Linear vs GitHub Issues & Projects
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
From $10 per user/month (Basic, billed yearly)
Free tierFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
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.
Effectively free — you are already paying for GitHub, and Issues adds nothing.
Free tier
Free plan with unlimited members but capped at 2 teams and 250 issues.
Unlimited issues on public and private repositories at no cost.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Linear · since 2019
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2009
Strengths
- 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.
Limitations
- 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.
Best for
Product and engineering teams that value speed and hate configuration.
Engineering-led teams already on GitHub who want one fewer tool.
All of these integrate with: Slack, Sentry.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.