· project-management / linear / height

Linear vs Height in 2026: Height is gone, here's where that leaves you

Height shut down September 2025. Linear survived and is betting on AI. Here is what developer teams actually need to know before picking a project management tool in 2026.

By

2,530 words · 13 min read

Height shut down September 24, 2025. Linear survived. If you arrived here looking for a side-by-side comparison, that part is settled. What’s left is whether Linear is actually worth it — and whether the $16/user/month Business plan is the version you need.

Short answer: Linear is the right call for dev-led teams. The free tier works for small projects; Basic at $10 works if you don’t care about AI; Business at $16 unlocks the AI features Linear shipped at a one-per-month clip through early 2026. Pick based on how much you spend on PM overhead, not on what features look impressive in a demo.

Who this is for

Engineering teams — startups through mid-size orgs — evaluating project management tooling in 2026. If you’re already using Jira inside a large enterprise with a long-term contract, this article won’t change that. If you were on Height and looking for what’s next, the answer is below. If you’ve never heard of either tool and you’re looking for something faster than Jira, you’re also in the right place.

What happened to Height

Height announced its permanent shutdown on March 22, 2025 via its official Twitter/X account. The service went offline September 24, 2025. As of June 2026, the website is offline and the product is gone.

Height raised $18.3M total across three rounds (via Crunchbase; AlleyWatch’s Series A coverage confirms the total):

  • $2.3M seed — January 2019
  • $2M seed — June 2020
  • $14M Series A — September 2021

No Series B followed. The company ran approximately four years after the Series A before closing. Height’s founders published no official post-mortem. Primary sources for the shutdown date are the official @height_app announcement and contemporaneous coverage from AlternativeTo.

What caused the shutdown? This article can’t answer that. There’s no verified explanation — only that funding stopped and the product closed. Drawing inferences about what it means for the AI-first PM category would be speculation, and we won’t do it.

The practical effect: every comparison article published before late 2025 is stale. The “Linear vs Height” search query now has a different answer than when both products were live.

For teams that moved to Linear when Height announced the shutdown in March 2025 — you had a six-month runway before the September cutoff, which is enough time to migrate. For teams that migrated later or are now researching this comparison for the first time: the migration is a one-way decision with no ability to go back to Height. There’s nothing to wait for.

Height’s core pitch was AI-first project management with a cross-functional, collaborative design. It launched when AI assistance in PM tools was still a differentiator. By 2026, every serious PM tool is adding AI features. Height’s closure doesn’t mean the category is wrong — it means one entrant didn’t make it to the point where that bet paid off.

Linear in 2026: pricing

Linear operates four tiers, billed monthly or yearly (yearly gets a discount):

PlanPrice (yearly billing)What you get
Free$0Core features, limited issue count
Basic$10/user/monthUnlimited issues, unlimited file uploads
Business$16/user/monthAll AI features (Triage Intelligence, Agent Automations, Code Intelligence)
EnterpriseCustom (annual only)SSO, advanced security, dedicated support, SLA

The line that matters: AI features are gated at Business. The Free and Basic plans give you Linear’s core issue tracker — fast, keyboard-driven, cycle-based — with no AI triage, no agent automations, and no Code Intelligence. If that’s all you need, Basic at $10 is honest value. If you want the AI layer, you’re committing to $16/user/month at minimum.

Enterprise is annual billing only. No monthly option. That’s worth knowing before you get deep into a procurement process.

Pricing source: linear.app/pricing and linear.app/docs/billing-and-plans, verified June 2026.

Linear’s AI bet

Between October 2025 and May 2026 — roughly eight months — Linear shipped four major AI features. The cadence matters: this is not a roadmap slide. These shipped.

@Linear in Slack (all plans) — October 2025

The @Linear Slack agent lets anyone in your workspace mention @Linear to create issues, get status updates, and take actions without leaving Slack. This is available on every plan including Free. It’s the AI feature you get regardless of tier.

Source: linear.app/changelog/2025-10-23-linear-agent-for-slack

Agent Automations (Business+, public beta) — March 2026

Triggered workflows that execute automatically based on issue events. If an issue hits a certain state, an automation can triage it, route it, update fields, or trigger a downstream action without a human in the loop. This is the feature Linear CEO Karri Saarinen was pointing at when he published “issue tracking is dead” in March 2026.

The concrete use case: a bug report lands in your inbox. Instead of a PM manually reviewing it, assigning a priority, routing it to the right team, and moving it to the right cycle, an automation handles that chain — because the issue context (labels, description, linked project) gives the agent enough signal to act. Whether the agent routes correctly depends on how well your workspace is organized, which is true of every rules-based system.

