Linear vs Redmine

From $8 per user/month (Basic, billed annually)

Free and open source

Simple, transparent per-seat pricing with no app marketplace to inflate it.

Free software. You pay for hosting, upgrades and the plugin maintenance that comes with them.

Free plan for small teams with unlimited members and limited issue history.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Linear · since 2019

Established

OSS community · since 2006

• Genuinely fast — the interaction latency is a feature, not marketing.
• Opinionated defaults mean it stays usable without an administrator.
• Excellent Git and Slack integration and a clean triage inbox.

• No licence cost at any user count.
• Full data control, which matters for defence, public sector and regulated work.
• Very stable and well understood.

• Deliberately inflexible; complex approval workflows and regulated processes do not fit.
• Weaker for non-engineering functions than Jira.
• No self-hosted option, which rules it out for some organisations.

• Dated interface that new team members find unpleasant.
• Plugin quality varies and upgrades frequently break them.
• You own hosting, backups, security patching and upgrades.

Product and engineering teams that value speed and hate configuration.

Organisations that must self-host and cannot spend on licences.