Corner AJiraVSCorner Blinear-review-r2

The short answer

For a team of 10, checked against Atlassian’s own plan comparison and Linear’s pricing page on 2026-11-07.

Pick Jira Premium if the team needs dependencies across more than one project, capacity planning or scenario modelling. Atlassian’s comparison puts dependency management at “Single Project” on Free and Standard and “Cross project” on Premium and Enterprise, and marks Advanced planning (Plans), Capacity management, Scenario Modeling, Expandable Work Type Hierarchy and Approvals as Premium and above. Premium is $1,950 a year for the 1 to 10 user tier, or $19.60 per user per month billed monthly, which is $196.00 a month at 10 seats.

Pick Jira Free if the control the team wants is workflow shape and reporting inside one project. The same comparison marks Customizable workflows, Custom fields, Timeline view, and Reports and insights as included on every plan including Free, and Free covers up to 10 users at $0. What Standard adds for this team is automation volume, 400 steps per user per month against 150 steps per subscription per month on Free, rather than the existence of those features.

Pick Linear if work already arrives as issues and batches into cycles. Basic is $1,200 a year at 10 seats and Business $1,920, both as annual seat costs. Business is the plan that adds private teams, guest access and Insights.

The deciding factor in each case, and what would settle it where either would do, is set out in the three sections at the end. The rest of this piece is the week that leads to those conclusions.

Scope and sourcing

This faceoff is assembled from two sources and no others: this publication’s approved review of Jira and its approved review of Linear. Both reviews were built by reading the vendors’ own published pages, retrieved 2026-11-07. Neither product was installed, trialled, measured or screenshotted, and nothing here is a report of using either tool. Every figure and feature below carries the vendor page and retrieval date the original review cited.

One rule shapes the whole piece. Where both reviews answer the same question, they are compared. Where one review settles something and the other does not, that is stated as exactly that: one side known, the other side not read. The missing side is never inferred, and a documented figure is never set against an absent one as though both were known. There is no overall winner here, no score and no ranking.

The fixed scenario

One software team of 10 people. Every plan tier, seat count and published limit below is read at that size. Pricing is read twice, at 10 seats and at 5, because the two vendors’ billing structures behave very differently as the team shrinks.

Where a team of 10 falls on each free plan

At exactly this size the two free tiers behave differently, and both reviews settle their side.

Jira Free is labelled “Free forever for 10 users” and “Up to 10 users” on Atlassian’s pricing calculator, read in a browser 2026-11-07 (atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing). A team of exactly ten sits on the boundary and can stay on it.

Linear Free is $0, described as “Free for everyone”, with unlimited members but 2 teams, 250 issues and a 10MB file upload limit (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07). The seat count is not the constraint; the issue and team caps are. The Linear review’s own judgement on that shape was that Free is a trial in practice rather than a plan, because 250 issues and 2 teams will not survive a real backlog.

So for a team of 10: both free tiers admit all ten people, and only Linear’s published caps are stated to bite. That is not a verdict on the paid plans, and nothing read in the Jira review establishes which features Jira Free carries, which is a gap that returns below.

Step one: triaging the week’s incoming work

This is the dimension where the two reviews are least symmetrical, and the asymmetry is the finding.

Linear’s side is settled to the plan boundary. Triage itself is marked “Included” on every plan, as is Customer requests (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07). The automation that does the routing and labelling is not. Triage Intelligence, triage rules, triage responsibility and issue SLAs are all “Not included” on Free and Basic and first appear on Business at $16 per user per month, and Linear Asks intake is likewise a Business feature, with Slack and email intake starting at Business and web forms, multiple Slack workspaces, private Slack channels and per-channel configurations reserved for Enterprise (linear.app/pricing). The Linear review draws the practical conclusion plainly: a lead reading the homepage promise of issues that are “instantly routed, labeled, and prioritized” (linear.app/, retrieved 2026-11-07) should read the automation behind that promise as priced at Business and above.

Jira’s side is described but not priced. Atlassian’s “What is Jira?” guide names no-code automation as rules that assign work, move items between stages or send updates when something changes (atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/getting-started/introduction, retrieved 2026-11-07). The Jira review states that nothing it read establishes which capabilities belong to which tier. The pricing page, read in a browser at a team size of 10, yields prices but no per-tier feature list.

