What Linear is
Linear presents itself as “the product development system for teams and agents”, described as “purpose-built for planning and building products” and “designed for the AI era” (https://linear.app/, retrieved 2026-11-07). That is the vendor’s own framing, and it is a fair summary of what the rest of its public material describes: a place where software work is filed as issues, grouped into projects and initiatives, run in cycles, and tied back to pull requests.
This review is based on reading eleven official pages: the homepage, the pricing page, the documentation index, and the documentation for cycles, projects, initiatives, initiative and project updates, Insights, members and roles, the GitHub integration, and AI Credits. All were retrieved on 2026-11-07 and each claim below names the page it came from. No product was used. Nothing below was verified by hands-on testing, and where the pages are silent, this review says so rather than filling the gap.
Issues, cycles and the core object model
The pricing table lists a single row called “Core”, defined as “Issues, projects, cycles, initiatives”, and marks it “Included” on all four plans (https://linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07). Those four objects are the whole spine of the tool, and the important point for a buyer is that none of them is gated behind a paid tier.
The homepage names the matching feature set under its build section: Issues, Git automations, Guided reviews, Cycles, Diffs and Releases (https://linear.app/). The documentation index carries a section headed “Issues and cycles” with articles for Issues, Cycles and Releases, and a “Planning” section with Projects, Initiatives, and initiative and project updates (https://linear.app/docs, retrieved 2026-11-07).
The cycles documentation settles how the practice actually runs, and the detail is in the walkthrough below: cycles are 1 to 8 weeks, set per team, repeating from a chosen weekday, with optional cooldowns and automatic rollover of unfinished work (https://linear.app/docs/use-cycles, retrieved 2026-11-07).
Intake and triage
The homepage claims Linear will “automatically turn conversations and customer feedback into actionable issues that are instantly routed, labeled, and prioritized for the right team”, and names Linear Agent, Customer Requests, Triage and Linear Asks as the features behind that (https://linear.app/).
The plan ladder splits this more finely than the marketing copy suggests. Triage itself is “Included” on every plan, as is Customer requests (https://linear.app/pricing). But Triage Intelligence, triage rules, triage responsibility and issue SLAs are all “Not included” on Free and Basic and first appear on Business, and Linear Asks intake is likewise a Business feature, with Slack intake and email intake starting at Business and web forms, multiple Slack workspaces, private Slack channels and per-channel configurations reserved for Enterprise (https://linear.app/pricing). So a team lead reading the homepage promise of issues that are “instantly routed, labeled, and prioritized” should understand that the automation doing the routing and labeling is priced at Business and above.
One release, start to finish
The following walks a single feature release through the product as the documentation describes it. It is illustrative, assembled from the vendor’s own docs to show how the pieces connect. No product was used and no part of this sequence was observed: it is what the documentation says happens, not a record of it happening.
Work arrives. Issues are the base object. Triage is included on every plan, so incoming reports land somewhere before anyone owns them (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07). The rules that route and label them automatically are not: Triage Intelligence, triage rules and triage responsibility are Business features.
The team sets a cadence. 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. You can create up to 15 future cycles to assign work into, and you can add a cooldown period after each one, during which issues cannot be assigned (linear.app/docs/use-cycles, retrieved 2026-11-07).
The cycle turns over. This is the detail worth knowing before adopting the practice, and it answers a question the earlier revision of this review had to leave open. 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. 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).
The release is a project. 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 you can attach saved filtered views 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).
Code closes the loop. The GitHub integration documents connection at the organisation level and separately at the account level, the second being what enables assignee syncing (linear.app/docs/github-integration, retrieved 2026-11-07). Only the integration’s overview page was read, so this review cannot describe the branch naming, pull request linking or status automation in detail, and does not.
Stakeholders are told. Project updates are structured posts on the project overview: 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, and an individual project can override both or opt out of reminders entirely. 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).
One constraint in that last step matters for a team on a paid tier using private teams: a project must be associated with at least one public team for its updates to appear in the workspace-level Slack channel. A project that lives only in private teams needs its notifications configured separately (linear.app/docs/initiative-and-project-updates).
What the free reporting gives you, and what you pay for
The pricing matrix splits reporting into three rows, and the gap between the first and the second is the one that decides a budget (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07).
Progress reports are included on all four plans, Free included. In practice that means project updates and the project progress graph. 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. Progress details only appear if overall progress has moved by more than 2% since the previous update, and the author can suppress them with Hide details before posting. On initiatives, a change of owner, target date or status is added to the update automatically (linear.app/docs/initiative-and-project-updates, retrieved 2026-11-07). The updates tab keeps the history, including property changes, and initiative updates can be set to show updates from sub-initiatives and their projects in one place.
