Jira vs Linear

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

From $10 per user/month (Basic, billed yearly)

Standard lists around $7.91 per user/month on monthly billing, falling with annual billing and as the user count crosses Atlassian's tier thresholds. The base price is reasonable; the cost comes from Marketplace apps, which frequently exceed the Jira licence itself, and every licensed user is billed whether or not they log in.

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 for up to 10 users with core features.

Free plan with unlimited members but capped at 2 teams and 250 issues.

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.