Linear's free plan counts down: 250 issues and it is over

Linear scores 57, low in our Usable band, and the shape is lopsided. Feature depth sits at 70 because cycles, triage and roadmaps come standard rather than as paid add-ons, along with GitHub, GitLab, Slack and Figma sync. That is proper sprint tooling given away, and only Jira and OpenProject beat it here.

Generosity at 50 is what drags the total down, and it is the pillar that decides this page. A 250-issue lifetime cap on an issue tracker is a design decision about when you start paying, not a limit you organise around. That is also why the score sits below Linear's rank of 5th in this category: rank credits a product most engineers enjoy using more than anything else on the list, while the score only measures how long you can use it for nothing.

The cap that matters is cumulative. 250 issues across the entire workspace (as of July 2026), not 250 per month and not 250 open at a time, which means a team of four shipping normally will meet it in a quarter or two. Every closed bug and every abandoned idea still occupies one of the 250.

We have not verified what Linear does at issue 251. Our data records the cap and not the behaviour, so treat a hard block and a prompt as equally likely rather than assuming either.

The other free limits are quieter:

• 2 teams, which is enough until you split engineering from design or support
• 10MB file uploads, so screenshots are fine and video is not
• No self-hosted option at any tier, so the data stays on Linear's infrastructure

The narrowness is worth naming too, because it is not a tier restriction. Linear is built for software work: issues, cycles, triage, roadmaps. Operations and marketing teams get less out of it than they would from ClickUp free, and no upgrade changes that.

Basic at $10 per user per month billed yearly is the first paid step, and its headline is subtraction: the issue cap disappears and you get 5 teams instead of 2. There is no new capability in that sentence, which is unusual for a first rung, and it tells you exactly what the free plan is for.

Business at $16 per user removes the team limit entirely and adds Zendesk and Intercom integrations, which is a support-org purchase rather than an engineering one.

Judged against the category, $10 per user for a tracker is at the top end. Plane charges $6 a seat for a broadly comparable structure with a self-hosting escape hatch, and Jira Standard is about $8 with an add-on marketplace behind it. Linear is not competing on price, it is competing on speed and on how little configuration it asks for, and plenty of teams decide that is worth the difference. What nobody upgrades for is a feature, because the feature set is already there. You upgrade for permission to keep using it.

No. Our answer is taster, one step below where a score of 57 would normally land, and the reason is the shape of the cap rather than its size. A free plan that meters the core object of the product, in this case issues, and counts them cumulatively rather than monthly, is a plan you are meant to outgrow. Our own scoring notes call it exactly that.

There is one group who can genuinely live here: a small team or a solo developer running a side project that will not generate 250 issues, ever. For them Linear free is one of the nicest tools on this list and costs nothing indefinitely. Everyone else is on a trial measured in tickets instead of days, and should price Basic at $10 per user per month into the decision from the start rather than discovering it in month four.

If a permanent free tracker is what you actually need, free Linear alternatives ranks them, and Plane's free plan is the closest match in feel with a 12-member cloud tier and no issue counter. The wider category sits at best free project management tools.