Linear alternatives for software teams in 2026

Linear became the default issue tracker for small software teams by doing a few things well: it is fast, it is opinionated about cycles and projects, and it looks like it was designed by people who use it. Teams leave it for equally specific reasons, and the right alternative depends on which one is yours. Here are the candidates, grouped by the reason you are looking.

Why teams leave Linear

Price at scale. Linear is cheap for ten people and noticeably not cheap for a hundred, especially once you need the features gated behind the higher plans.

Opinions you do not share. Cycles, triage and the default workflow suit product teams shipping continuously. Agencies, hardware teams and anyone running several unrelated streams of work tend to fight it.

Data and hosting. There is no self-hosted Linear. If the tracker has to live inside your network, that ends the conversation.

It is where the code is not. Teams that live in GitHub often decide that the tracker should too.

If you want the same feel, cheaper or self-hosted

Plane is the closest open source answer to Linear: issues, cycles, modules and views with a similar keyboard-driven interface, and you can run it on your own infrastructure or use the hosted version. The open source edition is behind the hosted one on some features, so read the comparison table before assuming parity.

Huly goes wider, bundling the tracker with chat, docs and a calendar, and it is also open source and self-hostable. It is the option for a team that wants to replace Slack and Notion at the same time rather than only the tracker.

Both are younger than Linear, which shows in the integrations. Check that the GitHub and Slack hooks do exactly what your workflow needs before moving the backlog.

If you want fewer opinions

Shortcut has been the pragmatic middle ground for years: stories, epics and iterations with enough structure for a product team and enough flexibility that nobody has to be retrained. It is less beautiful than Linear and more forgiving.

Jira is the answer when the question is really about process. If you need custom workflows per project, approval steps, audit history and a compliance checkbox, Jira does it, and the price of that is everything people say about Jira. Atlassian's newer, lighter templates help, but the complexity is the product.

If the tracker should live with the code

GitHub Projects has quietly become good enough for many teams: issues stay where the pull requests are, project boards and tables support custom fields and iterations, and the automation runs on the events you already have. It lacks Linear's polish and its cycle rituals, and it is free with the repositories you already pay for. Start here before paying for anything if your team is under fifteen people.

If you want everything in one place

Notion is not a tracker so much as a database that can look like one. Teams that already keep their specs, roadmap and meeting notes in Notion often decide the tracker belongs there too. It is slower than any purpose-built tool for triage, and better than all of them at keeping the issue next to the reasoning behind it.

How to decide in an afternoon

1. Export one real project from Linear, not a toy. Import it into the two candidates you are most curious about.
2. Run one planning session and one triage session in each. The planning session tests the structure; triage tests the speed, which is what people will complain about.
3. Count the clicks from "someone reported a bug in Slack" to "it is in the backlog with a priority". That path runs dozens of times a day and it is where the tools differ most.
4. Check the exit. Can you get everything back out in a format the next tool imports? Linear's export is good; make sure the alternative's is too.

Keep watching the category

Issue trackers are a crowded space with a new entrant every year, and the ones worth trying tend to show up in beta before they show up in comparison posts. The Linear alternatives page on TeaserTrack lists the tools in the same space as they are added, and the productivity category covers the docs and planning tools around them.