Shortcut alternative

A Shortcut alternative for teams who just crossed the free seat limit

Shortcut sits between Jira's configuration and Linear's opinion. The sixth engineer is where the invoice starts.

The short answer

Polaris is a free alternative to Shortcut for software teams that crossed its five-seat free limit. Shortcut lists Free for up to five users, Team at eight dollars fifty and Business at twelve dollars per user per month, checked 21 August 2026. Polaris has no seat count, includes docs and team chat, and lets tasks be assigned to AI workers that deliver on cloud machines.

Shortcut Free: up to 5 users
Shortcut Team: $8.50 / user / month
Shortcut Business: $12 / user / month
Checked: 21 Aug 2026

The sixth-engineer problem

Shortcut is a well-judged product for software teams: stories, epics and iterations that map onto how a small engineering group actually plans, docs alongside the tracker, and a git integration that does the obvious thing. Checked on 21 August 2026, the pricing page lists Free for up to five users, Team at eight dollars fifty per user per month, Business at twelve, and Enterprise on request, with yearly billing advertised as saving up to twenty-five percent.

Eight dollars fifty is not an outrageous number. The problem is what it is charging for. A tracker is a shared agreement about what is not finished, and the sixth engineer does not make the backlog move faster. They make it longer, and now they also cost eight dollars fifty a month.

The teams who come looking are usually the ones where engineering capacity is the constraint and the backlog contains work that is not engineering: writing the release notes, checking what a competitor shipped, updating the docs that went stale in March.

Head to head

Shortcut prices from shortcut.com/pricing, checked 21 August 2026.

Shortcut

Polaris

Cost

Free to 5 users, then $8.50 Team or $12 Business per user per month

$0 at any team size, no seat count

Planning model

Stories, epics, iterations and milestones

Workstreams with shared lanes, plus a Focus lane across three time horizons

Docs

Shortcut Docs alongside the tracker

Nested doc tree, block editor, versioning, file review, comments

Git integration

Branch and pull request linking with automatic state changes

GitHub as a connection an AI worker can be given, not a state-change link

Team chat

Not included

Included, plus an Inbox that turns Slack messages into prefilled task suggestions

Reporting

Burndown, cycle time and throughput reports

Worker activity feed, insights, and a per-job work log

Assignees

Humans

Humans and AI workers in the same members table

When work is finished

An engineer moves the story

A worker posts a comment with files and ticks acceptance criteria; a human closes it

When you should stay on Shortcut

Shortcut is genuinely good at the job it chose, and these are real reasons to keep it.

The story, epic and iteration model fits your team
It is a middle ground that suits engineering groups who found Jira too configurable and Linear too opinionated. Polaris has lanes and time horizons, not iterations, and does not produce cycle time or throughput reports.
Branch and pull request linking is part of the workflow
Stories that change state when a branch merges remove a class of manual updates. Polaris connects to GitHub for AI worker access, which is a different thing entirely.
You are five people or fewer
Shortcut Free covers up to five users, so there is no bill to escape yet and no argument on this page that applies to you.
Engineering reporting is how you run planning
Burndown, cycle time and throughput are the numbers a lot of teams plan against. Polaris does not produce them and does not have an equivalent.

What crossing five seats costs

Shortcut list prices checked 21 August 2026.

$1,020

Ten engineers on Shortcut Team, per year

$8.50 per user per month, before annual discount

$1,440

Ten engineers on Shortcut Business, per year

$12 per user per month

Polaris software, ten engineers or fifty

Billing begins only when a worker delivers something

Moving from Shortcut, or running both

Shortcut has a documented REST API and CSV export covering stories, epics, states, owners, estimates and labels, so a scripted move of the task data is straightforward. Iterations, git links, burndown history and workflow states do not have a destination in Polaris.

The pattern that costs nothing to test is narrower than a migration. Keep Shortcut for engineering. Open one Polaris workstream for the non-engineering work that keeps landing in the engineering backlog, connect GitHub so a worker can see the repository context, and assign three of those tasks to AI workers. Judge it on whether that backlog stops growing.

Go deeper

Linear vs Shortcut

Two trackers built for engineers, disagreeing about how much structure a team should be allowed to have.

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.

A Jira alternative that does some of the work, not just the tracking

Jira is the most configurable tracker ever built. Configuration is also the reason people go looking.

Connect GitHub to Polaris

Fine-grained tokens let you hand over three repositories instead of an account, which is the whole reason to use them here.

Polaris for software teams

Nobody joined your team to write the release notes. Something still has to write them.

The README describes a version of the code that no longer exists

A monthly list of statements in your docs that the code no longer supports.

Questions people ask

+How much is Shortcut per user?

Checked on 21 August 2026, Shortcut lists Free for up to five users, Team at eight dollars fifty per user per month, Business at twelve, and Enterprise on request, with yearly billing advertised as saving up to twenty-five percent. Ten engineers on Team is roughly one thousand and twenty dollars a year at monthly rates.

+Does Polaris have iterations or sprints?

No. Polaris organises work into workstreams with lanes shared between list and board views, plus a Focus lane pinned across today, this week and the next thirty days. Teams that plan in fixed-length iterations with velocity tracking would be losing their planning unit.

+Can I move Shortcut stories into Polaris?

Shortcut exposes a documented REST API and CSV export with stories, epics, states, owners, estimates and labels, which covers the task data. Iterations, git links, workflow states and burndown history do not transfer, so treat them as retired rather than migrated.

+What kind of engineering work can an AI worker actually take?

The realistic set is the work around the code rather than the code review itself: release notes, documentation updates, competitor checks, research write-ups, comparison documents. The worker runs on a cloud machine with live web search and connected tools, and delivers as a comment with files for a human to review and close.

+Is there a seat charge in Polaris at any team size?

No. The software is free with unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams and docs, and there are no tiers. The only charge is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour that a worker delivers, estimated by an open formula and written line by line to that worker's work log.