So a team on any plan, including Free, can run a weekly written cadence with health indicators, Slack delivery, threaded comments that sync bi-directionally with Slack, and reminders to the lead. For many teams that is the reporting they actually use.
Insights is the paid tier, and it starts at Business. The matrix marks it Not included on Free and Basic, Included on Business and Enterprise. The documentation is explicit on the same point: Insights is “Available to workspaces on the Business and Enterprise plans” (linear.app/docs/insights, retrieved 2026-11-07). The two agree, which is worth saying because other parts of this pricing page do not agree with each other.
What Insights actually measures, which no page in the earlier revision could answer, is a fixed set of six measures: 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. Burn-up charts show cumulative flow over time, monthly by default and adjustable to weekly. Results can be sliced and segmented, filtered by created or completed date, status type, label, project or team, shared by link to anyone in the workspace, or exported to CSV (linear.app/docs/insights).
That answers the practical question directly. If the lead’s question is cycle time, lead time, throughput or estimate accuracy, those are exactly the measures Insights provides, and they are a Business feature at $16 per user per month. If the question is only whether the project is on track this week, project updates answer it on every plan.
Dashboards is Enterprise only. The matrix marks it Not included on Free, Basic and Business. What Dashboards adds beyond the Insights panel is not described on any page read, so this review cannot say what an Enterprise buyer gets for it.
AI credits, and what they can cost
The seat price does not cover the agent features the homepage leads with. This section is from linear.app/docs/ai-credits, retrieved 2026-11-07, which the earlier revision of this review flagged as unread.
How it works. AI credits are a prepaid, workspace-level balance held in US dollars and pooled across the workspace. It is explicitly opt-in: “If your workspace never adds funds, you will not have access to these additional features, and you will never be charged for them.” Coding sessions and Loops are billed on actual usage rather than a per-seat fee.
What consumes credits. Two things, and only two. Cloud coding agents, when Linear Agent writes code and opens pull requests, and agent loops running agent work in the background. The doc states that other Linear AI features are included in the plan and do not draw on the balance. Both credit-consuming features are available on all four plans, Free included, provided credits are funded.
What it costs. Coding sessions are billed per session, and the cost is “model tokens at provider-published rates, with no markup, plus sandbox runtime”, with sandbox runtime billed in 20-minute increments and larger sandbox sizes consuming more for the same runtime. Loops are billed per run, and the doc gives the only figure on the page: a typical run without a coding session costs $0.07 to $0.20, with runs that start a coding session also incurring that session’s cost.
Who can spend it. This is the finding a buyer should weigh. Adding credits is restricted to workspace admins, or owners on Enterprise workspaces, with a $10 minimum ad-hoc top-up and a $50 minimum automatic reload. But spending is not restricted. Asked directly whether an admin can control who may use credits, the doc answers: “Not at this time. If AI credits are enabled for the workspace, anyone who has access to features that use AI credits can spend from the shared balance.”
The controls that do exist. Three, all narrower than per-member limits. Guests can be blocked from agent features with a “Prevent guests from interacting with agents” toggle under Security, Integrations and applications. Workspace admins can control who creates, updates and deletes workspace loops under Settings, Security, Workspace management, Manage loops. And spend limits and usage reporting live in Settings, Usage and limits, with per-session cost breakdowns by model, sandbox runtime and total.
Terms worth reading before funding it. Top-ups go through Stripe on a separate invoice from the Linear subscription, by credit card only, and may use a different card. Funds expire 12 months after purchase, unused balance rolls over across subscription billing cycles, and expired balances cannot be refunded, transferred between workspaces or restored. Where several balances exist they are consumed promotional first, then support-issued, then self-added, nearest expiry first within each group. If the balance runs out, credit-consuming features cannot start new work; balances are not real time, so a workspace can go briefly negative by a few dollars, which the next top-up covers first. Failed runs, retries and partial completions are billable for the resources used. If a workspace is deleted, any remaining balance expires, with a 48 hour window to undo.
What still cannot be verified. The per-session cost of a coding session is not a number on this page and cannot be derived from it. “Model tokens at provider-published rates” points at third-party price lists that are not quoted here, and no rate at all is published for sandbox runtime per 20-minute increment, nor are the sandbox sizes defined. The $0.07 to $0.20 range is given for loops only, is described as typical rather than bounded, and explicitly excludes any loop that starts a coding session. A buyer therefore cannot forecast agent spend from the vendor’s own documentation, and the seat arithmetic above remains a floor rather than a total. What can be said is that the exposure is bounded by choice: the balance is prepaid, opt-in, and nothing is charged if nothing is funded.
