For a small team, I can say Linear beats the hell out of JIRA.
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.
Same, if we’re going to talk about Linear I’d also like to say it’s probably one of the best webs apps that does one thing really well. Any tool for organizing teams of programmers should be a) dead simple and b) extremely performant. Which Linear does both.
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)
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.
Interesting question, would Linear performance slow down once it becomes heavily loaded? Are you confusing app performance preference for usage preference, or is there something where Linear is superior at a feature level? If JIRA's performance was lightning fast when heavily loaded, would your preference still be Linear?
I am seeing multiple references here to 30 second long page loads.
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.
This post is without context, but I assume it is regarding the fact that Linear experienced (is experiencing?) a prolonged outage today and this particular link redirected to their new home page's design in Figma, where you could see a chaotic cloud of cursors belonging to everyone else trying to file a ticket.
Being in product and engineering management for more than a decade, Linear is hands down the best tool I’ve used for ticketing. It would be hard for me to work somewhere if I wasn’t able to use it. Features are well designed, the tool is delightful to use and the design is world class. Also, there isn’t a tool I use that feels faster - it’s like they know what I’m about to click on before I do.
Karri (cofounder) from Linear here. Unfortunately we have been experiencing a DDoS attack the whole afternoon today, so the service is not optimal at the moment and the public website might be slow to load. We are actively blocking and mitigating the attack. https://linearstatus.com
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)
If only... Coordinated botnet attack against our service that started some hours ago but fortunately we have been able to mitigate it through number of means and return service to users
I couldn't find a mention of it - but is there any plans or ability to self-host? I'm personally not a fan of keeping everything in the cloud. Also are there export options in the event someone wanted to leave the platform?
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.
> "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.
I got a "so what" effect in under 1.5 seconds from opening the website which resulted into me ctrl+w'ing my ass out of it. If your landing page is like this it just blows.
This is very popular in academic world. “So what” effect usually means so what is the point of this paper/website/articles? After the reader have read the whole thing from top to bottom.
At this point you are grasping at straws. Your initial point was:
> What is this product anyway?
It's extremely clear what their product is, and scrolling just a little immediately gives you an idea of how they are trying to differentiate. Your current suggestion is a simple copy change that's very slightly different from the original.
When people say contrarian, it means it became mainstream :)
For every single post of product announcement there is a comment bitching about `value prop`. I agree sometimes marketing messages are terribly written. Look at the Obsidian thread from yesterday. Similar complaints.
However... all it takes is just to scroll. There is a screenshot which takes 60% of the homepage screen that shows an issue tracker.
They shouldn't be a noteworthy feature, but unfortunately we're at a point where even basic browser functionality like tabs and scrolling may break in some web UIs.
Jira introduced mainstream audiences to "one task assigned to one person." A radical idea, then, in corporate environments. Everything else doesn't matter.
Can anybody from Ramp, Loom, Vercel, Descript, Cash App, Raycast, Mercury, Retool, Alan, Arc, OpenSea or Pitch chime in on their experience with Linear and the scope of which they use it for their apps?
Co-founder of Raycast here. We've been using Linear since the beginning when it was only two of us. We're 16, and the app has become integral to our workflows. In a small company, it's crucial to be aligned. We use Linear to spec out our work and build up momentum. We ship an update of Raycast every two weeks and use cycles and projects to ensure we keep the release schedule.
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.
Hey there, I'm an engineer at The Browser Company (who makes Arc).
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.
so question if someone from Linear is reading these, which I assume they are:
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.
Reddit does this, annoyingly after typing Ctrl-F. I have to wait a short while until the browser's search bar pops up at the bottom, otherwise my instinct to immediately start typing the search phrase causes all sorts of actions, like following some people, hiding a thread, who knows what random stuff happens on each key press.
(Cofounder here) The app is fullstack typescript react application with custom realtime sync engine for instant updates and offline readiness. Our cofounder did a talk about our sync few years back: https://youtu.be/WxK11RsLqp4?t=2171
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.
