Today there are many different project management tools - Jira, Monday, Trello, and others. As a Project Manager, I use various tools, and in early 2022, I had the opportunity to start working with Linear. Below I am providing my honest opinion and experience with Linear so that you can judge whether it is worth it.
Reason 1: Easy to start with
I have to admit that such an easy setup and onboarding to a work management tool I have not met yet. If you had the opportunity to work with Jira or, e.g., Monday.com, you probably know that before the organization can start using them, you need to go through training and configuration. Linear managed to do it well. Right after registration, the user can be a full-fledged contributor. I applaud the UI.
Reason 2: Roadmap and issues management
Work at Linear is orchestrated around milestones, projects, and issues (there is no distinction between user stories or bugs, just issues since Linear believes that it is better to write tickets with a description of what needs to be done and not user stories).
What is great is that projects can be assigned to several teams simultaneously, greatly facilitating cross-team collaboration.
Example of Linear Roadmap
We can add project status and projects progress reporting directly in Linear (reporting is also visible on the roadmap, which brings a lot of transparency and visibility to ongoing work).
Example of project status, health and status report
Creating issues is very simple. When creating issues, you can specify several options - Status, Priority, Assignee, add Label, assign the issue to Project and add the issue to Cycle (something like Jira Sprint). In addition, you can create issues templates.
Well, and the most important that issue creation or updating is real-time, which helps everyone be on the same page.
Example of issue creation at Linear
As for milestones, so far I do not find them specially useful, but it is probably related to a specific development workflow.
Reason 3: Views configuration
What I like about Linear are the different view options configurations. As a Project Manager, I can filter out only those issues that interest me and decide whether I want to see them as a list of issues or perhaps work on the Kanban board.
Reason 4: filtering
Filtering, searching, and bulk changes work well in Linear. If you ever had a chance to work with Jira filtering, you would appreciate how simple Linear is. But, if you use advanced Jira JQL search options, you might not find Linear searching sufficient.
The same applies to bulk changes - using Command, you can make bulk changes to anything you want (no limitations).
Linear filtering options
Reason 5: Performance
The first thing you will notice when you start using Linear is how fast it is. In addition, Linear has commands that significantly improve the work speed. At this point, I only use commands to work in Linear.
Linear command console
But everything cannot be that good, right? So here are a few disadvantages I have found so far (as of October 2022).
Not that great 1: Reporting
Well, I must admit that if you are a large organization or reporting is vital for you - you might be disappointed at this moment. Currently, Linear allows you to do status reporting on projects and has a pretty cool burn-up chart on Sprints. Unfortunately, that's it.
I also tried exporting the data to Goole Sheets to put together my reports (such as lead time or resolution time). Unfortunately, available data do not allow such reports to be done.
Not that great 2: fields Customization
If you are an experienced user of project management tools, you will probably appreciate the ability to configure fields in different tools. This is not a possible option in Linear. You will be forced to use the fields system that is already in Linear.
Conclusion
Linear brings tickets and workflow management to a new level and makes everyone's life easier. If you are looking for something simple, fast, and easy to use - Linear would be a good choice. However, if you are interested in advanced reporting, forecasting and tool customization - Linear may not be enough to meet your needs.
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