Pinnable is a free Rails gem that lets your team pin comments on any element of your own app.
Pinnable is a mountable Rails engine. You turn it on for some users, they click an element on any page and leave a note, and each note remembers who wrote it, which page and which element. Pinafly is the hosted version for pages that are not in your app.
What Pinnable does
Click, pin, comment
In comment mode a click is caught before the page acts on it, and the note is attached to the element you clicked.
Stays on the element
Each pin stores a CSS selector, an XPath and a text quote, tried in that order on the next visit. A pin that cannot be found goes to an unanchored tray instead of being lost.
Works like a task list
Every note is open or resolved, with who resolved it and when. An inbox lists them and a deep link opens the page with the pin in focus.
Install it
Pinnable needs Rails 8 and Ruby 3.2 or later. You decide who sees the widget, with your own authentication.
gem "pinnable"
bin/rails generate pinnable:install
bin/rails pinnable:install:migrations && bin/rails db:migrate
<%= pinnable_widget %> # in your layout, before </body>Pinnable or Pinafly
Use Pinnable when the feedback is about your own Rails app and you want the data in your own database. Use Pinafly when the page is on someone else's site, when a client has to comment without an account, or when you want a coding agent to read the comments.
| Pinnable (the gem) | Pinafly (hosted) | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Inside your own Rails 8 app | Hosted by Pinafly |
| Which pages | Pages of the app it is installed in | Any URL, including pages you do not own |
| Where the comments live | Your database | Pinafly, deleted on a schedule you can read |
| A frozen copy of the page | No | Yes: the page as it looked when it was captured |
| Pins stay on the right element | Yes, re-found on each visit by selector, XPath, then text quote | Yes, against the frozen copy or the live page |
| Coding agents | Not built in | Reads comments over MCP and reports fixes |
| Who comments | The people you enable for it | Anyone you share a link with, no account needed |
| Cost | Free, MIT licence | Free to start, paid plans on the pricing page |