is no ambiguity about whether the round is closed.
Designers track status across projects. Your Aligno dashboard shows every project and every asset with its current approval status. You can see at a glance what is approved, what has open feedback, and what is still waiting on a client response.

That is the complete loop: share, comment, decide, track. The Aligno tool is intentionally focused on this loop and does not try to be a project manager, a design editor, or a file hosting service.

The Problem Aligno Solves

Design feedback has a habit of scattering. It shows up in email replies, Slack threads, screenshots with a red circle drawn on them, and comments left directly in a design file, often attached to the wrong version. Collecting opinions is rarely the hard part of a review round. Reaching a clear, defensible moment where the client has actually signed off is.

That gap is what Aligno closes. Instead of asking a client to describe feedback in words precise enough for someone else to act on correctly, they mark the exact spot on the design and the comment stays anchored there for the life of that asset. Instead of an approval that only exists as an email saying "looks good, thanks," Aligno records a specific decision, tied to a specific version, with a timestamp attached. When a client later disputes whether they signed off on something, you have an answer instead of a guess.

How a Typical Review Cycle Works, Start to Finish

The five-step version above is accurate, but it helps to see how the steps connect on an actual project.

Say you just finished a homepage design and want feedback before moving on to the rest of the site. You upload the image to a project in Aligno. If that same project also includes a PDF style guide or a staged website URL, those live alongside it as separate assets, each with its own viewer built for that format.

Next you generate a share link. If the project involves anything sensitive, a pitch deck under NDA, or a redesign that shouldn't be public before launch, you can add a password to the link and set an expiration date before sending it. Otherwise, you just send the link as it is.

The client opens the link directly. There is no account to create and no app to install. If you set a password, they enter it once; if you didn't, they land straight in the review. They click on the parts of the design they want to discuss and drop a pin, or draw a box, arrow, or freehand mark, at that spot. On a video asset, the pin attaches to a timestamp on the timeline instead of a location on the frame. On a PDF, the pin knows which page it belongs to. Comments support threaded replies, so you can ask a clarifying question on a specific pin and the client answers in that same thread rather than starting a new email chain.

You find out about new feedback as it happens. Aligno emails you when a client comments, replies, approves, or requests changes, and you can switch each of those notification types on or off independently in your settings. Teams that live in Slack can connect it instead and get the same activity posted into a channel, and Figma users can pull frames directly into Aligno as review assets rather than exporting images by hand. You can also send the same events into Zapier and thousands of other apps, or build on the REST API directly.

When the client is satisfied, they click Approve. That decision is timestamped and tied to the exact version they reviewed. If you later upload a revised version, the earlier comments and the earlier approval stay attached to the version they belong to, so nobody has to guess which round a given note came from. That is the whole loop, and it repeats the same way whether it's round one or round five.

Who Aligno Is For

Aligno is built for two audiences.

Freelance Designers

If you work solo and manage client rounds yourself, Aligno removes the back-and-forth email problem. Clients get a clean, professional review experience. You get feedback in one place and a clear approval record at the end of every round. See our design approval workflow for freelancers page for a full breakdown of how Aligno fits a freelance practice.

The Aligno app is particularly useful when you are juggling multiple clients at once. Instead of hunting through inboxes to figure out where each project stands, your dashboard gives you a live status view. Approved, pending, or changes requested, you see it all in one place.

Agencies and Small Teams

Agencies dealing with multiple clients across multiple projects face a coordination problem that email makes worse, not better. Feedback gets fragmented. Junior designers receive conflicting notes. Account managers spend time chasing approvals instead of moving work forward.

The Aligno design feedback workflow scales to agency use without requiring every stakeholder to create accounts, learn a new platform, or change how they communicate. Clients still get a simple link. Internally, the team sees consolidated comments, round history, and approval status. Visit the client feedback tool for agencies page for more on how Aligno works in a team context.

What Makes Aligno Different

There are several design review tools on the market. Here is what sets the Aligno tool apart.

No Client Login Required

This is the most common feedback we hear from new users: clients can leave pinned comments and submit approvals without creating an account. No signup friction means clients actually use the review link instead of emailing you a screenshot with a red circle on it.

Explicit Approval States

Most collaboration tools stop at comments. The Aligno app goes one step further by capturing an explicit decision at the end of each review round. "Approved" means approved, with a timestamp and the client's name attached. "Request Changes" means another round is needed. This distinction matters when you are invoicing, closing projects, or managing scope creep.

