Linear vs Jira for a small team The right tracker is the one your team updates.

Both track issues for software teams. They differ on what the free plan caps, how much of the process you configure yourself, how planning works, and where reporting sits on the price list.

Jacky Fakkeldij Building Driftto, on his own · Updated 20 October 2026

I build Driftto, an iPhone app for getting a thought into the right place without first finding the app, waiting for it to open and picking a project. Linear and Jira are both places it writes to. So I had a reason to read both closely, and small engineering teams weigh these two against each other all the time.

In October 2026 I went through Linear's pricing page and docs, Atlassian's Jira pricing page and support articles, and both US App Store listings. Everything below comes from those pages. Where a page didn't say which plan a feature sits on, I left the plan out rather than guess. Claims about speed are the vendors' own words.

The short answer

Linear fits a small product team that wants a fixed, fast way of working out of the box: set statuses, repeating cycles and a triage queue you adopt rather than design. Jira fits when you expect many teams with different processes, need custom fields and per-transition rules, or already run Confluence. You pay for that flexibility in setup time.

Linear's homepage calls it "purpose-built for planning and building products", and a customer quoted there says it has "the right opinions for fast moving teams." Jira gives you Scrum and Kanban, a workflow editor, and a long list of plan-gated admin and planning features.

What the free plans cap, and what a seat costs

The free plans limit different things. Linear's Free plan allows unlimited members but caps you at 2 teams, 250 issues and 10MB file uploads. Jira's Free plan allows up to 10 users, with 2 GB of storage, community support and 150 automation steps per month for the whole subscription.

So the question is which limit you hit first. A team of twelve can't stay on Jira Free. A team of four that files a lot of bugs can reach 250 issues on Linear Free within months.

Paid, Linear lists Basic at $10 per user a month and Business at $16, both billed yearly; Basic lifts the issue cap and allows 5 teams, Business makes teams unlimited. Atlassian prices Jira by user count. Its pricing data puts Standard at $9.70 per user a month on monthly billing, and Premium at $19.60, for sites up to 100 users, with lower rates per user as you grow. On yearly billing, up to 10 users costs $950 a year on Standard and $1,950 on Premium. Enterprise on both is annual billing only, through sales.

Workflows: opinionated or configurable

In Linear, each team has its own issue statuses, grouped into fixed categories that run from Backlog to Canceled. You can add, rename, recolor and remove statuses, and reorder them within a category, but the categories themselves stay in a fixed order. Linear's docs recommend letting integrations move issues between statuses, so nobody has to babysit tickets by hand.

Jira treats the workflow as something you build. Atlassian defines it as "a set of statuses and transitions that a work item moves through", and a work item can only move between two statuses if a transition exists. You add validation and condition rules to transitions. Custom fields and customizable workflows are on every plan, including Free. User roles and permissions start on Standard.

The trade is easy to state. Linear gives a small team less to decide on day one. Jira lets you encode almost any process, which also means someone has to own it.

Cycles and sprints

Linear's planning unit is the cycle, a team's repeating period of 1 to 8 weeks. Once you pick a length and start day, Linear creates upcoming cycles automatically and starts them at 12:01 AM on that day. Open issues roll over to the next cycle by themselves. You can add a cooldown between cycles for catch-up work.

Jira's unit is the sprint, and only Scrum spaces use them; Atlassian says plainly that sprints don't apply to Kanban spaces. You plan sprints from the Backlog, and Atlassian recommends a fixed two-week length to start. When you complete a sprint, you decide where unfinished work goes: the backlog, a future sprint, or a new one.

If your team wants planning to run on rails, cycles ask less of you. If you want an explicit planning and closing ritual, or a Kanban flow with no timebox at all, Jira supports both.

Projects, roadmaps and reports

In Linear, projects group issues around a shared outcome, with milestones inside, and initiatives sit above projects for company-level goals. The pricing table lists issues, projects, cycles and initiatives, plus progress reports, on every plan. Linear Insights, its analytics for spotting trends and blockers, needs Business or Enterprise, and dashboards are Enterprise only.

Jira has a timeline view on every plan, for planning work and mapping dependencies within a single space. Reports, dashboards and the summary view are on every plan too. Cross-team planning, called Plans, along with cross-project dependencies and capacity management, starts on Premium.

For a single team, both cover the basics on any plan. The difference shows up in reporting: Jira includes reports from Free, while Linear puts its analytics on the Business plan.

GitHub and Slack

Both link code to issues by key. In Linear, an issue ID in the branch name, the PR title or a phrase like "Fixes ENG-123" links the pull request. By default the issue moves to In Progress when the PR opens and to Done when it merges, and you can change those rules per team. A shortcut copies a ready-made branch name.

Jira uses the GitHub for Atlassian app. Put the work item key in the branch name, commit message or PR title, and branches, commits and pull requests show in the work item's development panel. The page I read doesn't describe status changes on merge, so I won't claim them here.

In Slack, Linear can create an issue from a message, keep the comment thread in sync, and send updates for teams, projects and views. Only people with a Linear account can create issues that way; Linear Asks, for everyone else, needs Business. Jira Cloud for Slack turns a message into a work item, sends notifications you can act on, and offers /jira commands such as /jira create.

Everything else, side by side

The rest, checked against Linear's and Atlassian's pages and both App Store listings in October 2026.

Which one I'd pick

For a startup engineering team that wants to start working this afternoon, with one shared rhythm and GitHub doing the status updates, I'd pick Linear and budget for Business once you want Insights or private teams.

For a team that already lives in Atlassian tools, needs custom fields and approval rules, has non-engineering teams on the same system, or expects to plan across many teams, I'd pick Jira. And if you are ten people or fewer and want reports without paying, Jira Free covers more of that than Linear Free.

Either way, a tracker only reflects what gets typed into it. The bug you spot on your phone in a meeting, and forget by the time you're back at a desk, is not in either one.

Capture into the one you picked, in one step

Into Linear: open Linear Mobile and use the composer, which Linear says is built with "an obsessive focus on speed." You can also share a screenshot or photo to Linear to start an issue, or mention @Linear in Slack and describe it.

Into Jira: in the Jira Cloud app, create a work item from your board or backlog. Atlassian also documents a Shortcuts action called Jira Create Issue, which you set up once with a site, project and work type. From Slack, /jira create opens a form.

With Driftto, open it, type or say the thought, and tap Linear or Jira. Each destination is set up once with a default team or project, so you don't pick one per note, and one capture can go to both. Here is how it works with Linear, and the same for Jira. Or say "Hey Siri, new capture in Driftto" and it goes to the destination you picked for Siri.

Questions

Driftto is in the App Store now.