So the comparison a reader wants here cannot be completed. It is known that Linear gates its triage automation at Business, and it is known that Jira publishes automation rules of a broadly similar description. It is not known which Jira plan carries them, and this piece does not guess. A team of 10 that cares about automatic routing can price that capability on Linear today and cannot price it on Jira from what was read.

What triage control costs in setup

Both reviews speak to setup burden, in different registers, and both findings matter.

Jira’s own guide exposes the configuration surface in its contents list: work item types, fields, workflows, permissions, JQL (Jira’s query language), automation, insights, advanced planning and capacity planning (atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/getting-started/introduction, retrieved 2026-11-07). Atlassian’s support home separately features administrative articles such as “What are permission schemes in Jira?”, “Give users admin permissions” and “Configure SAML single sign-on with an identity provider” (support.atlassian.com, retrieved 2026-11-07). The Jira review’s reading of that is the fair one: a tool with a query language, permission schemes and customisable workflows is a tool somebody has to configure and keep configured.

On the Linear side, triage automation appears in the reviews as a priced matrix row rather than a configuration project. Turning it on is a plan decision at $16 per user per month, not a schema decision.

Neither review quantifies hours for either tool. No page read for the Jira review publishes a setup time, an estimate of ongoing admin effort, or a statement of whether a team needs a dedicated administrator. Nothing read for the Linear review quantifies configuration effort either. The honest form of this comparison is structural, not numeric: Jira’s published surface asks for decisions that Linear’s published surface does not, and neither vendor says what those decisions cost in time.

Step two: setting up the sprint or cycle

Both reviews speak here, so both sides can be stated.

Jira’s guide names the units: Scrum boards for sprint-based teams and Kanban boards for continuous flow, among lists, boards, timelines and calendars as views of the same work (atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/getting-started/introduction, retrieved 2026-11-07). The choice of practice is the team’s.

Linear’s cycles documentation settles the mechanics in detail. Cycles are configured per team under Team Settings, where you enable them and pick a length. A cycle can last 1 to 8 weeks, starts at 12:00 AM on a chosen weekday in the team’s configured timezone, and repeats rather than being scheduled one at a time. Up to 15 future cycles can be created to assign work into, and a cooldown period can follow each one, during which issues cannot be assigned (linear.app/docs/use-cycles, retrieved 2026-11-07).

The difference visible in the sources is one of specificity rather than capability. Linear’s documentation fixes the shape of the unit of work and its bounds; the Jira pages read name the board types without fixing equivalent parameters. For a team of 10 choosing a cadence, Linear’s constraints are knowable in advance from the vendor’s own docs, and Jira’s are not from what was read.

Step two continued: what happens to unfinished work

This is a question most teams of 10 will ask within a month of adopting either tool, and only one review answers it.

Linear’s documentation settles it. Unfinished issues already in a closing cycle roll over automatically, with named exceptions: issues moved to backlog, triage, canceled, or completed during cooldown are not carried forward. The doc states flatly that there is no way to keep unfinished issues in a closed cycle. Teams can also auto-add any Started or Completed issue that has no cycle into the current one, and cycles that have not started yet show a capacity dial estimating whether the team is likely to finish what has been added (linear.app/docs/use-cycles, retrieved 2026-11-07).

No Jira page read in that review says what a Jira sprint enforces, or what becomes of unfinished items when one closes. So this cannot be compared. Linear’s behaviour is documented and automatic, with one named limitation; Jira’s is simply not established by the sources available here, and the absence of a statement is not evidence of either behaviour.

Worth naming as a finding in its own right: Linear’s rollover is a control the team does not configure, and it is also a control the team cannot override, since the doc says there is no way to keep unfinished issues in a closed cycle. A tool that asks nothing of you has also decided something for you.

Step three: tracking a release mid-flight

Both reviews describe grouping work toward a shipped outcome, and the two descriptions answer slightly different questions.

Linear. A project groups issues toward one outcome or completion date, carries its own progress graph, and can be shared across teams. It holds milestones with target dates and descriptions, and saved filtered views can be attached to it, which is how a standup view of In Progress issues or a view of one person’s issues gets pinned to the project itself (linear.app/docs/projects, retrieved 2026-11-07). Mid-flight visibility comes through project updates: structured posts on the project overview carrying a health indicator of On track, At risk or Off track plus a rich text description. The lead posts the first one, after which any workspace member can post subsequent updates. Admins can set a workspace default Slack channel and a reminder cadence, an individual project can override both or opt out, and reminders go only to the initiative owner or project lead for work in the In Progress category, with follow-up nudges 1 and 2 working days later (linear.app/docs/initiative-and-project-updates, retrieved 2026-11-07).

