Jira vs Linear

From $8 per user/month (Standard, indicative)

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

The base price is reasonable; the cost comes from Marketplace apps, which frequently exceed the Jira licence itself.

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

Free for up to 10 users with core features.

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

Category standard

Atlassian · since 2002

Widely used

Linear · since 2019

• Configurable enough to model almost any process, including regulated workflows.
• The largest integration ecosystem in the category by a wide margin.
• Universal familiarity — new hires already know it.

• 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.

• Configurability reliably degrades into slow, over-customised instances nobody wants to own.
• Performance on large instances is a recurring complaint.
• Marketplace app costs compound quickly.

• 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.

Organisations that need process flexibility and integration breadth above all else.

Product and engineering teams that value speed and hate configuration.