Key findings
- Speed draws praise from 29 of the 45 sources that discuss it, and 16 report slowness, heavy memory use, or a confusing UI.
- Of the 40 sources that compare Linear with Jira, 33 prefer Linear and 7 prefer Jira or went back to it.
- Customization is the most raised cost: 17 of the 22 sources that discuss it say Linear could not model something they needed.
- All 10 sources that discuss sync report failures, from stalls and error alerts to edits that revert and automations that stopped working.
- Among team and leader accounts, the most raised concern is reporting and portfolio views. Here, 12 of the 13 that discuss it raise it, from hours tracked for compliance to dashboards that saved views could not replace.
Teams move to Linear for its speed and pay for it in reporting and customization. Several teams that left needed a tracker for product, design, or sales as well as engineering. Drawn from the 298 public accounts behind Linear's Signals, published between January 2025 and October 2026.
Why teams moved
Teams describe leaving trackers that had turned into work of their own. One team chose Linear because Jira and Asana offered so many options that customizing them became work about the work. A six-person AI product team says its members have used Linear for six months without complaint since leaving Jira. Another moved sprints from Jira and Asana with little friction, citing cleaner boards and faster navigation.
A Hacker News commenter who has moved several teams to Linear calls each switch painless, and a small startup that left ClickUp says Linear strikes the right balance between features and speed.
Named leaders say it on the record. Morgan Linton, co-founder and CTO of Bold Metrics, calls moving his engineering organization from Jira to Linear one of the best tool changes he has made. A Coinbase India product lead says the team closed its last Jira tickets and moved fully. Macro's CEO Jacob Beckerman is cooler: his engineers moved the 18-person startup off Notion on their own. After the honeymoon he rates Linear just okay, because the board still falls behind the plans kept in docs and Slack.
What daily use is like
Speed also draws complaints. 16 of the 45 sources on speed report slowness, heavy memory use, or a confusing UI. Commenters in a June 2026 Hacker News thread describe a client stuck syncing for ten minutes, edits that revert, and numbers that change without a loading signal. Two GitHub issues on Linear's public repository report status automations that fired wrongly or stopped for weeks.
Agent delegation is the other daily theme. Developers hand issues to Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, and self-hosted agents, then use the MCP server to let those agents read and update issues.
What teams gave up
Teams leaving Jira lose reporting and history. The six-person team lost the advanced reporting it relied on, found integrations thinner, and saw its tool cost rise 40%. Another commenter misses Jira's change history on a ticket, and one argues Jira adapts to large organizations where each team runs a different process.
Reporting is the gap teams raise most often. A team on the Business plan says saved views are not cutting it and it needs dashboards. Another has to document the hours spent on each issue for IRS compliance.
Cycles draw a specific complaint. Unfinished work rolls into an already full cycle with no rebalancing, and Linear declined a request to change that behavior.
Who left, and why
A chief product officer ran Linear for two years and then moved the whole company to Jira, saying Linear serves engineers working tickets and ignores product people. A 20-person startup that needed backlogs for design, marketing, and sales stopped using it. At another company, engineering would not give up Jira's customization for Linear.
Two moves were toward fewer tools. Xiaofei Du's ten-person team let its backlog bloat and managed Linear through its MCP server once agents did the reading. After the team shrank, Du stopped paying for Linear and moved to GitHub issues. Another team stopped using Linear after moving its agent plans into repository Markdown files.
The 2026 shift toward agents
116 of the 138 sources that discuss Linear and agents date from 2026. 56 of the 138 report problems: agents that loop and burn tokens, a delegation that returned nothing, and an MCP server too token-heavy to use as working context.
The pushback is about direction. Eight sources worry that agent features add weight to a tracker they chose for its focus, and one developer argues terminal agents need a solid CLI more than an in-app agent.
Methodology
GILD synthesis of the 298 public accounts in Linear's Signals, each opened on October 12, 24, or 25, 2026. They comprise 116 Reddit posts and comments, 99 Hacker News comments and posts, 41 GitHub issues, and 18 blog posts. The rest are 11 posts on X, 12 talks and videos, and a Lobsters comment. Every count describes these 298 sources only. GILD checked product behavior against Linear's documentation on the same dates.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Public source
- 21
- Official documentation
- 4
- brushali on Reddit r/ProductManagement: six months on Linear after Jira (Sep 12, 2025)
- praying4exitz on Reddit r/ProductManagement: choosing Linear over Jira and Asana (Feb 7, 2025)
- Economy_List5060 on Reddit r/ProductManagement: moving sprints from Jira and Asana (Sep 29, 2025)
- previaegg on Reddit r/ProductManagement: a CPO moves the company from Linear to Jira (Feb 7, 2025)
- WolfgangBob on Reddit r/ProductManagement: a 20-person startup stops using Linear (Sep 12, 2025)
- Thunder_raining on Reddit r/ProductManagement: plans in the repository replace Linear (Apr 7, 2026)
- Capital-Barnacle2255 on Reddit r/Linear: Views do not replace dashboards on the Business plan (Jan 5, 2026)
- UnableGreen3328 on Reddit r/Linear: hours per issue for IRS compliance (Nov 27, 2025)
- Hacker News: moving several teams to Linear (Feb 7, 2025)
- GitHub issue on linear/linear: pull request merge automations stopped moving issue status (Sep 9, 2026)
- Xiaofei Du: We stopped paying for Linear (Aug 17, 2026)
- Fernando Rodriguez on DEV: Linear Agent isn't what you need (Apr 30, 2026)
- Hacker News: Linear cycles roll unfinished work forward without rebalancing (Aug 8, 2025)
- Hacker News: an employer that switched from Linear back to Jira over UX (Jun 7, 2026)
- Hacker News: Jira adapts to large organizations with different processes per team (Jun 7, 2026)
- Hacker News: colleagues won over within two weeks of switching from Jira (Apr 26, 2026)
- Hacker News: the Linear client stuck syncing (Jun 7, 2026)
- Hacker News: keep AI away from the issue tracker (Mar 24, 2026)
- Morgan Linton, CTO at Bold Metrics, on X: moving the engineering org from Jira to Linear (Apr 30, 2025)
- Akshay Chugh, Coinbase India, on X: the last Jira tickets closed (Mar 5, 2026)
- Jacob Beckerman, CEO of Macro, on X: our startup's journey from Notion to Linear (Feb 22, 2025)
- Linear docs: Cycles
- Linear docs: GitHub
- Linear docs: Jira
- Linear docs: MCP server