Redmine vs Linear

Free and open source

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

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

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

Established

OSS community · since 2006

Widely used

Linear · since 2019

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

Product and engineering teams that value speed and hate configuration.