Images, PDFs, Video, and Live Webpages

Many tools handle one asset type well. Aligno handles four. A typical agency project might include logo files (images), a brand guidelines document (PDF), a motion clip (video), and a staging website URL (webpage). Aligno design feedback works across all of them in the same project, with pinned comments and box, arrow, and freehand markup that are aware of the asset type, including page-aware pins on multi-page PDFs and timestamp-aware pins on video. For website-specific review workflows, see the website feedback tool page.

Not an All-in-One Platform

Most of the well-known names in this space started narrow and grew into broad platforms that also handle project management, internal critique, and asset libraries. That breadth helps some teams, but it adds friction to the one job freelancers and agencies do over and over: getting a client to review work and approve it.

Aligno stays narrow on purpose. It won't replace Notion, Linear, Jira, or your design tool, and it doesn't try to handle real-time co-editing or internal task boards. It does one job, which is getting clear, in-context feedback and a recorded approval from external clients who don't want to create an account. If you need a full project management suite, Aligno is meant to sit alongside it, not replace it.

Built by One Person, Not a Committee

Aligno is built and run by Dennis Overdiek, the founder. That shapes the product more than a logo on an about page suggests. Every feature described here comes out of the same narrow focus on client review and approval, rather than a roadmap shaped by a committee trying to satisfy every possible use case at once. It's also why every post on this blog, including this one, carries the same byline. Read more about the reasoning behind that focus on the about page.

Explore the full feature list for a detailed breakdown of everything above.

How Aligno Compares

The design feedback space has several established players. Here is a brief orientation of where Aligno fits.

vs. GoVisually. GoVisually covers a broader creative-proofing workflow, including version comparison and support for more design file types. Aligno is narrower, centered on images, PDFs, videos, live webpages, and explicit approval states. Read the GoVisually alternative comparison for specifics.

vs. Markup.io. Markup.io emphasizes broad file-type coverage, guest review, and integrations with other workflow tools. Aligno is more opinionated about client review and approval. See the Markup.io alternative page.

vs. Pastel. Pastel is widely used for website review and its docs also cover PDF and image review. The comparison with Aligno is more about workflow emphasis and approval handling than asset coverage alone. Full comparison: Pastel alternative.

vs. Ruttl. Ruttl combines visual feedback with live website editing. Aligno is more narrowly focused on collecting feedback and recording sign-off decisions. Details: Ruttl alternative.

For a full side-by-side breakdown of all these options, see the design feedback tool alternatives page.

The short version: the Aligno tool is not trying to be the biggest or most feature-rich option. What it does aim for is the clearest path from "client has feedback" to "client has approved." If that is the workflow you need, Aligno is worth a close look.

Aligno Pricing

Aligno is free to start. The free plan includes a meaningful amount of usage, enough to run real client projects and evaluate whether the workflow fits your practice.

The Pro plan removes the asset cap, keeps full approval history, and adds the tools you reach for on paid client work: custom branding so review pages carry your logo instead of the Aligno badge, review due dates that remind clients automatically, comment and sign-off export as CSV or PDF, and up to 3 team seats at no extra cost. Pricing is straightforward with no per-seat charges for clients, since clients never need an account. Because the review side of the product is entirely link-based, adding more clients to your account doesn't change what you pay; it only affects how many projects and assets you can keep active at once.

Visit the pricing page for current plan details and limits.

Getting Started with Aligno

If you have been looking for a design feedback tool that gives clients a frictionless review experience and gives you a documented approval record, Aligno is built for exactly that.

The Aligno app takes minutes to set up. Upload a design, generate a share link, send it to your client. That is the whole onboarding process. There's no client seat to provision and no separate login system to explain to someone who just wants to look at a homepage mockup and say yes or no. If you do work with other designers or project leads, Pro lets you invite up to 3 of them onto your account at no extra cost — but it stays entirely optional.

Aligno design feedback is live at aligno.io. Create a free account and run your first review today. No credit card required.

To recap: Aligno is a design feedback and client approval tool for freelancers and agencies. It supports images, PDFs, videos, and webpages, with timestamp-pinned comments on video and page-aware comments on PDFs. Clients need no account. Every review round ends with an explicit approval decision. If that sounds like what you have been looking for, welcome.

What Is Aligno? (And How It Compares to Other Tools)