Sidenote: While we had these issues, we decided to redirect our homepage to our website Figma file, where we shared iterations for the design and did a little community Q&A: https://twitter.com/linear/status/1580723933837332480)
I am so glad that I picked Linear for my startup. You folks have been consistently responsive, helpful, and keep delivering features that matter. It’s been a delight after a decade of Jira and the gang.
And for that, congratulations!
My one gripe about the new website (and it's something I notice many projects stumble at) is that the written copy fails to explain what the product actually is. "A better way to build products", "the new standard for software development", "a tool to remove barriers" -- this tells me nothing, unlike a simple "it's an issue tracker bro" would.
Show don't tell!
"Show, don't tell" is good advice for creative writing, which this website isn't. As a potential customer, it shouldn't be my job to cut through the marketing fluff to figure out if a product is something that is relevant to me.
This buzzword-driven style of writing, which has infected many a software project in recent years, is a pure triumph of form over function. Maybe it is necessary to appeal to the CTO types of the industry, but as a simple developer I do find it confusing and frankly repulsive.
Feature-wise Linear looks great though, so I might give it another try in some time.
P.S. Can someone please explain the hate for the pointer cursor? Why some products refuse to use it for links and buttons?
edit: I reread my comment and found it sounding a bit too critical. I really think that Linear is much better that most of the alternatives in the regard of UI/performance. It's just that I hate how the meaning of the word "performance" devalued with time and claims like "50ms = breathtakingly fast/world-class" continue to contribute to that.
I'd wager they're doing it becuase a pointer cursor feels more like a web browser, and would impede the feeling of the app being native.
It's not some, it's most. I just checked my Linux and Windows machines and all of the native apps (and the native UI of the system itself) there have a regular cursor when you hover over clickable elements.
I don't know what superhuman perception you have, but I'm personally good with anything up to 100ms.
The alternative is Jira where we're talking something like 5000ms to load an issue.
The killer missing feature for us is that we can't define different issue types. For example, we would typically have issue types like "Requirement", "Bug", "Signal", etc. with different icons and use child/parent hierarchies to sort these in a tree with this hierarchy: L1 high-level business requirement, L2 technical breakdown stories, L3 very specific requirement/bug/signal.
In line with this, there's no way to show the issue layout as an expandable tree-view (called "List" view in JIRA), and so our requirements tree would get all mashed up and flattened.
For each technical story/signal we would have a custom field where we set the source file where we are implementing it. This would help us hammer out the architecture of projects very quickly and have them line-up with technical requirements. Doesn't seem to be a way to add custom fields to different issue types. Later we would export this all out of JIRA to help write our documentation.
Lastly, a JIRA replacement without a corresponding Confluence replacement could be a bit of a point of friction. I hope that somewhere on your roadmap you plan to develop a basic solution to cater for the Confluence need.
Otherwise ... it looks nice. Have you thought about offering a self-hosted version, since JIRA no longer offers this?
1. The reason everyone hates Jira is because, over time, it has essentially become all things to all people, yet it doesn't solve the needs of any individual group perfectly. It actually has a huge, ginormous feature set, and part of the difficulty is figuring which settings or set of features are right for your team.
2. The reason Jira has become so difficult to replace is because nearly every team of moderate complexity uses some subset of features that aren't replicated in any other tool.
So, to the point, I hope that Linear doesn't implement your requested features (not exactly, but I just hope they are extremely judicious in which features they add). Or, rather, I'd just point out that Jira got to be the way it is because they basically implemented all the features. I think a good competitor will necessarily have to hit that sweet spot where they have 98% of the most critical features (especially startups/new companies), but will ruthlessly not add features that will lead to bloat and complexity.
Support for this kind of overcomplex use case is what makes JIRA so horrible to use. I very much hope Linear never bloats itself by adding this kind of thing.
But Confluence is the worst Wiki I've ever used. It's editor is obnoxious, it's so damn slow, you're losing edit whenever anything happen, tagging is quite often random (recently it added an unwanted "my.favorite" tag to page I'm copying), it's search is broken since the beginning, hierarchical view is broken, creating add on requires to be a high level admin and the implementation is horrible... And I've been forced to use Confluence for 10 years now, in multiple company. None was ever good with it. Heck, here people are screaming to go back to Sharepoint.