The CEO quote got coverage in The Register and DevClass. Both outlets used the same “moves sideways” framing — noting that Linear still runs a fully intact issue tracker alongside the AI features. That read is defensible. What’s not defensible is claiming this is vaporware: it shipped as public beta March 24, 2026.

Source: linear.app/changelog/2026-03-24-introducing-linear-agent

MCP connectors (Business+) — April 2026

Linear Agent can pull context from external tools via Model Context Protocol (MCP) and use that context to create or update issues. Confirmed working integrations at launch:

  • Granola — pull meeting takeaways into project updates
  • Glean — use enterprise search context to draft specs
  • Notion — pull interview notes into customer requests
  • PostHog — validate product hypotheses against analytics data

MCP is what lets Linear Agent act on real-world context instead of just the data inside Linear. For teams that already live in these tools, this closes a meaningful loop.

Source: linear.app/changelog/2026-04-23-linear-agent-mcp-support

Code Intelligence (Business+, public beta) — May 2026

Code Intelligence surfaces codebase context inside Linear issues. The positioning is deliberately cross-functional: it’s framed for PMs, support, and sales as much as for engineers — giving non-technical stakeholders visibility into what’s happening in the codebase without reading it.

In practice, this closes a specific gap: a PM asking “has this bug been fixed in main?” or a support engineer asking “what changed in this module?” can answer those questions inside Linear instead of bugging a developer or pulling up GitHub. For engineering teams, it means the issue and the code change it refers to live in the same place. Whether this is worth $16/user/month on top of Basic depends on how often your PM or support team currently interrupts engineers for code status questions. If the answer is “frequently,” the math may work.

It’s in public beta as of this writing. Linear hasn’t announced pricing for after general availability.

Source: linear.app/changelog/2026-05-14-code-intelligence

A note on post-beta pricing

Linear has not committed to post-GA pricing for Agent Automations or Code Intelligence. Both are in public beta with no announced pricing changes. Read that as uncertainty, not as a guarantee they’ll stay included in Business at $16. Check linear.app/pricing before making long-term plan decisions.

Integrations

Slack — strong

Linear’s Slack integration is deep and bidirectional. You can create issues from Slack messages, sync threads between Slack and Linear, set up personal and channel-level notifications, see rich link unfurls, and use the @Linear AI agent. As of May 2026, Linear added project-specific Slack channels — a feature still in active development.

This is one of the more complete Slack integrations in the PM space. It’s not just webhooks; it’s two-way.

Sources: linear.app/docs/slack, linear.app/changelog/2025-10-23-linear-agent-for-slack

Figma — useful, with limits

You can create new Linear issues from Figma (individual frames, sections, pages) and link existing issues to design elements. Issue status changes in Linear sync back to the Figma plugin. Linear’s docs describe the sync as “instant” — that’s a vendor claim this article can’t independently verify.

One clarification: Figma design previews don’t auto-sync. The plugin syncs issue status data, not the design itself. If your workflow depends on seeing updated design previews in Linear, you’ll need to refresh manually.

Sources: linear.app/integrations/figma, linear.app/docs/figma

GitHub — confirmed, specifics vary

Linear has a GitHub integration that’s been part of the product since early on and is actively used by a large fraction of Linear’s customer base. The integration is documented at linear.app/docs/github-integration.

This article won’t cite specific sync behaviors, PR trigger rules, or transition granularity. The research pass for this piece found conflicting information across sources on those specifics — enough conflict that publishing them as fact would be wrong. Check the current docs for the exact current behavior before designing automation workflows around it. The docs are the authoritative source; third-party summaries (including this one) can drift.

Who Linear is for

Good fit:

  • Engineering teams that live in GitHub and Slack and want their PM tool wired to both
  • Teams that run in cycles (sprints or otherwise) and use keyboard shortcuts
  • Orgs willing to pay $16/user/month for AI triage and automations to reduce PM overhead
  • Cross-functional teams where Code Intelligence lets non-engineers understand codebase status without pinging engineers

Poor fit:

  • Teams that need PM tooling under $10/user/month and want AI — that combination doesn’t exist in Linear; the AI features are Business-only
  • Organizations where non-technical stakeholders need Gantt charts, resource planning, or time tracking — Linear’s design is deliberately eng-centric and doesn’t try to solve those problems
  • Teams that want self-hosted or open-source — Linear is SaaS-only, closed-source, and doesn’t offer a self-hosted option

The $16/user/month threshold is worth naming explicitly. For a team of 15, that’s $2,880/year on yearly billing just for the plan that includes AI. That’s a real line item. Whether Agent Automations and Triage Intelligence pay for themselves in PM overhead saved is something only your team can answer with your own numbers. A rough heuristic: if your engineers spend more than an hour a week on triage and routing that an automation could handle, it probably pays out.

