We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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Throughout our article below, we'll use the words overwhelming and overly complex a lot.
Many of the most popular project management tools are designed for large teams and organizations, and they can be overwhelming and complex to set up and use for smaller teams. Here's what to keep in mind:
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A better way to build products for product and engineering teams of all sizes.
Linear is in an interesting category. It's in one way a product tool (e.g. focusing on bugs, feature requests, and sprints/cycles), and another part project management (for managing the tasks around the cycles).
The thing is, Linear is very much built for your engineering and product team to tie in all of this information together. You'd be hard-pressed to use Linear as a replacement for the company's general project management tool.
If you're heavily a product-focused company, and most of your employees are engineers and product people though, you can probably get away with just using Linear as your team's project manager.
While some people may say that Asana is a main competitor, we'd probably say that your product/engineering team is trying to fit into the more general project management needs of the rest of the organization.
It's not uncommon for much larger companies to use a general project management tool like Motion or Asana, along with Linear. Heck, even the engineering/product team at Motion uses Linear internally (alongside Motion of course).
The main competitor in this area is really the Atlassian suite (mainly Jira), and, well... Linear is just better and more modern in just about every way. Teams that use Linear often greatly enjoy using it, and have an appreciation for it (hugely advocating it). Whereas teams that use Jira when asked what they think would typically respond with an "it's fine, I guess".
Linear also integrates quite well with modern software like Slack via Dispatch. Their API is a joy to work with, and we're actually starting to see modern teams integrate their software with Linear before even that of Jira. That said, most any enterprise tool will integrate with Jira more likely than Linear. So it really depends on the size of your team and the accompanying stack that you're using.
Shortcut unites planning and development into a single experience with tightly integrated Issue Tracking, Sprint Planning, Roadmaps and Goals.
Shortcut used to be called Clubhouse and they were spiraling as a company, forced to rebrand because the perception around them wasn't great.
The marketing team changed what people thought of them as, but from a tech stack perspective, they are an incredibly old company, over a decade old, built atop a super legacy tech stack.
So if you're looking for a modern project management tool, we'd say avoid this decade-old software product with loads of tech-debt.
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