GitHub Issues & Projects vs Linear

Free tier available

From $8 per user/month (Basic, billed annually)

Effectively free — you are already paying for GitHub, and Issues adds nothing.

Simple, transparent per-seat pricing with no app marketplace to inflate it.

Unlimited issues on public and private repositories at no cost.

Free plan for small teams with unlimited members and limited issue history.

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2009

Widely used

Linear · since 2019

• Zero additional cost and zero additional integration to maintain.
• Automatic linking between commits, pull requests and issues.
• Issue forms enforce the reproduction detail that makes bugs actionable.

• Genuinely fast — the interaction latency is a feature, not marketing.
• Opinionated defaults mean it stays usable without an administrator.
• Excellent Git and Slack integration and a clean triage inbox.

• No native severity/priority model — you build it from labels.
• Reporting is weak; there is no real analytics layer.
• Poor fit for non-technical reporters who do not have GitHub accounts.

• Deliberately inflexible; complex approval workflows and regulated processes do not fit.
• Weaker for non-engineering functions than Jira.
• No self-hosted option, which rules it out for some organisations.

Engineering-led teams already on GitHub who want one fewer tool.

Product and engineering teams that value speed and hate configuration.