There is a place for a competitor to Confluence, because the need is still there. Help non-technical people capture and buld documents self-hosted inside your firewall with dynamic elements.
Atlassian's decision to dump the self-hosted version in 2024 will create the niche for all the companies that would want to migrate away. They just got greedy and got too big, went public, founders cached out and now it's the hired managers playground.
Linear does the opposite, adding rails so you can't go wild and reinvent complex processes. Thank god.
And different issue types in JIRA allows us to have different workflows and optional fields for different types of issues, ie in the use-case above the Requirement field has an extra field to mention a corresponding document and most of the issue types except business requirement have an extra field to fill in the source file where we will implement it.
I sure don't miss the 30+ second page loads, slow pagelads, slow saves, slow edit button, confusing comments section, and accidental random ticket body erasure when working with a heavily loaded JIRA instance.
But seriously, Linear is one of the best project management tools I've used. They do an SPA pretty well, which is rare, and its powerful yet pretty simple to use. I do find it a bit hard to wrangle saved views and find things via search sometimes, but overall its one of the 'least bad' tools in this category.
The only other app that I would say is comparable is Shortcut (https://shortcut.com), which I've used in anger at previous jobs. It's a bit simpler than Linear, a bit easier to get up to speed with, but less powerful.
But both are very good. And god help you if you have to use JIRA.
Probably one the fastest web app around, given how it preloads all JSON data from all sublinks on the page, so it loads immediately when you click on any links. It performs like a native app (assuming it’s online :p, it has offline support w/ the Mac and browser apps for plan B)
What is causing your JIRA projects to take that long? Too many custom fields? Large numbers of issues? Too many plugins? Really curious because most of our issues are sub-second.
I run a team that sits between Support and Engineering, bug reports from the highest tiers of support are written up as issues and submitted to our triage. We investigate the issues to find root causes, determine the parties best situated to resolve them, assess user impact, add appropriate labels, and then move them to the triage of the appropriate team's space.
The biggest limitation we've run into is adding metadata to our issues: labels are great, but when you transfer to another team you lose labels or have to add clutter to that team's set of chosen labels.
I've ended up building some tooling on top of Linear to record things like user impact assessment data. This tooling posts the data back into the issue as a formatted comment so it's visible inline, but we can query it directly in our database and build metrics off of it. This approach has really opened Linear up for us. Thanks for the graphQL end point, it's been very helpful!
Simply having everyone do what they think is best and hoping they talk enough to sort that all out on their own is great until you have several people unsure what to work on, two people accidentally doing the same thing, and management upset because your features are taking twice or thrice as long as your guestimates.
Eventually you realize that for anything sufficiently complex you need to track what the steps are, who is doing what, and when each part is probably going to be done. You don't want to be a bottleneck, so you make it publicly available to the whole team. Then congrats, you've invented ticketing.
If kotlin2 sticks to those small enough scales, they can indulge their preferences.
Bigger organisations have more and more need for structure.
And yes, I need to have a status. It allows me to warn people outside the dev team if there are any outstanding issues or if we'll be able to soon release something. Communication is key when your team is not its sole customer.
Of course, whether that structure and bureaucracy needs to be a ticketing system is a different question.
1. It's fast. All interactions are instant.
2. It looks great from top to details.
3. It's quite complex. The information architecture is confusing.
Ultimately we decided to go back to GitHub Issues because we spent too much time on clicking and finding things. Hope they fix the UI hierarchy.
I have been programming web for nearly 15 years. I, too, have issues with needless complexity, but I also dislike how (many) senior folks want to pretend that simple HTML/CSS is all it takes to build anything and all the coders using modern stack are stupid enough to ignore that.
Although simple HTML/CSS cannot build anything (not even close), simple HTML/CSS with a sprinkle of good JS can get you very far.
The site says shortcuts for everything. That's nice. But one of my biggest gripes is accidental actions with no indication on what you just did. If I have the app open in one window and don't realize I have focus and just start typing will it just start doing actions? Is there a way to disable these? Clickup does this to me a lot and its super annoying.
I love the speed of the app. The real-time sync and keyboard shortcuts guarantee fast interactions. We surround ourselves with the best tools to raise the bar of what everybody expects from software. It helps us to build better software, and Linear is an app (and website) that pushes our understanding of quality forward.
