Linear vs Superhuman
Both are productivity tools. Here is what separates them.
| Linear | Superhuman | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Productivity | Productivity |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Price from | Freemium | Paid |
| Upvotes | 9 | 4 |
| What it does | Issue tracking fast enough that people actually keep it up to date. | Email and documents in one workspace, with an AI assistant called Go. |
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 Superhuman is
Superhuman is a suite of AI work software covering email, documents and an assistant that runs across other applications. It began in 2014 as Superhuman Mail, an email client, and the founding team includes Rahul Vohra. The current line-up grew out of a group of products that originally included Coda and Grammarly, and both of those lineages are visible in what it now sells. Superhuman Docs is the document and project side. Documents hold text, tables, formulas and buttons, and AI can assemble them. Beyond static pages it runs workflows: approval processes, dashboards built and customised for data visualisation, and knowledge hubs that update themselves so the information in them stays accurate. Collaboration features include voting, reactions and charts, and templates cover common team set-ups. Anyone using it is classed as either a Doc Maker or an Editor. Docs AI, the assistant inside it, is in beta for Doc Makers. Document size is unlimited on Pro and above. There are more than 800 integrations, including Jira, Salesforce and Asana, and it works in real time alongside assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor. Go is the AI assistant, described as proactive and available in every app rather than only inside Superhuman's own. Grammarly is included with the Pro and Business plans, with a limited trial on the free plan. Elsewhere the suite connects to Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Jira and Salesforce. Superhuman puts the scale of the whole thing at more than 40 million people and over 50,000 organisations, and says it analyses 200 billion words a day. Pricing starts with a free plan at $0. Pro is $12 a month billed annually, or $15 billed monthly. Business is $33 a month billed annually, or $40 monthly. Enterprise is quoted individually. None of it is open source. The figure the company attaches to all this is four hours saved per person per week, which is a vendor claim rather than an independent measurement. The more useful point for anyone arriving on the strength of the keyboard-driven inbox is that email is now one component of a wider set. Documents, workflows and an assistant that follows you into other applications carry a substantial share of what is being sold, and the pricing covers the suite rather than the mail client alone.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.