Linear alternatives

12 tools that do a similar job, and what makes each one different.

What Linear is

Linear is an issue tracker for software teams, organised around teams, issues, projects and cycles. The plan tiers are drawn mostly around how many teams a workspace can hold rather than around long feature lists, so the shape of the organisation tends to decide the tier. The Free plan costs nothing, allows 2 teams, caps a workspace at 250 issues and limits file uploads to 10MB. Basic, at $10 per user per month billed yearly, raises that to 5 teams and removes both the issue count and the file upload caps. Business, at $16 per user per month billed yearly, allows an unlimited number of teams and adds private teams and guest accounts. Enterprise is custom priced and billed yearly. Triage is a per team inbox that collects issues arriving from integrations and from people outside the team, and its contents are excluded from normal views until someone deals with them. Each item can be accepted, marked duplicate, declined or snoozed with a single keystroke, and triage duty can rotate automatically through PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Rootly or Incident.io. The effect is that bug reports from support tools or monitoring never land unreviewed in a team's working backlog. A few capabilities sit higher up the tiers than expected. API and webhook access starts on Basic. The Zendesk and Intercom integrations, along with Code Intelligence and Triage Intelligence, require Business or Enterprise. SAML single sign on, SCIM provisioning, the audit log, and HIPAA support with a Business Associate Agreement are Enterprise only. The public API is GraphQL, and it is the same API the vendor uses for its own applications, which is a reasonable signal of how complete it is. Personal API keys can be scoped to Read, Write, Admin, Create issues or Create comments, and restricted to named teams. OAuth applications are created and managed in workspace settings. Webhooks fire on changes to issues, comments, documents, projects, cycles, labels and users, and the payload carries the whole data object plus the previous values of any changed properties, so a receiving system can work out what changed without keeping its own copy of prior state. The integration directory lists over 50 integrations across 12 categories, including GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Figma, Sentry, Zendesk, Intercom, Zapier, Notion and Datadog. A workspace can be pinned to a United States or a European Union data region. Data is encrypted in transit and the databases are encrypted at rest. Linear is SOC 2 Type II certified and states GDPR compliance.

Notion

Documents, databases and wikis in one workspace that bends to whatever shape a team wants, which is both the appeal and the risk. The same primitives make a meeting note, a project tracker, a CRM or a public site. Teams that agree on structure get a system of record; teams that do not get a sprawl nobody maintains.

Freemium

Obsidian

Notes as plain markdown files in a folder you own. Links between notes build a graph, and a large plugin ecosystem covers everything from tasks to spaced repetition. Because the files are local and open, the notes outlive the application and any company behind it. Sync and publishing are paid add-ons; the core is free.

Freemium

Raycast

A launcher that replaces Spotlight and then absorbs half the menu bar: window management, clipboard history, snippets, calculations, and extensions for the tools you already run. Everything is keyboard-driven and consistent, so muscle memory transfers between extensions. macOS only. The free tier covers most individual use.

Freemium

Todoist

A task list that survives daily use for a decade, the harder test for this category. Natural-language input parses dates and recurrence as you type, projects and labels organise without ceremony, and it runs on essentially every platform. Deliberately unopinionated about method, so it fits GTD or a plain list equally.

Freemium

Superhuman

Email rebuilt around keyboard shortcuts, speed and getting to an empty inbox. Split inboxes triage automatically, snippets handle repeated replies, and reminders bring back threads that went quiet. Sits on top of Gmail or Outlook rather than replacing them. Priced well above the alternatives, and sold on the hours it returns.

Paid

Attio

A CRM that models your pipeline instead of making you adopt theirs. Objects, attributes and relationships are defined by you, and it builds from real data, email and calendar activity populate records rather than waiting for someone to log them. Aimed at startups and investment teams whose process does not fit a standard sales funnel.

Freemium

Postman

Builds, tests and documents an API without writing a client first. Collections capture requests with environments and variables, tests run in CI through Newman, and mock servers stand in for endpoints that do not exist yet. Documentation generates from the collection, which is how it stays current. Ubiquitous enough that a Postman collection is a normal way to hand over an API.

Freemium

Airtable

A spreadsheet that grew a schema, views and an API. Fields have types, records link to records across tables, and the same data appears as a grid, kanban, calendar or gallery. Automations and interfaces sit on top. It is where a lot of internal tooling starts, and per-seat pricing is where a lot of it stops.

Freemium

Vercel

Deploys a frontend by pushing to a branch, with a preview URL for every pull request, the workflow most React teams now expect by default. Built by the maintainers of Next.js, which it supports first and best. Edge functions, analytics and image optimisation are included. Costs are predictable until traffic is not, and bandwidth is the line to watch.

Freemium

Figma

Interface design in the browser with everyone in the same file, which is what displaced the previous generation of desktop tools. Components and variants keep a design system consistent, auto-layout makes frames respond like real containers, and Dev Mode gives engineers measurements and generated CSS. Prototyping, commenting and version history are built in, so review happens where the work is.

Freemium

Pinecone

Managed vector search, so retrieval stops being an operational problem. You upsert embeddings with metadata and query by similarity with filters, and the indexing, sharding and scaling are handled. Serverless indexes bill on usage rather than provisioned pods. The decision is nearly always this against pgvector: a managed service that scales, or one less system to run.

Freemium

Pipedream

Workflows where every step can just be code. Connect a trigger, then write Node, Python, Go or Bash with managed authentication for the services you call, no credential handling of your own. Pre-built components cover the common cases. Suits developers who want the plumbing solved and the logic left alone.

Freemium