Examples herein describe systems and methods for aligning elements, such as conduit, ductwork, and plumbing within a computer-aided design (“CAD”) application. A plugin can provide an element alignment option on a graphical user interface (“GUI”) of the CAD program. An anchor point from which to align elements is selected in the GUI so that the plugin can choose locations within a structure to run multiple elements in parallel alignment. The system can recommend an alignment plane based on the slopes of the selected multiple elements and provide a direction for a run of the multiple elements. The systems retrieve the specifications and parameters of each individual element to determine its spacing among the run of multiple elements. The run of multiple elements is displayed and manipulated by the plugin via the GUI.