Linear vs Jira
Linear vs Jira
Emily Rivers
Marketing & Product
Aug 5, 2024
6m
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TL;DR: Linear and Jira are popular project management tools for product teams, each with distinct features. Linear is known for its simplicity, speed, and user-friendly interface, making it ideal for small to medium-sized software development teams. It excels in real-time collaboration, fast performance, and easy issue tracking. Linear also integrates seamlessly with Productlane, which allows teams to centralize customer feedback and include the most-wanted features in their roadmaps. Jira, developed by Atlassian, offers a comprehensive feature set with advanced issue tracking, customizable workflows, and rich reporting. It is highly configurable and suitable for large and complex projects but has a steeper learning curve and can overwhelm smaller teams. Linear's pricing starts at $8 per user per month, with a G2 rating of 4.5/5, while Jira starts at $7.16 per user per month, with a G2 rating of 4.3/5. Overall, Linear is recommended for its efficiency, integration with Productlane, and ease of use, while Jira is preferred for its scalability and customizability.
What is Linear?
Linear is a modern project management tool designed for software development teams. Known for its simplicity and speed, Linear focuses on providing an intuitive and efficient user experience. Built for bug tracking, Linear's features have grown into offerings such as task management and sprint planning. It's ideal for teams who follow a Scrum process as it allows project management teams to track the active sprint as well as other tasks.
Linear is known for being a straightforward tool with a great user interface. However, that does mean that it lacks customization options. It only offers predefined fields rather than allowing teams to customize workflows themselves. That being said, this simple process allows you to streamline issues and ensure that other team members from different departments can follow progress easily.
Start-up companies are best suited to Linear, but larger organizations who only want to use it for their development teams rather than across the company will also find Linear perfect for task management.
Top Linear features
Fast performance and intuitive interface: Linear is built for speed, allowing for quick task creation and management. It's easy to set up and has a visually appealing design.
Real-time collaboration: Send out team-wide project updates and hold real-time discussions on issues so you don't lose momentum in your sprint.
Easy issue tracking: Efficiently manage bugs alongside feature development, keeping new tasks clearly separate.
Product roadmaps: Easily create and manage project roadmaps to keep your team informed and on track.
Wide integration: Linear offers hundreds of integrations with other apps that help you streamline your processes. Popular integrations include Slack, GitHub, Zapier and Zendesk. Plus, Productlane is built on Linear, so you can use customer feedback to inform your product development.
Linear Pros, Cons & Cost
Pros:
User-friendly, intuitive interface
High performance and speed
Straightforward pricing options
Great for small to medium-sized teams
Cons:
Limited integrations compared to Jira
Fewer advanced features for large enterprises
Cost
Free plan: Unlimited members and up to 250 issues
Basic plan (From $8 per user per month): Unlimited issues and file uploads
Business plan (From $12 per user per month): Unlimited teams, guest accounts and access to Linear Insights (data analytics)
What is Jira?
Jira, developed by Atlassian, is one of the most widely used project management tools in software development. It offers extensive features for agile project management, including Scrum, issue tracking, sprint planning, and reporting. Jira is highly configurable and integrates well with other tools in the Atlassian ecosystem, like Confluence and Trello.
Larger organizations love Jira because it can scale with the business. It offers extensive customization options so you can create custom workflows that fit exactly with your current processes. That also makes it ideal for teams outside of software development - you could use Jira for task management in marketing, HR and customer success.
However, Jira's highly customizable platform is also one of its drawbacks. It's not as quick and easy to set up as Linear, and users find the interface harder to work with. A new project tends to take longer to set up, and it can be hard to find multiple projects within the UI. Jira was built with developers in mind, so if you're not a developer, expect it to take longer to get to grips with.
Top Jira features
Templates: Make it easier for the less technical members of your team to set up tasks and projects by picking from preset templates that help speed up setup time.
Custom workflows: Highly configurable workflows to match any process. Whether you prefer Scrum, Kanban or another process, you can set your projects up in the way you and your team want to work.
Rich reporting: Detailed reports and dashboards for performance and progress tracking.
Wide range of integrations: Integrates with numerous tools and services, including Figma, Salesforce and Zoom.
Jira Pros, Cons & Cost
Pros:
Wide range of features
Highly customizable
Strong integration capabilities
Suitable for large and complex projects
Cons:
Less intuitive interface, meaning a steeper learning curve for non-technical users
Can be overwhelming for smaller teams
Performance can be slow with large data sets
Cost
Free plan: Unlimited goals, protects, tasks, and forms for up to 10 users
Standard plan (From $7.16 per user per month): Unlimited users, external collaboration, and multi-region data residency
Premium plan (From $12.48 per user per month): Unlimited storage, customizable approval processes, priority support, and 99.9% uptime SLA
Our verdict on Linear vs Jira: the best tool for software development teams
While both Linear and Jira offer valuable features for product development teams, we think Linear stands out for its simplicity, speed, and user-friendly interface. It's particularly well-suited for small to medium-sized teams looking for an efficient and straightforward project management tool.
Furthermore, it's easy to close the customer feedback loop with Linear thanks to Productlane. Centralize all your ideas, opportunities, and customer feedback within Linear, then use Productlane to do research and collect customer feedback. With Productlane's 2-way sync, every Linear issue and project is kept up-to-date.
Jira, with its extensive feature set and customizability, is ideal for larger teams and complex projects but can be overwhelming and less intuitive. Productlane offers integration with Jira, via Linear's Jira Sync. Issues will then be synced with Productlane.
So, in the battle of Linear vs Jira, for Productlane Linear comes out on top. While Jira offers so many features and customization options, for most teams it is less user-friendly and can affect a team's productivity. On the other hand, Linear offers a better user experience and helps you through setup tasks so you can hit the ground running with your products. And with 2-way sync with Productlane, it makes including your customers' most-wanted features in your roadmaps a breeze.
FAQs on Linear vs. Jira
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