The plan ladder and what each tier unlocks
All figures in this section are from https://linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07.
Free is $0, described as “Free for everyone”, with unlimited members, 2 teams, 250 issues and a 10MB file upload limit. It includes the Core objects, Customer requests, API and webhook access, import and export, Triage, Pulse, issue sync, Diffs, and the AI and agent rows noted above.
Basic is $10 per user per month, shown against “Billed yearly”. It adds 5 teams, unlimited issues, unlimited file uploads, third-party app management and, per the feature table, Guided reviews.
Business is $16 per user per month, also shown against “Billed yearly”. It adds unlimited teams, private teams, guest accounts, Triage Intelligence, Code Intelligence, Linear Insights, Linear Asks, Zendesk and Intercom integrations, issue SLAs, triage rules, triage responsibility, team owners, advanced authentication, and Releases capped at “15 pipelines”.
Enterprise is shown as “Custom” with “Annual billing only” and no number. It adds SAML alongside Google SSO, SCIM provisioning, IP restrictions, domain claiming, audit log, HIPAA compliance, dashboards, sub-initiatives, web forms for Asks, 5 levels of sub-teams, unlimited Releases pipelines, invoice and PO billing, priority support, an account manager, custom terms and an uptime SLA.
One inconsistency inside the pricing page itself is worth noting at this point. The Basic plan card lists “Admin roles” as part of what Basic adds on top of Free, while the feature table below marks “Admin roles” as “Included” on Free as well. The two parts of the same page disagree, and this review does not pick the more convenient reading.
Where the ladder will pinch a team lead
The specific constraints to test against your own org shape, all from https://linear.app/pricing:
- Free is a trial in practice, not a plan. 250 issues and 2 teams will not survive a real backlog. Unlimited members on a 250 issue cap is an odd shape.
- Basic caps you at 5 teams. If your org already has six squads, Basic is out regardless of budget.
- SSO is Google only below Enterprise. Free, Basic and Business all show “Google” for SSO. SAML appears only on Enterprise, as do SCIM provisioning and the audit log. If your security review requires SAML or SCIM, you are in an unpriced Enterprise conversation from the start, whatever your seat count.
- Guests and private teams are Business features. If you need contractors or client users in the workspace, or a team whose issues are not visible workspace-wide, $16 per user per month is your floor.
- Sub-teams are 1 level on Business against 5 levels on Enterprise. A flat squad structure is fine on Business; a division, group and squad hierarchy is not.
- Releases are capped at 15 pipelines on Business and unlimited only on Enterprise.
- Uptime SLA, priority support and an account manager are Enterprise only. There is no published support commitment at all on the paid self-serve tiers.
What it costs, with the arithmetic shown
The only published rates are $10 and $16 per user per month, each shown against “Billed yearly” (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07). The examples below apply those published per-seat rates on the same billing basis, so the two tiers are directly comparable. Each line labels whether a figure is a per-seat rate or a team total. None of these totals include AI credits, which are billed separately and are covered in their own section below.
A team of 10 on Basic. Rate: $10 per user per month, billed yearly. Team total: 10 seats x $10 = $100 per month for the whole team. Over a year: $100 x 12 = $1,200 per year for the whole team.
The same team of 10 on Business. Rate: $16 per user per month, billed yearly. Team total: 10 x $16 = $160 per month for the whole team. Over a year: $160 x 12 = $1,920 per year for the whole team.
The difference. $6 per user per month, which for 10 people is $60 per month, or $720 per year for the whole team.
25 seats on Business, for a team planning to grow: 25 x $16 = $400 per month for the whole team, or $4,800 per year.
What forces the upgrade
For a team of ten, three things decide whether that $720 a year is spent, and all three are matrix rows rather than judgment calls (linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07).
Private teams. Marked Not included on Free and Basic, Included on Business and Enterprise. If any team’s issues must not be visible workspace-wide, Basic cannot do it. Note the knock-on from the walkthrough above: a project that lives only in private teams will not post its updates to the workspace-level Slack channel without separate configuration (linear.app/docs/initiative-and-project-updates).
