Linear

About Linear

Linear was founded in 2019 by Karri Saarinen and Jori Lallo (Finnish) and Tuomas Artman (Swedish), and has grown to become one of the most respected issue tracking tools in the software engineering community. The tool is known for its exceptional speed, clean interface, and opinionated workflow that enforces consistency across engineering teams. It directly competes with Jira and Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) for the engineering project management market. Linear's AI features (Linear Asks, issue summarisation, automatic priority suggestions, and natural language search) are integrated throughout the product rather than bolted on. These AI capabilities use OpenAI under the hood, with Linear acting as a data processor. Linear has stated that it uses OpenAI's zero-data-retention API option for AI features, meaning content submitted for AI processing is not stored by OpenAI beyond the inference call. Despite its Scandinavian founding team, Linear is now incorporated in Delaware, USA, and is headquartered in San Francisco. This is an important compliance distinction: the legal jurisdiction is US law, not EU law, and the CLOUD Act applies. However, Linear offers EU data residency — customer workspace data can be stored in the EU (AWS eu-west-1), and this is configurable at account creation. Linear provides a GDPR-compliant DPA and SCCs for EU customers. Linear holds SOC 2 Type II certification, which provides meaningful assurance on its security controls. It does not currently hold ISO 27001 certification. SSO (SAML) is available on higher-tier plans, as are audit logs and advanced security controls. Pricing includes a free tier for small teams (up to 250 issues), a Basic plan at $8/user/month, a Business plan at $14/user/month, and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing that includes EU data residency, custom roles, and advanced audit capabilities. For European engineering teams, Linear offers a good balance of performance, developer experience, and meaningful (if not perfect) data sovereignty controls — particularly compared to Jira, which has similar US jurisdiction exposure.