Linear vs Jira: Pricing, Features and Which to Choose

Linear starts at $10 per user a month (Basic, billed yearly) and tops out at a custom Enterprise quote, while Jira starts at $0 for up to 10 users and runs $8.48 per user a month for Standard or $15.56 per user a month for Premium. If you want a fast, opinionated issue tracker built for software teams, Linear is the simpler buy. If you need configurable workflows, large free-tier headroom, or an issue tracker that plugs into Confluence, Jira Service Management and a huge add-on marketplace, Jira is the safer default. The rest of this guide breaks down exactly what each plan includes, using the current tier structures published on Linear's own pricing page and Atlassian's Jira pricing page.

What Is Linear? What Is Jira?

Linear is an issue-tracking and project-management tool built specifically for software teams, with a design philosophy centered on speed, keyboard shortcuts and minimal configuration. Its own features page describes it as a system for "planning and building products," organized around issues, cycles, projects and initiatives.

Jira is Atlassian's issue-tracking and agile project-management platform, originally built for software bug tracking and now positioned as a general work-tracking tool across engineering, IT and business teams. Atlassian's Jira product page markets it as configurable enough to run Scrum, Kanban or custom workflows at any team size, backed by the wider Atlassian ecosystem (Confluence, Jira Service Management, and a large marketplace of add-ons).

Linear vs Jira Pricing Compared

Both companies publish list prices rather than hiding everything behind "contact sales," which makes a direct comparison possible. Linear's paid plans are billed yearly; Jira's per-user prices shown on its pricing page apply to the Standard and Premium editions, with Enterprise reserved for larger organizations (Atlassian's page lists Enterprise eligibility starting at 801+ users).

Cost example — a 20-person team, billed monthly per seat: on Linear Business ($16/user/month) a 20-seat workspace works out to $320/month ($3,840/year). The same 20 seats on Jira Premium ($15.56/user/month) come to $311.20/month ($3,734.40/year) — close to parity, with Jira slightly cheaper at the mid tier. Linear's entry tier, Basic ($10/user/month), would cost $200/month for 20 seats, while Jira's entry tier, Standard ($8.48/user/month), would cost $169.60/month for the same 20 seats — cheaper than Linear's entry tier. In short: Jira Standard is the cheapest paid option per seat at small-to-mid team sizes; Linear Business and Jira Premium land within a few dollars of each other once you need the advanced tier.

Free Plan Limits: Linear vs Jira

The free tiers solve different problems. Linear's Free plan allows unlimited members but caps the workspace at 2 teams and 250 total issues — it's built for a small team or side project that will eventually outgrow the issue count, not the seat count. Jira's Free plan flips that: unlimited goals, projects, tasks and forms, but capped at 10 users total, with 2GB of storage and 150 automation steps per month. A five-person startup with heavy ticket volume may prefer Linear's free tier; a 10-person team that wants Confluence-style collaboration and AI-generated reports at zero cost may prefer Jira's.

Issue Tracking and Core Workflow

Linear's whole product is organized around issues, projects, cycles and (at the workspace level) initiatives — the pricing page groups these as "Core" features available from the Free plan onward, with unlimited issues unlocked starting at Basic. Triage, used to route incoming requests before they become tracked issues, is part of the base workflow, and Business adds "Triage Intelligence" to help automatically route and prioritize incoming work.

Jira's equivalent is built around issues, boards, backlogs and sprints, with six selectable views (backlog, list, board, timeline, calendar, summary) available even on the Free plan. Because Jira's workflows and issue types are fully customizable — the feature that made it the default choice for large engineering orgs for two decades — teams can model approval steps, custom fields and multi-stage processes that Linear intentionally keeps simpler.

Planning, Cycles and Cross-Team Coordination

Linear's cycles are a built-in way to run time-boxed sprints without extra configuration, and initiatives let you group projects into a roadmap view. Jira's equivalent cross-team planning — "cross-team planning and dependency management" — is called out specifically as a Premium-tier feature, alongside customizable approval processes and team-type-specific onboarding. In other words: Linear bakes lightweight planning into every tier, while Jira reserves its more advanced, multi-team planning tools for Premium and above.

Automation and AI Features

Both vendors have put AI into their core product rather than selling it as a bolt-on. Linear's Agent platform and "Linear Agent" ship on the Free plan, and Business adds Code Intelligence (for surfacing code-related context on issues) and Linear Insights (reporting). Jira bundles Rovo — Atlassian's AI layer — into every tier including Free, where it powers "AI-driven reports and dashboards." Paid Jira tiers add Rovo Search, Chat and Agents, plus rising automation-step allowances: 150 steps/month on Free, 400/user/month on Standard, 750/user/month on Premium and 1,000/user/month on Enterprise.

