[JaakkoP]

If anyone is looking for alternatives, I’ve found Linear.app to be like a breath of fresh air compared to Jira.

All I was looking for after the slugfest of Jira was fast performance and keyboard shortcuts, and so far linear has been able to deliver.

[kstrauser]

We use Linear, too, and it’s pretty great. Let me put it this way: literally everyone on the engineering team was happy when we moved to it.

[powerslacker]

Curious how many boards/tickets you have in Linear. Is it ready for primetime or is it still a tool for small to medium companies?

[mdeeks]

I'm trying a demo of it and it looks like its mainly aimed at small to medium companies. There isn't enough hierarchy.

The top level organization in Linear is a Workspace. As far as I can tell this should be what your entire company falls under. The next and only level of organization under that is a Team. It really needs something in between that.

Teams have their own Issues, Board (singular), Cycles(Sprints), Projects, Ticket workflows. That means a Team must be a very small set of people (<10 people). So for a company with 1000 employees you might have 100 Teams.

Teams are shown in the UI in a flat list in many places. Expanding the list would likely overwhelm your screen.

The Roadmap feature applies to the entire workspace (your company). In medium sized companies you'll have Organizations with many hierarchies below it comprised of dozens of teams. An Org typically has roadmaps of their own that don't necessarily correspond to company level goals. Teams below the Org will also have their own roadmaps that usually fall under the Org's high level roadmap items but again not always.

There also needs to be more company level controls over settings like workflows. A strict company wide workflow for Bugs is common so that all teams have the same expectations around SLAs for fixes.

All that said I think you could make it work with enough filters and naming conventions.

Also holy hell Linear is fast and easy to use. If I was at a startup I would 100% put us on this.

[enra]

Linear founder/ceo here.

Thanks for detailed feedback and walkthrough! Just to share some context, we do have thousands of customers, ranging from early stage startups to public companies.

I also agree that we should support more hierarchy when it comes to roadmap, teams and even the workspace settings, and it's something we are working on.

> Board (singular)

Board view supported by other views too, like cycles, active issues, projects etc. The "Board" sits in the navigation for now until we can make the view settings robust enough to fully replace it.

[mdeeks]

Good to hear! Any write ups on how the larger companies organize and manage their Workspace?

Moving us from Jira/Confluence would probably take an act of god, but I could see teams going rogue and doing their internal planning in Linear while still using some part of Jira to ensure they stay connected to the rest of the company process. That way we could maybe do incremental adoption.

Is there any bidirectional Jira <-> Linear support? e.g. Someone creates a bug in Jira for us and it replicates into Linear? When I close it in linear it closes it in Jira.

[enra]

There is no write ups at least publicly yet. If there are specific questions we can try answer those based on what we have heard from other companies. [e-mail]

We do have a bidirectional Jira integration. It pulls in the basic information, and then also adds a Jira "attachment" & link to the Jira issue. If you close the issue in Linear, will also close it in Jira [1]

If you enable the Triage feature, it works nicely in a way that requests from other teams in Jira automatically come to the Triage queue and you can review them there. Same triage queue also works for customer support tools, sentry, creating issues through the API etc.

[1]: https://linear.app/docs/jira

[mdeeks]

Yeah I just found it. The hard map of Jira project to a Team makes it tough. We currently do 1 Org (hundreds of people) = 1 Jira project. Teams are mapped to Jira Components. I think without some level of customization on the sync we wouldn't be able to incrementally adopt. Everyone uses Jira differently unfortunately.

[joatmon-snoo]

+1: we use them too and they have a reasonably flexible product in terms of labelling and project definitions. The only notable complaint I have is that the search doesn't support negative filters.

[reustle]

Out of curiosity, had you tried Jira Next Gen or only Jira Classic?