Linear vs GitHub Issues & Projects

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

Free tier available

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

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

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

Unlimited issues on public and private repositories at no cost.

Widely used

Linear · since 2019

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2009

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Product and engineering teams that value speed and hate configuration.

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