Linear vs Obsidian
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 Obsidian is
Obsidian is a note-taking app that keeps notes as plain text Markdown files on your own device rather than on a vendor's server. It uses open file formats, so the notes are not locked into the app that made them. The base app is free to use and needs no sign-up, and it is free for personal, commercial and non-profit use alike. A commercial licence at 50 USD per user per year is optional rather than required. A one-off Catalyst supporter licence at 25 USD grants early access to beta builds. Desktop builds cover Windows, Mac and Linux, with the Linux version packaged as AppImage, ARM64 AppImage, Snap, Deb and Flatpak. Mobile versions are distributed through the iOS App Store and Google Play, with a direct Android APK for anyone avoiding the store. A browser clipper extension is published on the Chrome Web Store, the Safari App Store, Firefox Add-ons and Microsoft Edge Add-ons. Canvas is included at no extra cost and gives you a surface for arranging material visually rather than as a list. A single canvas can hold text cards, embedded Markdown notes, images, video, audio, PDFs, web pages and other canvases. Canvas files are saved in the open JSON Canvas format. Two paid services sit on top of the free app. Sync costs 4 USD per user per month billed annually or 5 USD billed monthly, and encrypts vault contents end to end with AES-256. The Standard tier covers one synced vault, 1 GB of total storage, a 5 MB maximum file size and one month of version history. Sync Plus, at 8 USD per user per month billed annually, raises that to ten synced vaults, 10 GB of storage that can be increased up to 100 GB, a 200 MB maximum file size and twelve months of version history. Sync runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android and supports a headless server deployment, and shared vaults let more than one person work inside the same synced vault. Publish turns a vault into a website. It costs 8 USD per site per month billed annually or 10 USD billed monthly, hosts up to 4 GB of content and carries a seven day refund guarantee. Published sites support custom domains, password protection, backlinks, graph view and full text search, and they can be excluded from search engine indexing when the site is meant for a limited audience rather than the open web.
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