Jira. The guide describes the timeline view as planning and tracking work across weeks or months while managing dependencies, and says teams use Jira to see how work connects across teams and spot blockers early (atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/getting-started/introduction, retrieved 2026-11-07).

Cross-team dependency management is the one thing in this step that only the Jira review speaks to. The Linear review documents projects as shareable across teams but does not address dependency tracking on the pages read. That is a one-sided data point, so it is reported as one: Jira’s own guide claims dependency management in the timeline view, and nothing read for the Linear review establishes what Linear does or does not offer there. Equally, Linear’s health indicators and update cadence are documented in a detail the Jira pages read do not match, and that is not a claim that Jira lacks an equivalent.

The release constraints each review does settle

Two concrete limits sit on the Linear side and should be checked by any team of 10 planning release pipelines.

Releases are capped at “15 pipelines” on Business and are unlimited only on Enterprise (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07). And a project must be associated with at least one public team for its updates to appear in the workspace-level Slack channel, so a project living only in private teams needs its notifications configured separately (linear.app/docs/initiative-and-project-updates, retrieved 2026-11-07). That second one compounds with pricing, since private teams are themselves a Business feature.

The Jira review records no equivalent published cap. That is an absence of a figure in the pages read, not evidence that no limit exists.

Step four: reporting progress to someone accountable

Linear’s plan boundary is settled. Progress reports, meaning project updates and the project progress graph, are included on all four plans, Free included (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07). A project update automatically carries a summary of what moved since the last one: delays, target date changes, new leads, milestone progress and overall progress, with progress details appearing only if overall progress has moved by more than 2% since the previous update, and the author able to suppress them with Hide details before posting (linear.app/docs/initiative-and-project-updates, retrieved 2026-11-07). So a weekly written cadence with health indicators, Slack delivery and reminders to the lead is available on every plan including Free.

Insights is the paid gate and starts at Business, marked Not included on Free and Basic and Included on Business and Enterprise, with the documentation agreeing that Insights is “Available to workspaces on the Business and Enterprise plans” (linear.app/pricing and linear.app/docs/insights, retrieved 2026-11-07). It measures a fixed set of six: Issue count, Effort as total estimate value, Cycle Time from issue start to completion, Lead Time from issue creation to completion, Triage Time spent in Triage status, and Issue Age since creation. Issue count and Effort render as bar charts; the four time measures render as scatterplots with 25th, 50th, 75th and 95th percentile markers, with burn-up charts for cumulative flow, slicing and segmenting, filtering, link sharing inside the workspace and CSV export (linear.app/docs/insights). Dashboards is Enterprise only, and what it adds beyond the Insights panel is not described on any page read for that review.

Jira’s plan boundary is not settled. The guide reports built-in reports that draw on a team’s history to show trends, and customisable dashboards, pitched as answering how a project is tracking “without building a spreadsheet” (atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/getting-started/introduction, retrieved 2026-11-07). But the Jira review states that the pricing page, read in a browser at a team size of 10, yields no per-tier feature list. So which Jira plan carries which reporting is unknown from the sources here.

The consequence for a reader: on Linear, a team of 10 can decide today whether weekly on-track reporting on any plan is enough or whether cycle time and lead time justify $16 per user per month. On Jira, the capability is described and the plan it sits on is not, so the same budget decision cannot be made from what was read. No like-for-like plan comparison is drawn for reporting.

The unknowns that block comparisons a reader expects

These are limits of what is known, stated here so they are not mistaken for findings in the vendors’ favour, and not handed to the reader as research to do.