Guest access. Also Not included on Free and Basic, Included on Business and Enterprise. The documentation adds the detail the matrix does not: guest accounts are “billed as regular members” (linear.app/docs/members-roles, retrieved 2026-11-07). A guest is a full-price seat. Guests can see issues, projects and documents for the teams they are explicitly added to and take the same actions as members there, but they cannot see workspace-wide features including workspace views, customer requests and initiatives, and they cannot be team owners.
So for a team of ten plus three client contacts, Business is not $160 per month. It is 13 seats at $16, which is $208 per month for the whole team, or $2,496 per year. A buyer planning to bring clients in should count them as seats from the start.
Reporting. Insights is the Business gate discussed above. If cycle time and throughput have to come out of the tool rather than a spreadsheet, that is the upgrade.
One further Business row is worth naming because it is an administrative constraint rather than a feature: team owners are Not included on Free and Basic. On Free every member is automatically an admin, and on Basic and Business the user who upgrades the workspace is granted the admin role (linear.app/docs/members-roles). Delegated per-team control, letting a team lead manage their own team’s settings, labels, templates and access without a workspace admin, requires Business. Making a team private, deleting a team or changing its parent are team-owner-only operations.
What the pricing page does not settle
Several things a buyer needs are simply not published, and that is itself a finding about buying from this vendor.
Both paid rates are shown against “Billed yearly” only. No month to month rate appears anywhere on the pricing page, so a buyer who wants monthly billing cannot work out what it would cost, or whether it is offered. Enterprise is shown as “Custom” with “Annual billing only” and no figure, so there is no way to size an Enterprise budget from public information, and as noted above the security and org modelling requirements that push a team to Enterprise are common ones.
The prices carry a dollar sign and no other currency is shown, so a buyer outside the United States cannot confirm local pricing or whether tax is included. No free trial length for the paid tiers is stated, no annual or volume discount is stated beyond the yearly billing basis of the quoted rates, and no nonprofit, education or startup rate appears on the pages read. The homepage footer does link to a “Startups” page (https://linear.app/), but that page was not read and nothing about its terms can be stated here.
A note on the two scale claims
The homepage says “Linear powers over 50,000 product teams. From ambitious startups to major enterprises” (https://linear.app/, retrieved 2026-11-07). The pricing page says “Trusted by more than 50,000 companies” (https://linear.app/pricing, retrieved 2026-11-07).
Those are different claims against the same number. A company can contain many product teams, so 50,000 teams and 50,000 companies cannot both be the natural reading of one underlying count. The material read does not reconcile the two, and this review does not treat either as the stronger figure.
Documentation and self-serve support signals
Eight documentation articles were read for this review alongside the index (https://linear.app/docs, retrieved 2026-11-07): cycles, projects, initiatives, initiative and project updates, Insights, members and roles, the GitHub integration and AI Credits. Everything else below is read off the index rather than the articles themselves, so it describes the shape of the self-serve material rather than its depth.
For onboarding there is a Start Guide, an Import Guide and an “Import Issues” article described as “quickly move issues from your existing issue tracker into Linear”. For administration there are articles on Workspaces, Teams, Login methods, Invite members, Members and roles, SAML, SCIM, API and Webhooks, Third-Party App Approvals, Security, Audit log, Billing and plans, AI Credits and Exporting Data. Named integration articles cover GitHub, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Sentry and Slack, plus an Integration Directory.
That the enterprise administration topics are documented publicly, rather than held back for sales conversations, is a positive signal for anyone who has to answer a security questionnaire. The index also offers “Contact support” as a navigation item, though no response time commitment is published on any page read, and the pricing table reserves priority support for Enterprise.
Who it suits, on the evidence available
On the sources read, Linear looks aimed squarely at a software team that already works the way the tool is shaped: work arrives as issues, gets batched into cycles, and closes against a pull request. The inclusion of Diffs, Guided reviews, Git automations and a cloud coding agent means intake, planning and code review sit in the same place, which is the main argument for it over a general purpose tracker. The fact that issues, projects, cycles and initiatives are on every plan, including Free, means the core model is not something you buy your way into.
Two caveats temper that. First, anything resembling an enterprise requirement, meaning SAML, SCIM, an audit log, HIPAA, a support commitment, an uptime SLA, or more than one level of sub-teams, moves a buyer to an Enterprise tier with no published price. Second, the agent features the vendor leads with draw on a prepaid AI credit balance whose per-session cost the vendor does not publish, so the seat arithmetic above is a floor rather than a total. That balance is opt-in and prepaid, so the exposure is bounded by choice rather than open-ended, but it cannot be forecast.
Every feature claim in this review comes from the vendor’s own pages, attributed above. None of it was verified by using the product.