Linear is the better app overall, scoring 8.9 to 8.7. Linear wins on 4 of the 5 scores, Cursor on 1.
Software teams who want fast, low-friction issue tracking and planning
Developers who want AI help built into every part of their editor
Score by score
The details
| Feature | Linear | Cursor |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Developer Tools | Developer Tools |
| Category rank | #3 of 8 | #5 of 8 |
| Developer | Linear Orbit, Inc. | Anysphere |
| Pricing | Free + paid plans | Free + paid plans |
| Usable for free | Yes | Yes |
| iPhone & iPad | ✓ | — |
| Android | ✓ | — |
| Mac | ✓ | ✓ |
| Windows | ✓ | ✓ |
| Linux | — | ✓ |
| Web | ✓ | — |
Strengths and weaknesses
Linear
- Extremely fast and keyboard-friendly
- Sensible defaults with little setup
- Automatic status updates from pull requests
- Less customizable than enterprise trackers
- Built for software teams, awkward for other work
Linear is the issue tracker developers actually enjoy using. It is very fast, fully keyboard-driven and opinionated in a good way, with cycles, projects, roadmaps and triage that keep work moving without endless configuration. Git integrations update issues automatically, and you can assign issues to AI coding agents. The trade-off is flexibility: if you need deeply custom workflows, fields and reports, it can feel limiting.
Full Linear review
Cursor
- Deep AI help built into every part of the editor
- Familiar VS Code base with easy migration
- Choice of frontier models from several labs
- Usage-based pricing can be hard to predict
- Code is processed by cloud AI models
Cursor is the AI code editor many developers switch to first. It is built on VS Code, so your extensions and settings carry over, and it adds fast tab completion, an agent that edits across many files, and cloud agents that work in the background. The catch is pricing: usage-based limits can be hard to predict, and your code is processed in the cloud, so use Privacy Mode for sensitive work.
Full Cursor review
