Linear
The product development system for teams and agents
By Linear · 4.4/5 Value-Position score (estimate)
Positioning guardrails
Best for
- Product and engineering teams that want issues, projects, roadmaps, docs, and code review in one opinionated system
- Companies pairing human engineers with AI agents for triage, drafting, planning, and coding sessions
- Scale-ups and enterprises migrating off legacy trackers such as Jira
- Organizations that prioritize speed and low-noise workflows over heavy configuration
Ideal size: 10–1,000+ product and engineering staff people · Startup to enterprise product org; Business or Enterprise plan for agentic and compliance features
Not for
- Non-engineering departments (HR, finance, marketing ops) wanting a general work-management suite
- Teams that require self-hosted or on-premises deployment
- Buyers who want deep per-field configurability rather than opinionated defaults
- Companies looking for one vendor to cover CRM, ITSM, and ERP as well
Value metrics scorecard
Time-to-Value
1–2 weeks, self-serve
~7 days to first production value
Total Cost of Ownership
$9,600/yr
Starts at $0 · Per user, per month billed yearly: Free $0, Basic $10, Business $16; Enterprise custom pricing with annual invoice/PO billing only
Implementation Friction
2/5
Engineering + admin effort required
Value-Position score
out of 5 · model estimate
Full cost breakdown
Mandatory implementation fee
None
Seat tiers
Unlimited members on all plans; Free limited to 2 teams, Basic 5 teams, Business and Enterprise unlimited teams
Add-on costs
- AI credits are required for Coding sessions and Loops
- Salesforce integration is an add-on on top of a paid plan
- Enterprise-only items: priority support, account manager, SAML/SCIM, uptime SLA
Company & support
Who is behind Linear, and how your team gets help once it is live.
Company
- Founded
- 2019 · 7 yrs in business
- Headquarters
- Not recorded
How you get support
- PhoneNot listed
- EmailAll plans
- Live chatNot listed
- Support portal / ticketsNot listed
- Community forumAll plans
- Help centre / docsAll plans
- Dedicated account managerEnterprise only
- In person / on-siteNot listed
- Hours
- Not recorded
- Response time
- Uptime SLA and priority support on the Enterprise plan
Contact page offers a user Slack community, Linear Docs, and [email protected] for questions; Enterprise adds priority support, an account manager, and migration/onboarding support.
“Not listed” means the vendor’s public pages don’t mention that channel, not that it is unavailable. Ask about it during evaluation.
Market position
Where Linear sits against its closest alternatives. Pick any two of cost, speed, friction and buyer score, and up to 9 companies to compare.
Quadrant view
Typical annual cost × Time-to-value
The lines cross at the median of the solutions shown, so about half sit on each side of each line. A dashed ring marks an outlier pinned to the edge; hover for its value.
Companies on the chart 6 / 10
- Linear
- Assembled
- Notion
- YAROOMS
- monday.com
- Stitchflow
Add or change companies
Up to 10 companies including Linear. Listed closest first.
Stack fit signal
Compatibility with standard B2B ecosystems.
Ships an official MCP server. Connects to Claude Code, Claude Desktop, ChatGPT connectors and Cursor out of the box.
AI & MCP readiness
What Linear ships in AI, and what it asks of your ecosystem.
AI features shipped
Linear Agent reads projects, issues, customer requests, docs, and code to draft updates, plan cycles, and answer codebase questions. Triage Intelligence routes and labels incoming work; Coding sessions run tasks in a secure cloud sandbox and open pull requests. Admins control model availability and spend limits.
Your data & models
- Trains on your data
- Not recorded — ask the vendor
- Runs on
- OpenAI, Open-weight models
- AI pricing
- Billed by usage or credits
In your ecosystem
- AI connection
- Official MCP server
- Model key
- Not recorded
- AI usage audit
- Basic visibility
Compliance attestations
* IAPP AIGP certifies individuals, not products. It means named staff hold the credential — not that the platform does.
Bottom line
Linear is a product development system for software teams, combining issues, projects, roadmaps, docs, and code review with AI agents that triage, draft, and write code. Free and low-cost per-seat plans make it self-serve, while Enterprise adds SAML/SCIM, audit logs, and HIPAA-eligible controls. Over 40,000 companies including OpenAI, Coinbase, and Ramp use it. Fast to adopt, opinionated by design, and less suited to non-engineering work or self-hosting.
Frequently asked questions
How quickly can a team get up and running on Linear?
Linear is self-serve: a workspace can be created on the free plan and paid plans are billed per user, per month billed yearly (Basic $10, Business $16). Linear Docs covers a start guide and importers for moving issues from an existing tracker, and migration and onboarding support is listed on the Enterprise plan. Most teams should reach first production value in one to two weeks without a paid implementation project.
What does Linear cost per year for a mid-sized team?
There is no platform fee; you pay per user. A 50-person team on the Business plan at $16 per user per month billed yearly is roughly $9,600 per year. The Free plan supports unlimited members with 2 teams and 250 issues, Basic is $10 per user per month, and Enterprise is custom-priced with annual invoice/PO billing. AI usage is metered separately through AI credits.
How is AI usage charged?
AI features such as Coding sessions and Loops require AI credits; the pricing page marks them with a credits requirement. Per the changelog, coding sessions charge model usage at the provider's published token rates with no markup, plus sandbox runtime at $0.25 per 20-minute block, shown on a usage dashboard. Admins can set workspace-wide and per-user spend limits that reset daily, weekly, or monthly.
Which security and compliance certifications does Linear hold?
Linear's security page states SOC 2 Type II audits, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, GDPR commitment, and HIPAA compliance with a BAA available on request. Enterprise features include SAML and SCIM, advanced authentication, IP restrictions, domain claiming, audit logs covering the last three months, and app approvals. Data is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.2 and at rest with AES 256-bit, and workspaces can be hosted in the EU or the US.
Can Linear connect to the tools our teams already use?
Yes. Linear's integration directory covers GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Figma, Notion, Zendesk, Intercom, Front, Sentry, Datadog, Zapier, Google Sheets, Discord, and more, with a public API for custom builds. Salesforce integration is available as an add-on. For AI clients, the Linear MCP server gives compatible tools secure access to issues, projects, and comments.
Is on-premises or self-hosted deployment available?
Linear's published materials describe a cloud service with multi-region hosting, letting a workspace choose to store data in the European Union or the United States. No self-hosted or on-premises deployment option is documented, so buyers with hard data-residency or air-gap requirements should confirm directly with Linear before committing.