Linear also scores well on the basics that existed before the AI push: the interface is fast, keyboard-driven, and opinionated in ways that reduce friction for engineers who dislike clicking through hierarchies. Even on Basic at $10, you’re getting a substantially faster experience than Jira for teams that work the way Linear expects you to work — cycles, labels, no-noise issue creation.

Alternatives

If Linear isn’t the right fit, three options are worth looking at seriously:

Plane

Open-source, self-hostable, and actively developed. Plane runs on your own infrastructure for free or on their cloud for a reasonable per-seat fee. The feature set covers the core of what Linear does — issues, cycles, modules, views. The AI features are nascent compared to Linear’s 2026 push, but if budget or data residency is the constraint, Plane is the most credible alternative.

plane.so

Shortcut

Formerly Clubhouse. Shortcut’s design centers around stories and epics rather than pure issue tracking — it’s more comfortable for product teams that mix engineers and non-engineers. Pricing starts at $8.50/user/month. If your team felt Height’s collaborative cross-functional angle (Height leaned more toward mixed teams than Linear does), Shortcut is the closest match.

shortcut.com

Linear Free or Basic

Worth saying plainly: if you want Linear’s UX but can’t justify $16/user, Basic at $10 is a complete issue tracker without any of the AI features. For small teams doing lightweight sprint management, the Free tier is not crippled in a way that forces you to upgrade immediately.

Jira

If you’re already inside an Atlassian ecosystem — Confluence, Bitbucket, JSM — Jira is often the path of least resistance regardless of its overhead. The integration surface area justifies the complexity in those contexts. Outside of it, Linear or Plane are usually faster to operate.

For teams switching to Jira from Height (rather than from nothing): that’s a significant step backward in UX speed to gain a larger integration ecosystem. Worth doing only if the Atlassian surface area is genuinely useful to your workflow.

For former Height users

Height’s cross-functional angle was different from Linear’s. Height targeted mixed teams — designers, PMs, engineers together — with an AI assist layer on top. Linear’s core design is more eng-centric: it’s built around how software engineers think about tracking work, not how a broad cross-functional team thinks about managing projects.

If you were a primarily engineering team on Height: Linear is the obvious place to land. The speed improvement is real; the Slack/GitHub integrations are solid; and the cycle-based workflow maps well to how eng teams already operate. The transition from Height to Linear for engineering-heavy teams is usually not painful.

If you were a cross-functional team that valued Height’s collaborative design: Shortcut is the closest match. Linear works, but you may find its eng-first assumptions a friction point for non-engineer team members — particularly around views, reporting, and how the tool prioritizes engineer keyboard-driven use over PM visual planning. Shortcut’s story-and-epic model is more familiar to product teams coming from a non-engineering PM background.

One thing worth noting for any former Height user: you’ve already experienced what it means to have a PM tool shut down mid-project. That’s a reasonable reason to weight financial stability and funding history in your next tool decision. Linear has not announced funding rounds publicly in recent years, which generally signals either sustainable revenue or stealth; the fact that the product is actively shipping at high cadence in 2026 is the more relevant signal than balance sheet speculation.

Verdict

Linear is the survivor in this comparison, not just by elimination. The product is fast, the keyboard-driven UX is still meaningfully better than most alternatives, and the AI features shipped in 2025–2026 are real work being done at a meaningful cadence.

Pick Business ($16/user/month) if you have a dev-led team of 5–25 and the AI triage and automations would eliminate PM overhead you’re currently paying for in human time.

Pick Basic ($10/user/month) if you want a fast, clean issue tracker with unlimited issues and no AI. That’s not a consolation prize — it’s a solid tool.

Pick Plane if you want open-source or self-hosted, or if the budget doesn’t stretch to Linear’s tiers.

Pick Shortcut if you were a Height user with a cross-functional team that needs something less eng-centric than Linear.

There’s no affiliate angle in this article — neither Linear nor Height (now offline) has a revenue-share program. Try Linear’s free tier at linear.app and evaluate from there.

References