• Jira’s per-tier feature boundary is unsettled. The product page asserts that “Every Jira plan comes with the AI tools you need to activate your team” (atlassian.com/software/jira, retrieved 2026-11-07), while the pricing page read in a browser at 10 seats yields no per-tier feature list. Nothing read establishes that Rovo agents, AI Search, Teamwork Graph or MCP and CLI access are available on Free, or available in the same form on Standard as on Premium. The question is open, not resolved in the marketing claim’s favour.
• No Jira page read publishes AI usage limits, quotas, token costs or output quality for any of the agent features described (atlassian.com/software/jira and the guide page, retrieved 2026-11-07). A lead evaluating the agent story has no published ceiling to plan against.
• Linear publishes no per-session cost for coding agent sessions and no sandbox runtime rate. Coding sessions are billed as “model tokens at provider-published rates, with no markup, plus sandbox runtime”, with runtime in 20-minute increments and no rate given, while the one published figure is $0.07 to $0.20 for a typical loop run without a coding session (linear.app/docs/ai-credits, retrieved 2026-11-07). So Linear’s seat price is a floor rather than a total. The exposure is bounded by choice, since the balance is prepaid and opt-in and nothing is charged if nothing is funded, but it cannot be forecast.
• Neither vendor publishes support response times or hours for the self-serve paid tiers. Atlassian’s support pages list channels without stating entitlements (support.atlassian.com and support.atlassian.com/atlassian-knowledge-base/kb/, retrieved 2026-11-07), and Linear reserves priority support, an account manager and an uptime SLA for Enterprise with no published commitment on the paid self-serve tiers (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07).

Two seat-count traps before the pricing table

On Linear, two things the reviews settle change the arithmetic. Guest accounts are “billed as regular members”, so a guest is a full-price seat (linear.app/docs/members-roles, retrieved 2026-11-07), and guest access is itself a Business feature. The Linear review works the example: a team of ten plus three client contacts on Business is 13 seats at $16, which is $208 per month, or $2,496 per year. Separately, AI credits are a prepaid workspace-level balance that the seat price does not cover, pooled across the workspace and opt-in (linear.app/docs/ai-credits, retrieved 2026-11-07).

No Jira page read in that review addresses guest or collaborator billing. That is unknown rather than equivalent, and a team planning to bring clients into Jira cannot size it from what was read.

What it costs at 5 and at 10 seats

All figures read in a browser on 2026-11-07 from atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing and linear.app/pricing. Currency USD; both pages show only a dollar sign, and USD for Jira comes from that page’s own structured pricing data. Monthly and annual billing are kept in separate rows and are not blended. The Linear figures are annual seat costs and exclude optional AI credits, which are separate and cannot be forecast from the published information.

The two vendors do not publish the same thing, and the table is built to show that rather than hide it. Jira publishes both billing bases, and prices annually by user tier, so its annual Standard and Premium figures are identical at 5 seats and at 10 because they are a flat tier price labelled “User tier: 1 - 10”, not a per-seat rate. Linear publishes one per-seat rate per paid plan, billed yearly only, so its totals halve from 10 seats to 5 while Jira’s annual tier does not move at all. There is no single comparable number across the two, and inventing one would misrepresent both.

What the table marks as unverified

We verified annual pricing; we could not verify a monthly rate. Linear’s pricing page shows Basic and Business against “Billed yearly” and shows no month to month figure, so the Linear numbers in the table are annual seat costs and nothing in them should be read as a monthly commitment. That is a gap in what we could verify, not a finding that Linear does not offer monthly billing. A buyer who wants to pay monthly should ask Linear directly rather than assume either way.

Optional AI credits sit outside every Linear figure here. The Linear review establishes that credits are a separate prepaid workspace balance, that coding sessions are billed on model tokens at provider rates plus sandbox runtime, and that no rate is published for that runtime. Loops are given only as a typical range per run. So the seat costs below are a floor for a workspace that funds credits, and the usage on top of them cannot be forecast from Linear’s published information. A workspace that never adds funds is never charged for them.

Neither vendor quotes Enterprise at this size: Jira offers no Enterprise figure below 801 users, and Linear shows only “Custom” with annual billing only.

The crossover a small team should check

On Jira, annual billing is a saving only once the team is large enough for the tier it is sold in. Working from the two published rates: a Standard seat billed monthly is $9.70 x 12 = $116.40 a year, which makes the $950 annual tier worth paying at nine seats ($1,047.60 billed monthly for a year) but not at eight ($931.20). Premium crosses in the same place, $235.20 per seat per year against a $1,950 tier: $2,116.80 at nine seats against $1,881.60 at eight (atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing, read in a browser 2026-11-07). A team of 10 is above the crossover on both plans; a team that expects to sit at seven or eight for a while is below it.

No equivalent crossover exists on the Linear side, because only one billing basis is published.

Which team should pick Jira

On what these reviews establish, Jira suits a team of 10 whose work spans groups with dependencies it cannot hold in its head, that wants workflows shaped to its own process rather than to the tool’s, and that wants reporting it does not assemble by hand. Atlassian’s own guide is the basis for each of those: dependency management in the timeline view, customisable work item types, fields and workflows, and built-in reports drawing on team history (atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/getting-started/introduction, retrieved 2026-11-07).

