How to share a reference board with your team

Sharing a reference board usually comes with strings attached. Some tools charge for every person you add, so showing a client three boards means buying them a seat. Others make you export a flattened PDF that’s out of date the moment you change anything.

DarkRef takes a different approach to sharing a moodboard with your team. You invite people by email, give each of them a role, editor or view-only, while you stay the owner, and everyone works from the same live board. Crucially, joining is free: you never buy a seat for a collaborator or a client, though anyone who edits needs their own DarkRef Pro. This guide explains how sharing works, what each role can do, and how to share with different kinds of teams without losing control of your board. DarkRef is free to download on the App Store, Windows, and the web; only the host and anyone who edits need Pro.

How sharing works

Sharing in DarkRef is deliberately simple, there’s no workspace to provision and no admin seat to manage:

• Invite by email. Add a collaborator’s email address, then send them the board link from your own email app with Send invite. If they already use DarkRef, the invitation also shows up in the app.
• Assign a role. You are the owner, and each person you invite is an editor or view-only, which decides what they can do once inside.
• They join for free. Anyone you invite can open and follow the board at no cost with a free DarkRef account, on any device.
• You host with DarkRef Pro. Hosting a live, shared board is part of DarkRef Pro; invited editors need it too, and view-only people don’t.

If you want the play-by-play of actually running a live session, live cursors and all, see our companion guide, how to collaborate on a moodboard in real time. This post focuses on the sharing model itself: who can see what, and who can change it. Live boards first arrived in the DarkRef live boards & collaboration update.

The three roles: owner, editor, view-only

Roles are how you share widely without handing everyone the keys. Here’s what each can do:

The split matters because a reference board is fragile: one accidental drag can scatter a carefully composed layout. Roles let you open a board to a dozen people while keeping edit rights with the two or three who should have them.

View-only boards for clients

The view-only role is the quiet hero of team sharing. It lets you present live work to people outside your core team without any of the usual risk:

• A client can open the board and watch the direction take shape, but can’t nudge an image or delete a note.
• There’s nothing to export and re-send, the board they’re looking at is always current.
• Because they join free, you can share with an entire stakeholder group without a per-seat conversation.
• When the work updates, so does their view, no “final_v3” attachments in an email chain.

That combination, always-current and zero-risk, is what makes a view-only DarkRef board a genuinely nicer way to show clients where a project is heading.

Free to join: the seat math

The economics are worth spelling out. In most collaborative tools, cost scales with people: more collaborators, more seats, a bigger monthly bill. In DarkRef, only the people who edit pay. DarkRef Pro is a single plan at $1.99/month or $19.99/year per person. Everyone the host invites to view joins for free, and an invited editor needs their own plan.

For a freelancer or a small studio, that changes the calculus entirely:

• Presenting to a five-person client team costs you nothing extra, they all join free.
• A freelancer who edits a board for one project needs their own DarkRef Pro at $1.99/month, but there’s no seat for you to provision.
• Your cost is predictable: one flat plan, no matter how the audience grows.

Sharing patterns for different teams

Honest note: what board sharing doesn’t do

DarkRef’s sharing is built around whole-board roles, owner, editor, view-only, rather than fine-grained, per-image permissions or department-level admin controls. It’s made for creative teams and client presentations, not for enterprise governance with audit logs and SSO. It also isn’t a project-management tool: there are no assigned tasks, due dates, or approval gates on the board. If you need formal sign-off tracking, run that in your PM tool and use DarkRef for what it does well, keeping everyone looking at the same visual direction, with the right level of access.

Getting your team set up

• Build the board first with your opening references so people arrive at something real.
• Decide roles before you invite: who edits, who only watches.
• Invite by email and assign each person their role.
• Default clients and stakeholders to view-only, upgrade someone to editor only if they genuinely need to change the board, and remember an editor needs their own DarkRef Pro.
• Keep editors few. A tight set of editors and a wide set of view-only observers is the reliable pattern.

FAQ

How do I share a reference board with my team?

Turn your board into a shared live board and invite people by email address. Send each person the board link, and give them an editor or view-only role that controls what they can do. Everyone you invite can join for free from any device.

What can each role do?

An owner hosts the board, manages invitations, and can edit it. An editor with DarkRef Pro can add, move, and arrange references in real time. A view-only collaborator can open and follow the board but cannot change it, which is ideal for clients and reviewers.

Can I give a client view-only access?

Yes. The view-only role lets a client open and follow the board live without being able to move, edit, or delete anything. The board they see is always current, so there’s nothing to export and re-send, and because joining is free, you can share with an entire client team at no extra cost.

Do the people I invite have to pay?

Not to join and view. The person hosting the shared board needs DarkRef Pro ($1.99/month or $19.99/year), and so does anyone you invite to edit. View-only people join free, so there is no charge as your audience grows.

Can my team use different devices?

Yes. DarkRef has native apps for iPhone, iPad, Windows, and macOS plus a web app, and everyone shares the same board regardless of platform. A teammate on an iPad and a client on the web can both open the same board.

Is this the same as real-time collaboration?

Sharing and real-time collaboration go together: once you’ve shared a board and assigned roles, editors work on it live and everyone sees changes instantly with visible cursors. For a step-by-step of running a live session, see our guide on how to collaborate on a moodboard in real time.