Linear vs Jira

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

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

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.

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.

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

Free for up to 10 users with core features.

Widely used

Linear · since 2019

Category standard

Atlassian · since 2002

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Product and engineering teams that value speed and hate configuration.

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