Redmine vs Linear
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
Free and open source
Open sourceFrom $10 per user/month (Basic, billed yearly)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free software. You pay for hosting, upgrades and the plugin maintenance that comes with them.
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 tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free plan with unlimited members but capped at 2 teams and 250 issues.
Open source
GPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
OSS community · since 2006
Widely used
Linear · since 2019
Strengths
- No licence cost at any user count.
- Full data control, which matters for defence, public sector and regulated work.
- Very stable and well understood.
- 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.
Limitations
- Dated interface that new team members find unpleasant.
- Plugin quality varies and upgrades frequently break them.
- You own hosting, backups, security patching and upgrades.
- 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.
Best for
Organisations that must self-host and cannot spend on licences.
Product and engineering teams that value speed and hate configuration.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.