Full disclosure: I built It's a Plan, a self-hosted, open source Linear alternative with AI agents. So take this comparison with a grain of salt. I'll try to be fair, including telling you when to just stay on Linear.
Linear is great. Fast, polished, nice to use. It's a Plan started as a board I built for myself, then I open-sourced it. Here's how the two actually compare.
Pricing: per seat vs one flat price
Linear charges per seat: $10/user/month on Basic, $16 on Business, billed yearly. The free plan stops at 2 teams and 250 issues.
A team of 10 on Business pays $1,920 a year. 50 people pay $9,600.
It's a Plan is self-hosted. Community is free for any number of people. Pro is $240 a year for the whole instance. Ten people or a hundred, same $240.
AI agents in Linear and in an open source tracker
Both have them now, so this isn't a "we have AI and they don't" post.
In Linear you delegate an issue to Cursor, Codex, Devin or Linear's own agent. Agents don't take a seat, which is nice. The catch is the bill: Linear's coding sessions and Loops run on prepaid AI credits, model tokens plus $0.25 per 20 minutes of sandbox time. You pick from Linear's list of models, no bring-your-own-key, and the repo gets cloned into their sandbox.
In It's a Plan an agent gets its own account and you hand it work like a teammate. The difference is where it runs and who bills you:
- inside your instance, on any model, with your own API key
- or on your laptop / VPS through a runner that calls
claude,codex,opencodeor any command you want, using the subscription you already pay for. The repo never leaves your machine.
Recurring work: Loops vs workflows
Linear has Loops: you describe a job in plain language, and Linear Agent runs it on a schedule or when something changes in issues, projects, cycles or pull requests. It can also start from Slack or GitHub. Loops are on paid plans and draw from your AI credits.
It's a Plan splits this in two:
- Schedules (free): any agent runs on a cron ("triage bot, every weekday at 9") or when an issue enters a state.
- Workflows (Pro): you draw a chain of agents on a canvas. An issue event, a cron, a person or a webhook starts it. One agent writes, the next one checks, and it can send the work back with notes for another pass. Each step shows its tokens and cost on your own key.
The second one is basically n8n for everyday agent work, except the issue is the state and you review the result on the board. We moved our own content pipeline (research, draft, edit) off n8n onto it.
One detail worth knowing: event triggers only fire on a human's action, so two bots can't ping-pong each other at 3am.
Open source vs closed: SSO, data and code
- SSO. On Linear, SAML and SCIM are Enterprise-only. In It's a Plan, OIDC and SCIM are in the free edition.
- Data. Linear runs only in their cloud. It's a Plan runs wherever you put it.
- Source. Linear is closed. It's a Plan is AGPL-3.0, so you can read it, fork it and fix what blocks you.
Where Linear is just better
Polish. Speed. Keyboard flow. Years of product work, and it shows. More importers (Jira, Asana, Shortcut, GitHub Issues), more ready-made partner agents, zero ops.
That gap is shrinking, though. Me and 52 contributors work on It's a Plan every day.
Linear or an open source alternative: which one?
Stay on Linear if you don't want to host anything and per-seat pricing doesn't hurt.
Try It's a Plan if you want your data on your own server, a bill that doesn't grow with every hire, or agents running on your own keys.
There's a built-in Linear importer, so you can try it on a real project, not an empty board.
The full side-by-side table (licence, hosting, agent cost, API, importers) is here: It's a Plan vs Linear.
Repo: GitHub
Where this is going
Four releases in the last month, plus bug fixes and security audits every week. You can follow it in the changelog.
Pro already runs in production for teams in 9 countries, from solo founders to people at companies with thousands of employees. Here's what anonymous telemetry from self-hosted installs looks like this week. Some of them run with 100+ people, one tracks more than 10,000 issues.
The goal, honestly, is pretty simple: build a really good tracker where people and agents work as one team, in a setup that feels familiar to both. And earn a real place next to Linear and Jira along the way.
If you try it, tell me what's missing. That's pretty much how the roadmap gets made.