This seems like a really nice tool. I'm quite happy with some of the "older" tools I'm still using: Shortcut for project management at my company, Trello for personal todo lists, and Evernote for notes. Trying to stick to the philosophy of
"if it ain't broke, don't fix it" when it comes to all these new tools and services. I think Shortcut and Trello are still great tools and I'm not in a hurry to replace them. But Linear does look very good. Maybe I'll try it out whenever I start a new project.
I'm using it every day. I have analyzed all alternatives and all of them fail with something, especialy since the Tasks feature was introduced. So, no, it has not been destroyed. I has been tough, but I think a lot of people use it and are happy with it.
I guess some people spend so much time in Jira or whatever that they want keyboard shortcuts for everything? My company uses Jira and I'm a developer and I've never felt like “oh my god I'm wasting so much time mousing around in Jira”.
Yes. Across all companies I’d guess 20% of what goes into jira effort actually aids development, with the remaining 80% primarily aiding people other than the developers to understand how the development is unfolding and will unfold.
Sounds like at some point someone set up a good system there.
I use Jira a lot and... there are keyboard shortcuts. There are keyboard shortcuts for Confluence.
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.
Jira used to aggressively interpret keyboard input as a stream of hotkeys which would result in entropy being introduced into your board. Latest redesign fixed that, but at the cost of being criminally slow.
Anyone using linear without the rest of their team adopting it yet? Obviously the full benefits will only be realized when everyone is using it, but I'm still curious to hear if people are benefitting from using it to manage their own work.
I work with two long term clients (one has two projects going on, the other three), plus I have my own personal projects.
Linear has become a vital part of my workflow. The first thing is that splitting tasks by teams (client 1, client 2, and me) and then by project for each team allows me to do some neat stuff:
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.
Breathtakingly fast
Built for speed with 50ms interactions and real-time sync.
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.
I have never meet anyone who has used Jira, only suffered under it. (Though I will say my main complaints about Jira are ideological, rather than purely technical. I would dislike it even if there were 1ms page loads).
I don't think that's a fair performance bar to set for web apps, or even native apps. The 16ms window for games is used to process input, shuffle data in very fast memory, do calculations, and render a frame on a very fast GPU specifically built for that purpose.
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.
Reading through the comments it appears more than 10 employees of linear are dominating 33 comments. Sorta seems like this is marketing at its sneakiest.
It's a really easy mistake to make so I don't blame them. When people are talking about your product it's instinctive to jump in; it takes a lot of effort to not dominate the conversation.
Can't speak for other teams who may have advanced, complex workflows but we migrated from JIRA to Linear for our small team, and haven't looked back. Just the simple fact that it feels like we can store and reference information from a ticket without spending 10 minutes waiting for it to load is a killer feature to me.
I stopped using Jira years ago, and stopped hiring people, and work with one other full time person, making a complex software product, and I feel like I accomplish 2x as much as I used to with much more value, at far lower cost.
One thing that I hated when I used to use Confluence is the amount of loading it does every, single, time I navigate to any page. I can't help but feel the pain of my browser downloading and loading the same thing over and over and over again every day. Please, what is wrong simple user interface like we have here in HN?
I get the appeal of ticketing, I really do. But ultimately, it's a form of control. ICs can't be trusted to figure out what to do on their own, and can't be bothered to talk their team for guidance. And management needs dashboards to track progress. I get it. But I don't want to work on a team where such things are necessary.
It’s not as simple as that. ‘Talking’ doesn’t create a reference where you can see what’s been done yet, and of course people leave teams or get sick etc. so there are many reasons to want to see what was and wasn’t completed.
Very true. My point was that you don’t have to use ticketing as a control mechanism - you can use it however you like and it doesn’t imply distrust. Similarly you can have an overbearing or micromanaging boss whether or not ticketing is used.
