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Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

Linear looks fascinating.

We’re using Zenhub now and it’s slow and misused in our org (one giant project board instead of separate boards per repo / project).

Curious if anyone here is / has used linear and could compare their experience with it to Monday, Asana or Zenhub?

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Linear founder here. As you pointed out issue tracking and project management tools can get easily out of control if concepts get overcomplicated etc. I can't really say of the other tools but we tried to build Linear to be simple and really fast, and adopt to your needs as your grow (e.g. enable more advanced features as you need them).

Linear is free to use for a modest issue count so it's pretty low key to try it out for a project with your team if you want to compare it. And if you end up switching, we have open source import scripts available: https://github.com/linearapp/linear-import If you end up trying us out and need help organizing your team, feel free to contact me jori@linear.app

I use linear extensively. It’s the best tool for managing development tasks imo. Takes the best features of JIRA without the horrible UI/UX (linear has workflows, boards, lists, assignments, tags, cycles, projects, etc).

It’s also just incredibly simple to start using. They have a free version, so I’d say it’s worth checking out. It has integration with GitHub and Slack, which is about all I need as far as integrating goes.

I’ve used both Monday and Asana. I’ve not used Zenhub. Comparing linear to Monday and Asana, I’d say linear is much faster. It’s a native Mac app. It’s also nicer looking than both imo, which is a big deal for me.

I use Linear and have previously used Asana and Jira. Linear is much, much better. It's much faster, the design is better (easier to understand what i'm looking at, switch between board and list views), and doesn't have infinite complexity. You can create tasks, and subtasks, and projects, and that's it. There are Cycles (sprints) with some neat scheduling tools for it, that may not be useful for you if you don't work that way -- our team does so it's very nice. I'd recommend giving it a shot, I think once you actually use the application for about 5 minutes you'll understand if it's worth it or not.

I was looking at linear. But we do use kanban (no sprints). Do you know if sprints are basically a required part of using Linear?

I do know —- they are not!

Using Linear on an 8 person team. Refugees from JIRA in the corporate world. Absolutely love it - keeps us on track across time zones.

The one piece that's probably missing is a tie in to broader "roadmapping" software - I know what's coming in the next 3 sprints, but we haven't found a way to intuitively tie this to our 12-month roadmap - well automatically anyway.

Maybe https://linear.app/method/roadmap ? You have to enable it in

    https://linear.app/YOUR_ORG/settings/roadmap

I’ve used Asana in the past. Compared to Linear, it’s absolutely terrible. It’s super slow, has inconsistent UX, and barely supports keyboard shortcuts. Linear supports keyboard shortcuts for literally everything, is blazing fast, and looks nice. It’s one of the few web apps that I actually enjoying using.

Just to toss another hat in the ring - people who are interested in a tool that has a lot of same performance/hotkey characteristics as Linear but takes a different approach to what a product management tool/issue tracker should be should take a look at Kitemaker (YC W21) [0]. We've also got great integrations to Github, Slack, Figma, etc. We've got a pretty generous free tier so you can try it out for quite a while with your team before you need to pay.

0: https://kitemaker.co

Using Linear in a 5-person team since June and we love it. Super fast, flexible and capable. Highly recommended.

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