The deciding factor is whether an owner exists. The configuration surface in Atlassian’s own contents list, work item types through to capacity planning, plus permission schemes and JQL, is work somebody has to do and keep doing, and no page read quantifies it or says whether a dedicated administrator is needed. If nobody on the team of 10 is willing to own that, the control is theoretical and the setup cost is real. The Jira review’s own framing holds: a team whose work is a flat list of tasks will be paying, in setup and overhead, for structure the sources give no reason to think it needs.

Which plan delivers it can now be said, from Atlassian’s own plan comparison on the pricing page (atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07).

Three of the four capabilities this recommendation rests on are marked included on every plan, Free among them: Customizable workflows, Custom fields, and Timeline view, with Reports and insights also carrying a check in all four columns. So a team of 10 that wants workflows shaped to its own process and reports it does not assemble by hand can verifiably have those at $0, inside Free’s limit of 10 users per site.

The fourth is where the money is. Dependency management is listed as “Single Project” on Free and on Standard, and “Cross project” only on Premium and Enterprise. The planning features around it follow the same line: Advanced planning (Plans), Capacity management, Expandable Work Type Hierarchy, Scenario Modeling and Approvals are each marked Premium and Enterprise only. A team whose dependencies sit inside one project is covered on Free. A team whose work spans projects is on Premium, which is $1,950 a year for the 1 to 10 user tier, or $19.60 per user per month billed monthly, $196.00 a month at 10 seats.

Automation is on every plan and differs by volume rather than by existence: 150 steps per subscription per month on Free, 400 per user per month on Standard, 750 on Premium. For a team of 10 that is the clearest reason to pay for Standard, because Free’s allowance is a single pool for the whole site rather than per person.

What the comparison does not settle is the detail inside those rows. “Reports and insights” carries one check per plan, so which chart types, AI-generated charts or saved-report limits apply on Free rather than Premium cannot be read from it, and this recommendation does not rest on them. A team buying Jira specifically for a named reporting capability should confirm that capability, not the row.

Which team should pick Linear

Linear suits a team of 10 whose work already arrives as issues, batches into cycles and closes against a pull request. That is the Linear review’s own reading of the evidence, resting on Issues, Git automations, Guided reviews, Cycles, Diffs and Releases sitting in one place (linear.app/, retrieved 2026-11-07) and on issues, projects, cycles and initiatives being marked “Included” on all four plans, so the core model is not something a team buys its way into (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07).

The deciding factor is whether a fixed cycle cadence with automatic rollover suits the team. Cycles are 1 to 8 weeks, per team, repeating from a chosen weekday, with up to 15 future cycles and optional cooldowns, and unfinished work rolls over automatically with named exceptions and no way to keep unfinished issues in a closed cycle (linear.app/docs/use-cycles, retrieved 2026-11-07). A team that wants that rhythm gets it without configuration. A team that wants to decide case by case what happens at cycle close is accepting a decision the tool has already made.

Three matrix rows move such a team from Basic at $1,200 a year to Business at $1,920 a year for 10 seats: private teams, guest accounts and Insights, all marked Not included on Free and Basic and Included on Business and Enterprise (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07). And on either plan the seat total is a floor, not a total, if the agent features are funded.

When either would do, and what would settle it

A team of 10 that needs only a simple board and a weekly on-track report to one accountable person could reasonably use either, on what the reviews establish. Linear covers that case on every plan including Free, through project updates with On track, At risk or Off track health indicators (linear.app/docs/initiative-and-project-updates, retrieved 2026-11-07), subject to the 250 issue and 2 team caps on Free. Jira’s guide describes boards and built-in reports and says you do not need Agile to use Jira and “can start simple and add more structure as you grow” (atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/getting-started/introduction, retrieved 2026-11-07), and Jira Free admits all ten people.

Two questions would settle it, and the reviews leave both open rather than answering them. First, which Jira tier carries the automation and reporting this team actually needs, since the pricing page read in a browser at 10 seats publishes no per-tier feature list. Second, what the team’s forecast agent spend on Linear would be, since the per-session cost of a coding session and the sandbox runtime rate are not published. Neither question is answerable from the material these two reviews rest on, and neither is answered here.