It's close: GitHub edges it 9.0 to 8.9, so the right pick depends on what you need. GitHub wins on 2 of the 5 scores, Linear on 3.
Developers and teams who want hosting, code review and CI in one place
Software teams who want fast, low-friction issue tracking and planning
Score by score
The details
| Feature | GitHub | Linear |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Developer Tools | Developer Tools |
| Category rank | #2 of 8 | #3 of 8 |
| Developer | GitHub (Microsoft) | Linear Orbit, Inc. |
| Pricing | Free + paid plans | Free + paid plans |
| Usable for free | Yes | Yes |
| iPhone & iPad | ✓ | ✓ |
| Android | ✓ | ✓ |
| Mac | ✓ | ✓ |
| Windows | ✓ | ✓ |
| Web | ✓ | ✓ |
Strengths and weaknesses
GitHub
- Industry-standard home for code and open source
- Actions automates builds, tests and deploys
- Generous free plan with unlimited private repos
- Feature sprawl makes settings hard to navigate
- Outages can stall your whole team's workflow
GitHub is the default home for open source and many company codebases, and its tools are hard to beat. Pull requests, code review, Issues and Projects cover the full workflow, and Actions runs your builds and deployments. Copilot adds AI code review and a coding agent that can open pull requests for you. Private repos are free. The catch is growing complexity, and an outage can stall your whole team.
Full GitHub review
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