Integrations, SSO and Enterprise Controls

Linear's Business plan adds Zendesk and Intercom integrations on top of the base integration set, plus private teams and guest access. Enterprise is where the compliance checklist lives: SAML and SCIM provisioning, invoice/PO billing, granular admin controls and advanced org modeling. Jira follows a similar pattern but spreads security features earlier — Standard already includes user roles/permissions, external collaboration and multi-region data residency — with Enterprise adding support for multiple identity providers, enforced SSO, SCIM and Atlassian Guard Standard bundled in for advanced governance.

For teams that need to document their security posture to a buyer or auditor, Atlassian publishes a dedicated trust and security center, and Linear documents its own approach across its product documentation.

Support and Uptime

Jira publishes explicit support SLAs by tier: community support on Free, 9/5 regional support with a 2-hour critical-issue response on Standard, 24/7 critical-issue support with a 1-hour response and a 99.9% uptime SLA on Premium, and 24/7 support for all issues with a 99.95% uptime SLA on Enterprise. Standard also adds "up to 100,000 users per site" as a headroom figure, which signals Atlassian is comfortable positioning Jira for very large single-site deployments even on its entry paid plan.

Linear's pricing page does not publish numbered response-time SLAs in the same way; it instead lists "priority support" and "account management" as Enterprise-tier benefits, without a published response-time figure or uptime percentage. Teams that need a contractual uptime guarantee in writing should treat that as a point in Jira's favor until Linear publishes an equivalent SLA.

Where Asana (and Other Tools) Fit In

"Linear vs Jira vs Asana" is a common search because the three names often compete for the same project-tracking budget, even though they aren't quite interchangeable. Linear and Jira are both purpose-built issue trackers aimed primarily at software and product teams — tickets, sprints/cycles, and engineering workflows are the center of gravity for both. Asana, by contrast, is a general work-management tool aimed at cross-functional teams (marketing, ops, design) that need task lists, timelines and approvals more than they need a developer-grade issue tracker. If your team's core unit of work is a code-linked issue, the real decision is Linear vs Jira; a broader operations team evaluating all-purpose task tools is answering a different question.

Switching Between Linear and Jira

Teams outgrowing Jira's complexity sometimes move to Linear for speed; teams outgrowing Linear's simplicity sometimes move to Jira for configurability. Both companies anticipate this: Linear's documentation covers importing issues from Jira (along with other trackers) so existing ticket history, labels and assignees carry over rather than starting from zero. On the Jira side, Atlassian's Enterprise tier includes "migration & onboarding support" as a named line item, reflecting that large accounts moving between editions — or between a competing tool and Jira — get hands-on help rather than a self-serve import alone.

Practically, the decision to migrate is rarely about price alone. Teams that outgrow Linear's Free or Basic plan tend to do so because they need Jira-style configurability (custom fields, approval workflows, multiple issue types per project) rather than because Linear got more expensive. Teams that leave Jira for Linear more often cite speed and interface friction than price, since Jira Standard remains the cheaper per-seat option at most team sizes.

Linear vs Jira: Which Should You Choose?

A few patterns repeat across Linear's and Jira's own marketing and pricing pages, and they map onto real buying decisions:

• Choose Linear if you're a startup or product engineering team that wants opinionated defaults, keyboard-first speed, and a workspace that stays simple as you grow from Free to Basic to Business.
• Choose Jira if you're scaling past a single engineering team, need Confluence and Jira Service Management in the same ecosystem, or require the deep workflow customization Jira has offered for years.
• Choose Jira Free specifically if you're under 10 users and want zero-cost AI reporting and unlimited projects without a credit card.
• Choose Linear Free specifically if your team is larger than 10 people but your issue volume is still light (under 250 open issues across 2 teams).
• Budget for Enterprise conversations on both sides once you need SAML/SCIM, multiple identity providers, or data residency controls — neither company publishes self-serve Enterprise pricing.

Teams evaluating developer tooling more broadly may also want to see how CI/CD platforms price out; Pandromeda's GitHub Actions vs Jenkins pricing and hosting comparison uses the same tier-by-tier approach for build automation.

What's Next

Expect pricing on both sides to keep shifting as AI features mature: Atlassian has been folding more of Rovo into lower tiers rather than selling it as an add-on, and Linear's Agent platform is still young enough that its Business-tier AI features (Triage Intelligence, Code Intelligence) are likely to expand. If your team is weighing an AI coding agent or assistant to pair with either tracker, Pandromeda's plain-English guide to Model Context Protocol (MCP) explains the standard several AI coding agents now use to connect to tools like issue trackers. Before committing to either platform at scale, confirm current per-seat pricing directly on Linear's pricing page or Jira's pricing page, since both vendors adjust list prices periodically.

Written byFelix Moreau

Felix Moreau writes Pandromeda's software coverage and how-to guides. He covers Windows, macOS and Linux updates, the apps people rely on, emulators and developer tools, and turns official documentation into clear, numbered steps that work on the current version.

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