Linear vs Notion
Both are productivity tools. Here is what separates them.
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.
What Notion is
Notion is a workspace application where documents, databases and calendars are built from the same set of blocks, so written notes and structured records sit in one place rather than in separate tools. Third-party listings describe it as an all-in-one workspace covering note-taking, project management and task organisation, and that modular, block-based structure is what separates it from a straightforward document editor. Beyond writing and storing documents, Notion is used for recurring operational work. The vendor gives automating weekly reporting and responding to security alerts more quickly as examples of what teams route through it. Third-party listings note row-level permissions, which control who can see which records inside a shared database, alongside the collaboration features on shared pages. Notion launched with an API, so the workspace was scriptable from the beginning rather than through an add-on bolted on later. It integrates with Slack, and third-party listings note that content can be synced with connected apps so the same record does not have to be maintained in two systems. The product runs on the web and as mobile apps. Adoption is unusually broad for a tool with this much configuration in it. Notion reports over 100 million users in more than 50 countries. Among large companies, 62% of the Fortune 100 use it, as do over 98% of the Forbes Cloud 100. More than half of Y Combinator companies use it as well, which suggests it tends to be adopted early by small teams rather than rolled out later by an IT function. The user community runs to more than 1.4 million members. The flexibility is both the appeal and the cost. Because a workspace can be shaped almost any way, two teams on the same product can end up with structures that look nothing alike, and the work of deciding that structure falls to whoever sets it up first. Notion is made by Notion Labs Inc, is not open source, and is sold on free and paid tiers.
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