Linear - Project Management That Doesn't Suck

I spent three years debugging Jira's search functionality before realizing it was fundamentally broken. Ever try searching for an issue by title in Jira? Good luck - it'll return everything except what you're looking for. Linear's search actually works because they didn't try to cram 47 different search syntaxes into one broken interface.

The Real Problem with Traditional PM Tools

Here's what nobody tells you about Jira: it takes 4-8 seconds to load every single page. That's 2 minutes wasted per day just staring at loading spinners. Multiply that across your entire engineering team and you're literally burning money watching progress bars. Linear loads in under 800ms because they actually give a shit about performance optimization.

We switched our 25-person engineering team to Linear in 2023 after Jira crashed during our biggest product launch. The Atlassian status page said "degraded performance" while our entire backlog was inaccessible for 6 hours. That's when you realize you're depending on software built by people who've never had to ship code under deadline pressure.

What Linear Actually Does vs The Marketing Bullshit

Strip away the corporate speak and Linear is simple: fast issue tracking that doesn't hate developers. No 20-step workflows, no mandatory fields for everything, no plugins that break with every update. You create an issue, assign it, track it, close it. The API actually makes sense because it's GraphQL instead of whatever REST nightmare Jira cobbled together. Their documentation is actually usable, unlike Atlassian's 400-page manual that contradicts itself every chapter.

Their 2025 updates added AI-powered triage and agent integrations - basically AI teammates that can work on issues for you. The Cursor integration is particularly slick for automating simple bug fixes.

The UI loads instantly because they use local-first architecture with a client-side SQLite database. While other tools are making round trips to check if you're allowed to click a button, Linear already has your data cached locally. It's what every web app should have been doing for the past decade.

Their GitHub integration actually works seamlessly - unlike most PM tools that treat version control as an afterthought.

Migration Hell: What They Don't Tell You

Moving from Jira to Linear took us something like 3 weeks, not the "few hours" their sales team promised. Jira's export is intentionally broken - they give you XML files that don't include half your data and require custom scripts to parse. We lost all our issue attachments and had to manually recreate our project structure.

But here's the thing: it was still worth it. Our team velocity increased something like 30% in the first month just from not having to wait for pages to load - maybe more, hard to measure exactly but it was noticeable. Engineering satisfaction scores went from 4.2/10 to 8.1/10 because people could actually find and update their work without wanting to punch their monitor. The productivity gains were measurable within weeks, validated by DORA metrics. There's actual research backing this up - tool friction kills developer productivity. McKinsey even wrote about it, which means it's either really important or complete BS, but in this case they're right.

Pro tip: Export your Jira data to CSV before starting the migration. Linear's import tool works better with CSV than with Jira's XML export, and you'll save yourself days of debugging why half your issues are missing descriptions. The migration documentation covers the gotchas they don't mention in the sales demo.

Why Linear is Fast (And Other Tools Aren't)

Linear uses a local-first architecture where your client downloads and caches all your team's data in a local SQLite database. When you open an issue, Linear's reading from disk, not making an HTTP request. That's why it loads instantly while Jira sits there spinning. This performance-first approach is what separates Linear from traditional web apps.

The catch? Your initial load takes 10-15 seconds as it downloads your team's entire dataset. With 5000+ issues, that's something like 50MB of data - at least that's what I remember seeing. But once it's cached, everything is instant. The sync happens via WebSocket connections using their custom CRDT implementation to handle conflicts when multiple people edit the same issue.

Here's the real kicker: offline mode actually works. I've edited issues on a plane and they synced perfectly when I landed. Compare that to Jira, which throws HTTP 500 errors if you look at it wrong while connected to WiFi.

The GraphQL API That Doesn't Hate You

Linear's GraphQL API is what APIs should have been all along. Instead of making 47 REST calls to load one project view, you write one query and get exactly the data you need. The introspection actually works, the TypeScript SDK generates types automatically, and the playground doesn't crash every five minutes. Their developer documentation is actually helpful, unlike most API docs that feel like they were written by lawyers.

Authentication is straightforward:

## Get all issues assigned to you
query MyIssues {
  issues(filter: { assignee: { id: { eq: "your-user-id" } } }) {
    nodes {
      id
      title
      priority
      state {
        name
      }
    }
  }
}

Rate limiting is 1,500 requests per hour (about 25 per minute), which is actually reasonable for most use cases. Compare that to Jira's API, which starts throwing 429s after 20 requests and has documentation that makes tax law look simple. Linear's rate limiting approach is transparent and predictable.

Where Linear Will Screw You Over

Linear's search can struggle with large datasets. Based on our team's experience with 10,000+ issues, searching becomes noticeably slower as the client-side search reaches its limits and falls back to server requests. This isn't well-documented, but the performance degradation is noticeable in teams with extensive issue histories.

The mobile app gets sluggish when you have a ton of notifications - I think it was around 200-300 unread when I started noticing lag. During a production incident when everyone was creating issues faster than I could triage them, I had to use the web app on mobile to get reasonable performance.

Shit that'll break on you (learned the hard way in 2025):

Safari users are screwed - GraphQL subscriptions don't work in 16.4+. Apple broke WebKit again. The playground crashes constantly too.

That new Cursor integration is slick but watch your credits - it burns through them fast if you're not careful. Found out when my monthly bill hit $200.

Bulk operations just timeout after 30 seconds with no progress bar. Super helpful when you're trying to close 100 issues from a sprint.

The AI triage thing occasionally assigns mobile bugs to our data engineer. Real smart.

GitHub sync shits the bed if you have too many open PRs - stops working around 1000+. Slack integration just randomly breaks and shows "We had some trouble connecting" which tells you absolutely nothing.

The Real Cost (Beyond Just Money)

Linear's pricing starts at $8/month per user, but here's what they don't tell you:

• Migration costs: Budget 2-3 developer days minimum for data migration and workflow setup
• Training time: Even though it's "simple," expect 1-2 hours per team member to learn the keyboard shortcuts and workflows
• Integration overhead: Each third-party integration requires setup time and ongoing maintenance
• Lock-in risk: Export is limited to CSV/JSON, no way to preserve issue relationships or history

The free plan's 250 issue limit sounds reasonable until you realize that includes closed issues. A busy team hits this in 2-3 months. The jump to $8/month per user for unlimited issues caught us off guard - went from $0 to $200/month overnight.

Enterprise Deployment Reality

Linear's SAML integration took our IT team 3 days to configure properly. The enterprise documentation assumes you know Active Directory inside and out. We had to open two support tickets to get user provisioning working correctly. The integration setup process is more complex than they let on.

Security audit findings from our SOC 2 review:

• API keys never expire (security risk for long-running integrations)
• No IP allowlisting for API access
• Audit logs don't capture bulk operations
• Data retention policies require Enterprise plan ($$$)

Linear's security page claims SOC 2 Type II compliance, but their actual security controls are basic compared to enterprise tools.

Bottom line: Linear works great for small-to-medium engineering teams, but scales poorly once you need enterprise controls or have complex compliance requirements.