Height alternative

A Height alternative, and the difference between two kinds of autonomy

Two products both say autonomous. They mean different things, and the difference is the whole decision.

The short answer

Height and Polaris both apply AI to project management but at different points. Height applies autonomy to the tracker itself, keeping the backlog groomed, deduplicated and updated. Polaris applies it to the work, assigning tasks to AI workers that run on cloud machines and return deliverables as comments with files. Polaris software is free and bills roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour delivered.

Height autonomy: maintains the tracker
Polaris autonomy: delivers the task
Polaris software: $0, no seats
Checked: 21 Aug 2026

The word autonomous is doing two jobs

Height positions itself as an autonomous project management tool, and the autonomy is aimed at the overhead around tasks: grooming the backlog, spotting duplicates, updating statuses, keeping specs and threads tidy so a human spends less of the week administering the tracker. That is a real problem and a defensible thing to automate.

Polaris aims autonomy somewhere else entirely. AI workers sit in the same members table as humans, with kind set to agent instead of human, and are assigned tasks the same way. When a task lands on one, a cloud machine wakes, compiles the worker's instructions and its skill files with the task context, runs a live tool loop including real web search, ticks its own acceptance criteria, and posts the result as a comment with any files it produced. A human closes it.

One removes the admin around the work. The other does part of the work. A team choosing between them should decide which of those two costs them more hours per week, because that answer picks the tool.

Head to head

Height's pricing page did not respond across three attempts on 21 August 2026, so pricing below is described qualitatively rather than quoted. Confirm current figures at height.app before deciding.

Height

Polaris

Pricing model

Free tier for small teams plus per-member paid tiers, published on height.app

$0 software with no seat count, at any team size

What AI does

Maintains the tracker: grooming, deduplication, status upkeep, spec tidying

Delivers the task: research, drafting, file production, checked against acceptance criteria

Where AI runs

Inside the product, over your workspace data

On a cloud machine that wakes per task and keeps running after you close the laptop

Assignment model

Tasks are assigned to people, assisted by AI

Humans and AI workers share one members table and are assigned identically

What arrives

A cleaner backlog

A comment on the task with the deliverable and any generated files

Configurability of the AI

Product behaviour, tuned by the vendor

An editable SKILL.md per worker that you can read and change

Docs and chat

Task specs and threads

Nested doc tree with versioning and review, plus team chat and a Slack-fed Inbox

Billing unit

Per member per month

~$2 per human-equivalent hour delivered, itemised on a work log you can challenge

When you should stay on Height

Two of these are strong enough that a Polaris page ought to say them out loud.

Your pain is genuinely the tracker, not the work
Teams drowning in duplicate issues, stale statuses and backlog grooming meetings have a problem Height is aimed directly at. Polaris does not automate backlog hygiene.
You want AI that stays inside the tool
Height's autonomy operates on your workspace without a machine going off to run tool loops elsewhere. For teams with a low tolerance for agents acting on external systems, that is a smaller surface to reason about.
Predictable per-member billing is easier to approve
A fixed per-member price is trivially budgetable. Usage-metered billing, even at two dollars an hour with an open formula, requires explaining a variable line to whoever signs off.
You need a mature, shipped product with customers
Height has been in market for years. Polaris is in free public beta with no customers and no case studies, and for some buyers that alone settles it.

Same Tuesday, two products

With an autonomous tracker

Duplicate issues merged before standup
Stale statuses updated without a nudge
The backlog is accurate and readable
Every task in it is still waiting for a person

With AI workers

Three tasks assigned to workers instead of people
A cloud machine wakes for each and posts progress
Deliverables arrive as comments with files attached
You review, rate and close; the machine never marks work done

A note on the pricing gap on this page

Every other page in this cluster quotes a competitor's list price from their own pricing page, dated 21 August 2026. Height's pricing page did not load across three attempts on that date. Third-party summaries published in 2026 disagree with each other on the tier names and rates, so quoting them here would put a number on the page that a reader could disprove in one click.

The tier structure is a free plan for small teams plus per-member paid tiers with higher limits. For the current figures, read height.app directly. This page will be updated when the source is readable.

Go deeper

Linear vs Height

One of these two products no longer exists. The idea behind it is the interesting part.

Autonomous agent

Autonomy is a range, and the interesting question is where the boundary sits.

Agentic project management

The line is whether the agent holds the work item or only summarises it.

Cloud agents versus local agents

Most teams end up running both. The useful question is which work belongs where.

Assigning a task to an AI worker

There is no prompt box. The task is the prompt, and the checklist is the contract.

A Linear alternative for the work Linear was never meant to hold

Linear is the best issue tracker most engineers have used. This page is not going to pretend otherwise.

Questions people ask

+What is the actual difference between Height and Polaris?

Height applies AI to the tracker, keeping the backlog groomed, deduplicated and current. Polaris applies AI to the work, assigning tasks to workers that run on cloud machines and return deliverables as comments with files. If your weekly cost is administering the board, Height is aimed at you. If it is tasks nobody has time to start, Polaris is.

+Why does this page not quote Height's prices?

Height's pricing page did not respond across three attempts on 21 August 2026, and the third-party summaries available disagree on tier names and rates. Publishing a number nobody could verify would be worse than publishing none, so the tier structure is described instead. Check height.app for current figures.

+Can a Polaris AI worker be edited or corrected?

Yes. A worker's capabilities are stored as a real SKILL.md file you can open, read and change, rather than a hidden prompt. Its tool access comes from a fixed catalog of fourteen connections, authorised once and stored server-side. Changing the skill file changes what the worker does on its next task.

+How do I know an AI worker is not inflating its hours?

Every job writes to the worker's work log, and the human-equivalent hour is computed by an open formula from observable effort such as searches run, prose produced and files returned, clamped between five minutes and eight hours per session. You can challenge any line on the bill from the work log itself.

+Is Polaris mature enough to compare against a shipped product?

It is a working product in free public beta with no customers, no revenue and no case studies, and the recorded demos on the site include an unstaged machine session delivering a task. Anyone comparing on track record should weigh that honestly rather than take a marketing page's word for it.