Linear earned its reputation the hard way: a genuinely fast, keyboard-driven issue tracker that software teams actually enjoy using, instead of tolerating. That reputation comes at a real cost — per-seat pricing that scales with headcount, and a closed platform you can't run on your own infrastructure. Digging through our catalogue turned up 14 tools that name Linear as a direct alternative, and they split into two genuinely different groups: tools built for human software teams who want Linear's speed without the seat cost, and a newer category built specifically to give AI coding agents — Claude Code, Cursor, and similar — their own Linear-style board to work from. Here are 7 real ones worth knowing about.
For human teams: Linear's speed, without the lock-in
Circle
Circle is a free, open-source project management UI modeled directly on Linear's interface, self-hostable and MIT-licensed.
For who: teams who like Linear's exact look and keyboard-first UX but want to self-host for free rather than pay per seat forever.
Price: free and open source (MIT license), self-hosting required — there's no official managed SaaS.
Forces: modeled closely on Linear's interface, so the learning curve is close to zero if your team already knows Linear; no seat cost, ever.
Limites: no official hosted option, so you own deployment, updates and backups yourself; as a community project it won't match Linear's broader roadmap of integrations.
Gryphin
Gryphin is a Kanban-based project management platform for small software teams that combines sprints, Gantt charts and AI-powered automation in a single interface.
For who: small software teams who want Linear-style sprints plus a Gantt/timeline view Linear doesn't really emphasize.
Price: Free (3 seats, 5 boards, 25 AI actions/mo, 500MB storage); Team $39/mo or $390/yr (10 seats, unlimited boards, 250 AI actions/mo, 25GB); Pro $79/mo or $790/yr (10 seats, 1,000 AI actions/mo, timeline/Gantt, analytics, 100GB); Enterprise custom (unlimited seats, 5,000 AI actions/mo).
Forces: sprints, Gantt charts and AI automation combined in one board, with a real free tier to test first.
Limites: even the Pro tier caps at 10 seats — growing past that means an enterprise conversation — and AI action limits could bite an actively automating team.
Kanbanq
Kanbanq is a minimal kanban tool with a sprint board and a backlog board, real-time collaboration, and AI-generated task summaries for small teams.
For who: teams who find Linear's feature surface bigger than they need and want something genuinely minimal.
Price: free (unlimited users and spaces, 250 tasks); Pro €4.50/user/month (unlimited tasks, unlimited AI).
Forces: real minimalism — just sprint and backlog boards — with cheap, AI-inclusive per-seat pricing on the paid tier.
Limites: the free tier's 250-task cap is easy to hit, and the intentionally thin feature set won't satisfy teams that actually use Linear's deeper cycles/roadmap workflow.
TaskView
TaskView is an open-source, self-hosted project and task management platform with Kanban boards, dependency graphs, GitHub/GitLab integrations and native MCP support.
For who: engineering orgs who want to own their issue tracker's data and auth outright instead of renting Linear indefinitely.
Price: Community Edition is free and open-source with unlimited users (Kanban, sprints, time tracking, SAML/OIDC SSO); or a one-time perpetual license — Starter $690-990 (20 users), Team $1,740-2,490 (50 users), Business $3,490-4,990 (unlimited users).
Forces: no recurring per-seat fee if you choose the one-time license, SSO included even in the free Community Edition, and native MCP support so AI agents can read/write tasks too.
Limites: self-hosting is entirely on you — server, updates, backups — with none of the "just works" convenience of Linear's managed cloud.
For AI coding agents: a Linear-style board built for the agent, not the human
The other half of this list isn't really a Linear replacement for humans at all — these tools give each AI coding agent its own task board, because an agent burning through a feature needs the same thing a human sprint board gives a team: a shared, persistent view of what's done, in progress, and blocked.
Agent Kanban
Agent Kanban is a Kanban board built for AI coding agents instead of humans — it gives each agent an identity, assigns it tasks, and tracks its work across repositories in real time.
For who: teams running multiple AI coding agents in parallel who want a Linear-style board to track what each agent is actually doing.
Price: free and self-hostable (FSL-1.1-ALv2 license); the license blocks reselling it as a competing hosted service.
Forces: purpose-built for agent-not-human workflows, free, and self-hosted from day one.
Limites: it solves a genuinely different problem than Linear — agent orchestration, not human sprint planning — so it's not a drop-in swap if what you actually need is a human team tracker.
TaskShell
TaskShell is a task manager built for the AI era — it lets Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor read and update your tasks directly through MCP, so your AI agents and you always work from the same to-do list.
For who: teams who want their AI agents and human developers looking at the exact same task list, instead of the agent working from a blind prompt.
Price: free to get started; full pricing beyond that isn't published on the homepage.
Forces: native MCP read/write access for agents, with humans and agents sharing one list rather than two disconnected systems.
Limites: pricing opacity past the free tier, and it's a far newer, smaller product than Linear with nowhere near the integration breadth.
KanVibe
KanVibe is an open-source Kanban board with embedded browser terminals, built for people running multiple AI coding agents (Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex) on parallel tasks and git worktrees at once.
For who: developers juggling several agent sessions across git worktrees who want to watch and drive each one from the same board as its task card.
Price: free and open source (AGPL-3.0), self-hosted.
Forces: terminals embedded directly in the board, so you can jump into an agent's live session without leaving the task view.
Limites: self-hosted only with no managed cloud option, and it's a genuinely niche fit — built specifically for multi-agent git-worktree workflows, not general team project management.
Side-by-side
| Tool | Built for | Pricing | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Circle | Human teams | Free, self-hosted only | Wanting Linear's exact UI for $0 |
| Gryphin | Human teams | Free → $39-79/mo | Sprints + Gantt in one board |
| Kanbanq | Human teams | Free → €4.50/user/mo | Genuine minimalism |
| TaskView | Human teams | Free OSS or one-time $690+ | Owning your data, no recurring fee |
| Agent Kanban | AI coding agents | Free, self-hosted | Tracking multiple agents' work |
| TaskShell | AI agents + humans | Free to start | One shared list for agents and people |
| KanVibe | AI coding agents | Free, open source | Multi-agent git-worktree workflows |
Which half of this list applies to you depends entirely on who's actually doing the work. If it's your human team and the goal is Linear's speed without Linear's seat pricing, start with Circle if you just want the same UI for free, or TaskView if you want a one-time cost instead of a subscription forever. If the "team" doing the work increasingly includes AI coding agents running in parallel, none of the classic PM tools — Linear included — were built with that in mind; Agent Kanban, TaskShell and KanVibe exist specifically to fill that gap, and it's worth trying one even if you've never considered replacing Linear before.