GitHub Issues & Projects vs Linear
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free tier available
Free tierFrom $10 per user/month (Basic, billed yearly)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Effectively free — you are already paying for GitHub, and Issues adds nothing.
Simple, transparent per-seat pricing with no app marketplace to inflate it. Business is $16 per user/month billed yearly; Enterprise is quote-based and annual only.
Free tier
Unlimited issues on public and private repositories at no cost.
Free plan with unlimited members but capped at 2 teams and 250 issues.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2009
Widely used
Linear · since 2019
Strengths
- 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.
Limitations
- 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.
Best for
Engineering-led teams already on GitHub who want one fewer tool.
Product and engineering teams that value speed and hate configuration.
All of these integrate with: Slack, Sentry.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.