Integration
Connect Linear to Polaris
A Linear API key carries one person's visibility, so the account you make it on decides what every worker can see.
What connecting buys
Connecting Linear gives a Polaris worker access to your Linear issues through a personal API key, authorized once for the organisation. Polaris verifies the key by asking Linear who it belongs to and refuses to store a key Linear rejects. The key inherits its owner's visibility, so create it on an account whose access matches what workers should read.
- Credential
- Personal API key
- Verified live
- Linear returns the key owner
- Visibility
- Whatever the key's owner can see
Who the key is, matters more than what it can do
Linear issues an API key against a person. When Polaris validates one, Linear answers with that person's name, which is exactly what the connect panel then displays back to you. That single detail should drive the decision: a key made on the CTO's account gives workers the CTO's view of every team.
For most teams the right move is a key from an account scoped to the teams the workers actually support. Not because Polaris will misbehave, but because access you never granted is access you never have to reason about again.
What workers do with Linear connected
Linear stays the engineering tracker. The connection is about the work that surrounds an issue rather than replacing the board.
Read the issue before writing about it
A worker drafting release notes or a postmortem starts from what the issues actually say, instead of from what somebody remembered in a meeting.
Turn a backlog into prose
Cycle summaries, changelog drafts and status write-ups are the kind of work that always slips because it is nobody's favourite hour of the week.
Cross-reference the tracker with the conversation
With Slack connected as well, a worker can line up what was said in a channel against what exists as an issue, and file the gaps as suggestions in the Inbox.
Carry context between tools
The same worker can read a Linear issue and produce a customer-facing note in Docs, which is the handoff that usually costs a person half a day.
Keep Linear, add workers
Engineering teams that like Linear should keep Linear. The two sit beside each other.
Stays in Linear
- Cycles, estimates and the issue graph
- Engineering triage and the keyboard-driven workflow
- Git branch and pull-request linking
- Whatever your team has already automated there
Moves to Polaris
- The writing nobody does: release notes, postmortems, docs
- Work owned by people who do not live in an engineering tracker
- AI workers assigned tasks the same way a person is
- The bill, which stops being per seat
Workers and work this connection feeds
Hire an AI QA engineer
Fourteen vague reports go in, fourteen tickets with steps, expected behaviour and a severity come out, with the three duplicates already merged.
Hire an AI project coordinator
The unglamorous half of running projects, done every week without anyone having to be the person who nags.
Hire an AI technical writer
The documentation debt on your team is not a writing problem, it is a nobody-has-two-free-hours problem, and this is the worker for those two hours.
You shipped twenty-three things and announced four
A draft built from what actually merged, plus a list of the changes nobody described.
Forty new issues on Monday, half of them the same bug
Every new issue checked for duplicates, version and repro before an engineer opens it.
The two hours before planning that nobody schedules
Carry-over, gaps and blockers assembled the day before, so the meeting is about commitment.
Questions people ask
+What kind of Linear credential does Polaris need?
A personal API key from Linear's API settings, the kind that starts with lin_api_. Polaris validates it by running a small query that asks Linear who the key belongs to, and shows you that name once it is stored.
+Does connecting Linear sync my issues into Polaris tasks?
No. Polaris tasks and Linear issues stay separate. The connection is read access for workers, not a two-way mirror, which is deliberate: a half-working sync between two trackers is worse than either tracker alone.
+Can I limit which Linear teams a worker sees?
Through Linear, yes. The key inherits the visibility of the account that created it, so a key made on a member with access to two teams gives workers those two teams. Polaris has no separate filter on top of that.
+Do I still need Linear if I use Polaris?
That depends on whether cycles and the issue graph are load-bearing for your team. Plenty of teams keep both, connecting Linear for engineering and running everything else in Polaris. The alternatives page for Linear makes the case on both sides.
Related
Every tool a Polaris worker can be given
One catalog, one credential per tool per organisation, authorized by an owner and used by every worker who carries it.
Hire an AI QA engineer
Fourteen vague reports go in, fourteen tickets with steps, expected behaviour and a severity come out, with the three duplicates already merged.
The two hours before planning that nobody schedules
Carry-over, gaps and blockers assembled the day before, so the meeting is about commitment.
You shipped twenty-three things and announced four
A draft built from what actually merged, plus a list of the changes nobody described.
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.
Linear pricing, checked August 2026
A generous free tier with two hard caps, and paid rates published on yearly billing only.
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.