That's one form that ticketing can take, but I think it's way off to suggest that's all ticketing is. I've known even solo devs who got a lot of benefit out of a (simple) ticketing system.
Ticketing is a form of organization. If it's being used to control people, that's a problem with the org, not ticketing.
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.
I'd wager that the original idea here is more akin to a list of task, with some info added on top of it. That's how I see it myself.
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.
OK, we are firmware developers who use JIRA in a very advanced way with our clients, and we gave it a go and I just came back here to give the team some feedback because no doubt they are watching this very closely.
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?
Actually, I think your post highlights a couple important things:
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.
> 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.
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.
You'd better hope that enough people need a very barebones tracker (thousands of barebone trackers exist) enough to pay for it and keep it alive. Or you can implement the "overcomplex use case"(s) and create a product that is actually more useful than those other thousand of issue trackers built-in to tools that people already use.
I honestly despise Confluence. Jira is kind of OK if you don't create overly complex workflow (they will fail) and avoid using it as a documentation tool (it's not versioned, editing tool are lacking, adding content is quite limited, updating content while fighting field is not fun and finding back the last CR related to a feature is hell).
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.
They've (recently?) introduced a feature where they disable the editor window in Confluence if the browser even momentarily loses the network connection. On a poor network it's absolutely unusable now.
I've been using Confulence for a long time in all my companies. It's not the best product for sure.
However, regarding:
1) slowness - it's faster selfhosted than their shitty cloud solution
2) editor - one of the best features, not replicated anywhere is their macro collection. I'd prefer markdown, but dynamic object embedded in our specs/documentation is a very useful feature. Also for non-technical people their editor even in current state is easier than other non-WYSIWYG editors for sure.
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.
We could use tags for this, but with an issue type hierarchy you can strongly-type your database i.e. make sure that people don't put a Signal under a high-level business requirement.
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.
This is the sort of workflow that makes Jira suck... so much mental capacity is wasted on categorization rather than coding. It simultaneously tries to be an issue tracker and a project manager and each team reinvents their own preferred workflow while littering the shared Jira graveyard with a bunch of dead fields and labels and screens and such.
Linear does the opposite, adding rails so you can't go wild and reinvent complex processes. Thank god.
Looks great, but Jira was never getting picked by the users this is marketed to; it's picked by their bosses. It'll be much tougher to sell those people on an alternative.
JIRAs growth strategy was based on developers adopting it without having to talk to their bosses first because it was cheap enough to do so. Nowadays, this probably works differently, but that’s how they initially gained traction.
When people crib about how the modern web stack is hodgepodge of buzzwords with little-to-no value, you can show them this. Nearly every page loads within milliseconds, and it's perfectly usable even if you disable JS. The product itself is a great example of how you can deliver a blazingly fast and near-native experience with web technologies.
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.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadI 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.
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)
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.
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.
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)
And for that, congratulations!
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.
> "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.
How about - Software that simplifies work management for teams
> What is this product anyway?
It's extremely clear what their product is, and scrolling just a little immediately gives you an idea of how they are trying to differentiate. Your current suggestion is a simple copy change that's very slightly different from the original.
For every single post of product announcement there is a comment bitching about `value prop`. I agree sometimes marketing messages are terribly written. Look at the Obsidian thread from yesterday. Similar complaints.
However... all it takes is just to scroll. There is a screenshot which takes 60% of the homepage screen that shows an issue tracker.
Cmon folks, we can do better.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like at some point someone set up a good system there.
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.
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?
My guess is that they are excited about their product being on here.
If kotlin2 sticks to those small enough scales, they can indulge their preferences.
Bigger organisations have more and more need for structure.
Of course, whether that structure and bureaucracy needs to be a ticketing system is a different question.
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.
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.
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.
A huge part of its appeal is that it actively prevents workflows like yours. On purpose.
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.
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.
Linear does the opposite, adding rails so you can't go wild and reinvent complex processes. Thank god.
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.