Linear
Modern issue tracking and project management for engineering teams
What it does
Linear is issue tracking and project management built specifically for software teams. Keyboard-driven, opinionated, extremely fast. Core primitives are Issues, Projects, Cycles (sprints), and Roadmaps, organized under Teams. Its opinionated defaults - required states, cycle-based planning, deep GitHub and Slack integrations - are the point. It is the Jira replacement that engineers actually want to use and product managers can live with.
Free tier
Yes
Starts at
$8/mo
Setup
easy
Key features
Integrates with
GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Figma, Sentry, Zapier
Who this fits
- B2B SaaS engineering teams (1-100 devs) shipping product weekly
- Startups that want structure without the bureaucracy of Jira
- Product-led orgs where PM, design, and eng all live in the tracker
- Teams doing continuous cycles / sprints (Linear's core loop)
- Agencies with a dedicated engineering practice serving software clients
Who it does NOT fit
- Non-software teams (marketing, ops, sales) - Linear's model is issue-shaped, not campaign-shaped
- Trades, real estate, medspa, restaurants - completely wrong tool
- Enterprise orgs with 500+ engineers requiring deep permissioning and portfolio management (Jira is still the fit)
- Teams that need Gantt-heavy project planning with resource management
- Waterfall or long-cycle project work
Pricing
Real gotchas
- Linear is opinionated - custom workflows are limited by design. Teams that need many custom states or approvals struggle. This is a known design trade-off Linear's founders have publicly defended in blog posts and Hacker News threads
- No native time tracking. Third-party integrations exist (Toggl, Everhour) but agencies often bounce off this
- No Gantt view. Roadmap is milestone-based, not resource-based
- Public issue sharing is limited; not a good customer-facing feedback portal (use Canny or Featurebase)
- Data export via API is complete but not one-click; migration to or from Linear needs planning
- Free plan is generous but the 250 issues per team cap sneaks up on active teams
Integrations that matter
Otto’s take on this tool
Recommend Linear when: user is a software team, business_size is 2-100, and they want a fast, opinionated tracker. Highest fit for B2B SaaS engineering and product teams. Pairs with GitHub, Slack, Figma, and Sentry. Do NOT recommend for non-software teams (Asana, ClickUp, Monday), for trades or field service, for large enterprises that need Jira's flexibility, or for agencies whose bread-and-butter is time-tracked billable hours. Flag the "opinionated by design" point up front - teams that fight it will churn.
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