Comparison
Linear vs Shortcut
Two trackers built for engineers, disagreeing about how much structure a team should be allowed to have.
The verdict
Shortcut suits engineering teams that want epics, stories, milestones and configurable workflows without Jira's administrative weight, at $8.50 per user per month billed annually as checked on 21 August 2026. Linear suits teams that would rather have fewer options and a faster client, at $10 per user per month billed yearly. The free tiers differ: Shortcut allows ten users, Linear allows unlimited members but only 250 issues.
- Shortcut Team
- $8.50 / user / mo, annual
- Linear Basic
- $10 / user / mo, yearly
- Free tiers
- Shortcut 10 users · Linear 250 issues
- Checked
- 21 August 2026
The verdict
Shortcut is the better choice for a team that liked Jira's structure and hated Jira's administration. It keeps the epic, story and task hierarchy, keeps milestones above epics, keeps iterations, and lets you build up to five custom workflows on the Team plan without hiring anyone to own the configuration. It is also cheaper, at $8.50 per user per month annually against Linear's $10.
Linear is the better choice for a team that wants the tracker to disappear. The client is fast enough that filing an issue is not a decision, Triage turns incoming reports into a queue somebody actually clears, and the defaults are opinionated enough that nobody spends a Thursday arguing about statuses. That is worth $1.50 a head to a lot of teams and worth nothing to others.
The free tiers are shaped so differently that they can decide it outright. Shortcut's free plan takes ten users with no cap on issues, which suits a small team with a large backlog. Linear's free plan takes unlimited members but stops at 250 issues and two teams, which suits a larger group evaluating it on a slice of work.
Head to head
Read from shortcut.com/pricing and linear.app/pricing on 21 August 2026. Both vendors quote annual rates; monthly billing costs more at each tier.
Linear
Shortcut
- Entry paid price
Basic $10 per user per month, billed yearly
Team $8.50 per user per month, billed annually
- Next tier up
Business $16 per user per month
Business $12 per user per month
- Free tier
250 issues, 2 teams, unlimited members
Up to 10 users, unlimited issues
- Hierarchy
Projects and issues, with sub-issues
Milestones, epics, stories and tasks
- Workflow customisation
Light; states are largely fixed by design
Up to 5 custom workflows on Team, unlimited on Business
- Iterations
Cycles, which end on date and roll work forward
Iterations with explicit start and end, closer to sprints
- Reporting
Insights on Business
Advanced reports on Team, objectives and key results on Business
- Speed
The reason most switchers cite
Fast, but not the product's headline claim
- Best fit
Teams that want one opinionated flow
Teams that need several flows without an admin
Comparison of Linear and Shortcut by What decides it.
Where each one wins on merit
Linear
- Triage as a real inbox, so bug reports do not rot in a backlog
- A desktop client that stays usable when the network does not
- Cycles that force honest scoping by ending whether or not work is done
- An agent platform available even on the free tier
- Design consistency tight enough that new hires need no walkthrough
Shortcut
- Epics and milestones, so a quarter of work has a container above the sprint
- Custom workflows per team without a configuration owner
- Docs built into the same product, which removes one subscription
- A free tier that does not cap issue volume
- A lower per-seat price at both paid tiers
Two questions that decide it
Does more than one team need a different set of states?
If yes, Shortcut. This is the clearest functional gap. Linear's fixed states are a feature until the second team arrives with a genuinely different process.
Is anyone currently not filing issues because filing is annoying?
If yes, Linear. Lost information is more expensive than a workflow compromise, and Linear's whole design argument is about that friction.
A third option worth knowing about
Both of these are engineering trackers, and both have added agent features in the last two years. If part of what you are evaluating is how AI fits into your team's work rather than into a single developer's editor, the shape of that question is worth separating from the tracker question.
Polaris is an all-in-one workspace where AI workers are members of the team rather than a feature of the tracker. Humans and agents live in the same members table, so an AI worker is assigned a task through the same flow as a colleague. A cloud machine wakes for that task, runs a live tool loop with real web search, ticks the acceptance criteria on the task as it goes, and posts the finished work as a comment with any files it produced. The machine never marks the task done; a person closes it and rates it.
Capabilities are stored as a SKILL.md file you can open and edit rather than a hidden prompt, which is the part engineers tend to care about. The software is free with no seats; billing is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour delivered, from an open formula, logged per job. Linear, GitHub and Slack are all in the connections catalog. Polaris is in free public beta with no customers yet.
Questions people ask
+Can you import Shortcut data into Linear?
Yes. Linear's migration assistant supports Shortcut alongside Jira, Asana and GitHub, and there is a CSV route as well. Epics generally map to Linear projects. Custom workflow states have no direct equivalent, so anything relying on a hand-built state machine needs remapping by hand before the import.
+Which is cheaper, Linear or Shortcut?
Shortcut, at both paid tiers as checked on 21 August 2026: $8.50 against $10 at entry, and $12 against $16 at the next level, all billed annually. For a twenty-person team the Business-tier gap is about $960 a year.
+Does Shortcut have something like Linear's Triage?
Not as a distinct product surface. Shortcut handles incoming work through workflow states and integrations rather than a dedicated triage inbox. Teams that route a high volume of external bug reports usually find Linear's model less effortful.
+Do both integrate with GitHub the same way?
Both support branch naming conventions, pull request linking and automatic state transitions on merge, and both are reliable at it. Linear's version is slightly more automatic out of the box; Shortcut's is more configurable. Neither is a reason to choose one over the other.
+Is Shortcut a good Jira replacement?
For an engineering-only Jira instance, usually yes: the hierarchy is familiar, workflows are configurable, and the administrative burden is far lower. For a Jira instance shared with support, legal or finance, no. Shortcut is built for software teams and does not try to be a general work platform.
Related
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 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.
Linear pricing, checked August 2026
A generous free tier with two hard caps, and paid rates published on yearly billing only.
Jira vs Linear
One tool is opinionated and fast. The other is configurable and permanent. That is the whole decision.
Linear vs Height
One of these two products no longer exists. The idea behind it is the interesting part.
Replacing Linear, Notion and GitHub
Three tools a technical team chose on purpose, and none of them has to move anywhere.
Assigning a task to an AI worker
There is no prompt box. The task is the prompt, and the checklist is the contract.
Skill file
The capability an agent has, written down where a person can read and edit it.