Linear

What it is

Linear is opinionated project tracking built for software teams — keyboard-driven, with a data model of issues, projects, cycles, and roadmaps. Ops teams adopted it for internal initiatives because it imposes more structure than a Notion database and less ceremony than Jira.

Two things changed in 2026 and both matter to the buying decision. The paid tiers were renamed and repriced: Standard and Plus are gone, replaced by Basic at $10 and Business at $16 per user per month on annual billing. And Linear turned the product into an agent host — Linear Agent shipped in public beta on 2026-03-24, coding sessions with prepaid AI credits on 2026-06-11, and Loops on 2026-07-20. The version of this page that described Linear as “fast issue tracking with an API” is no longer the whole product.

Why it shows up in ops stacks

• Speed is the actual feature. Sub-100ms interactions and a command palette on every surface. That sounds like a UX detail and behaves like a process change: ops teams file issues they would otherwise not have bothered to file.
• Structured by default. Cycles, status, priority, labels, and projects ship out of the box. A RevOps initiative that would sprawl across three spreadsheets gets one object model with a state machine.
• Linear Asks. Internal requests raised in Slack become tracked Linear issues with an owner and a status. For an ops team that currently runs intake through DMs, this is the single highest-value thing on the Business tier — and the reason a non-engineering team buys Linear at all.
• Agents as workspace members. Linear Agent can be assigned to an issue, added to a project, or @-mentioned in a comment. It triages, answers questions about the workspace, drafts project updates, and files follow-up work. It is on every plan including Free, and it does not consume credits.
• A first-party MCP server. Hosted at https://mcp.linear.app/mcp, with a read-only endpoint at https://mcp.linear.app/mcp/readonly. Claude, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, and Zed connect to it directly, so an external agent can read and write issues without you building an integration. Very few tools in this category ship a maintained first-party server.

Pricing

Verified against linear.app/pricing on 2026-09-08. All per-user rates below are annual billing; monthly billing costs more and is called out separately.

• Free — $0. Capped at 250 issues and 2 teams, unlimited members, 10MB uploads. Includes the agent platform, Linear Agent, and API/webhook access.
• Basic — $10/user/mo annual, $12/user/mo monthly. Unlimited issues, 5 teams, unlimited file uploads, admin roles.
• Business — $16/user/mo annual, $18/user/mo monthly. Unlimited teams, private teams, guests, Triage Intelligence, Code Intelligence, Loops, Linear Insights, Linear Asks, Zendesk and Intercom integrations. MCP access sits on this tier.
• Enterprise — custom, annual billing only. SAML and SCIM, granular admin controls, migration support, invoice/PO billing.

Two corrections against older figures. Basic replaced Standard and the entry price moved $8 → $10, up 25%; Business replaced Plus at $14 → $16, up 14%. Annual billing saves $24 per seat per year on both paid tiers.

AI credits are the line item people miss. No plan bundles them. Credits are purchased separately, expire 12 months after purchase, and are required for coding sessions and Loops — not for Linear Agent itself. Coding sessions bill model tokens at provider-published rates with no markup, plus $0.25 per 20-minute block of sandbox runtime. A Loop run without a coding session typically costs $0.07–$0.20. Workspaces on a paid plan received a promotional pool at the 2026-06-11 launch worth $20 per unsuspended user; that is a one-time grant, not a recurring allowance.

Real-world band for a 25-person ops team on Business: $4,800/year in seats, plus whatever Loops consume. A loop firing on every triaged issue at 200 issues/month lands near $170–$480/year in credits. Budget the credits as a separate line; they do not appear on the subscription invoice.

Best for

RevOps and Talent leaders at companies where engineering already runs on Linear, and the ops team wants one issue model instead of a second tool. The scoped case that justifies the Business tier on its own: replacing Slack-DM intake with Linear Asks, so internal requests get an owner, a status, and a cycle-time number you can report.

If engineering is on Jira and ops wants Linear, the argument is weaker — you are adding a tool, not extending one, and the cross-tool handoff is manual.

Versus the alternatives

• Jira — the share leader. Pick it when you need custom fields, custom workflows per project, and approval chains that Linear deliberately refuses to model. Jira bends to your process; Linear asks you to adopt its own. Atlassian’s agent layer is Atlassian Rovo at $5/user/mo, which is the cheaper way to put AI over an existing Jira estate.
• Asana or Monday.com — pick either when marketing, finance, or legal are primary users. Linear’s model assumes issues, cycles, and shipping; teams that plan in campaigns and calendars bounce off it within a quarter.
• Notion — the fastest-growing entrant in adjacent territory, now selling agents and databases as one surface. Pick it when the work is documents with light tracking attached. Once you need cycle time, throughput, or a state machine you can report on, the Notion database becomes the thing you are maintaining instead of the work. The Notion vs Linear comparison covers the split in detail.
• Productboard — different job. It sits above Linear on roadmap and customer-input prioritization; a lot of teams run both rather than choosing.
• Stay on Free — if your ops team files fewer than 250 issues total and needs 2 teams or fewer, the free tier includes the agent and the API. Upgrade when the issue cap bites, not before.

Watch-outs

• AI credits are unbundled and expire. Loops and coding sessions have no included allowance on any plan, and unused credits expire after 12 months. Guard: run one month of Loops on the promotional pool, measure actual cost per run against the $0.07–$0.20 range, and buy credits against that measured number rather than pre-purchasing a year.
• MCP and Asks are Business-tier, not Basic. The two features an ops team actually buys Linear for sit on the $16 tier, so the real entry price for this use case is $16, not $10. Guard: price the pilot at Business from the start; a Basic pilot tests a product you are not going to run.
• The opinion is a feature and a tax. Linear models work one way and does not add configuration to accommodate exceptions. Guard: before rollout, name the two workflows your team runs that Linear will not model, and decide where those live — a documented exception is fine, a discovered one becomes shadow process in a spreadsheet.
• Custom fields and views still trail Jira. They have improved, but if your reporting depends on per-project custom schemas, you will hit the ceiling. Guard: build your three required reports during the trial, not after the migration.
• The free tier’s cap is issues, not people. 250 issues is a low ceiling for an active ops team — unlimited members makes Free feel roomier than it is. Guard: estimate your monthly issue volume before treating Free as a durable plan; most ops teams cross 250 within a quarter.
• Loops only fire on Linear’s own object model. An external trigger — an inbound email, a calendar change, a CRM field update — does not start a Loop. Guard: if your automation needs to start outside Linear, put Zapier or a webhook in front of it and have that create the Linear event.