It's critical to our eng, design & product processes.
We switched from another tool because the other tool was painfully slow. It was a night & day difference. It's been about a year now since we've fully committed to Linear. I'm very glad we have!
We use their cycles feature heavily. We ship our app weekly, and our product development process is split into three 2-week cycles that form a "milestone". We model that work accordingly in Linear.
We also use their "Projects" feature quite heavily. We'll often have folks working across a few projects a time. This feature helps my ADHD brain understand what the most important thing across any number of ongoing projects is, and then focus on accomplishing that.
Personally, the best feature for me is the speed of the app. That, alongside the keyboard shortcuts, make it pretty hard to give up.
Another thing I particularly like about Linear (aside from speed, product polish & wonderful design) is how you can opt-in to using it more. If you just want to use it as an issue tracker for teams, that works great! It's how we started. But you can also grow into the product more as you harden your processes or figure out what works best for you.
tl;dr — I can't imagine ever using another tool to help build products besides Linear.
Biggest weakness is definitely the "workflow" part. For example, trying to automate rather simple workflow that involves email to ticket isn't trivial and either requires you writing your own integration or passing via something like Zapier (or writing your own integration with Zapier?).
I used Linear by myself until the free-tier issue limit was used up. I can confidently say it worked great for me (the integrations and built in GitHub automation were killer for me, and worked with 0 config out of the box). However, I had trouble getting my PM on board because she was concerned that Linear was a great issue tracking tool, but we'd be losing too many capabilities from ClickUp. Personally, I'd rather have a targeted tool that does one thing extremely well rather than a tool that does 10 things poorly.
This is extremely convenient for us as our issues are often discussion threads. I’ve rarely seen this mirrored in other ticketing systems. But then with 1 IT person (Hi), we are not quite the normal customer of such systems.
[0] DoneDone V1, which has an atrocious search function and questionable email notifications, can’t remember what our issue was with their current version V2 https://www.donedone.com/
The app works both in the browser and we also distribute it with Electron wrapper for macOS and Windows, but it's essentially the same experience.
I did not know about the jira shortcuts until recently. Not really a huge deal for me. Seems like linear's are definitely better but shrug. Keyboard shortcuts are not the source of my issues (ha!) with issue trackers.
Confluence shortcuts tho. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one in my company that knows them haha. Which says something about confluence for sure.
Sounds like at some point someone set up a good system there.
1. I have a global view, where i can see the status of each single ticket. I use this because when I’m selecting my next task. I don’t know if I’m gonna choose something from client 1, client 2, or my personal project
2. I have a “bug” view that aggregates every task with a bug label, it’s the first thing I check when selecting a new task, same reason of .1
3. I have a view for each client, that aggregates the tasks from every project of that client. I use this when I’m doing a call with the client and I have to update them on the status of each project
Before Linear I was using multiple Trello boards and then using a power up to sync all of them in multiple aggregation board, to essentially replicate the same workflow. Also, it feels more native then trello, it’s quicker than Jira and the key lard shortcut are super handy when I’m creating a lot of tasks, since I have to duplicate each task from the client ticketing system.
Sorry but 50ms is not breathtakingly fast, especially when native apps and video games can handle multiple interactions at once in 16ms or even faster.
Web apps can also render frames in 16ms, but input often involves fetching data from much slower and unreliable disk or network, processing data on a much slower general purpose CPU, and rendering it via runtimes and frameworks that add considerable overhead. Given all of that, 50ms (20 FPS) does sound very responsive, if maybe not breathtakingly so.
Are you familiar with console input latencies?
Unfortunately I stopped using due to the lack of robust offline features (this might have improved meanwhile).
> "Linear is a tool to remove barriers. Powerful yet simple to use, it helps you to plan ahead, make better decisions and execute faster. You don’t have to come up with best practices for how to use Linear — we already built them directly into the product."
So much weasel words. "tool to remove barriers", "plan ahead, make better decision and execute faster".
Going a bit deep into the features page shows some features, but why not have them front and center, in plain english, on a simple, handmade HTML page, that is fast and easy to browse?
Note : I do come from a software engineering background, but as a solo developer.
It's pretty neat and let's you really get in the flow of things.
My guess is that they are excited about their product being on here.
