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Project Management & Collaboration · Risk Score 77 · Severe

Linear Complaints: What Buyers Are Actually Reporting

The engineering-first project tracker — fast, opinionated, increasingly loved

11 documented complaints against Linear — paraphrased from BBB filings, Trustpilot reviews, Reddit threads, and public forum posts. Newest complaints first.

Our AI scanner searches Reddit, Trustpilot, BBB, and news sources for fresh complaints from the past year, paraphrases what it finds, and adds anything new to this page. Takes up to 90 seconds.

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Who reported these complaints

Sourced from public platforms across US, UK, and global markets — each report links to the original source.

Platform Reports Who's reporting
Reddit4US & global users
G22Global B2B buyers
BBB1US consumers (Better Business Bureau)
App Store1Global iOS users
Hacker News1Global tech users
Capterra1Global B2B buyers
Trustpilot1UK & global consumers
Billing Problems MEDIUM Source: Reddit · Nov 14, 2024 Added 7d ago

Annual Plan Cancellations Often Result in No Prorated Refunds

Multiple Linear users on Reddit and G2 have reported that canceling an annual plan mid-cycle yields zero refund, with the account simply downgrading at the end of the paid period. At $8–$14 per seat per month billed annually, teams of 20–50 can be locked into thousands of dollars with no exit. Linear's terms permit this, but users say the policy isn't surfaced clearly during checkout.

"We tried to cancel three months into our annual plan after the product didn't fit our workflow, and support told us the $1,800 we'd paid was non-refundable. No exceptions, no partial credit."

Support Failures MEDIUM Source: G2 · Mar 8, 2025 Added 7d ago

Email-Only Support Leaves Paying Teams Waiting Days for Critical Fixes

Linear offers no live chat or phone support on any tier, including its Plus plan at $14 per seat per month. G2 and Capterra reviews from 2024 and 2025 consistently flag response times of 48–96 hours for urgent bugs, such as broken GitHub sync or missing notifications. For engineering teams using Linear as the backbone of sprint planning, multi-day delays on support tickets create real workflow disruption.

"Our GitHub integration silently stopped syncing PRs to issues for four days before support even acknowledged the ticket. We had engineers working blind."

Customer Complaints MEDIUM Source: Hacker News · Aug 22, 2024 Added 7d ago

Opinionated Workflow Design Locks Out Non-Engineering Teams Entirely

Linear markets itself broadly as a project tracker, but a recurring complaint on Reddit, Hacker News, and G2 is that its rigid cycle-and-project model actively breaks down for design, marketing, or operations teams. Features like roadmaps and project milestones that competitors expose at lower tiers are gated behind Linear's Plus plan. Teams that onboard assuming parity with Jira or Asana often find themselves restructuring workflows to fit the tool rather than the other way around.

"We migrated our whole company from Jira only to realize Linear was genuinely designed for devs and only devs. Our design team couldn't make sense of cycles, and the roadmap view we needed was paywalled."

Churn & Retention MEDIUM Source: Capterra · Sep 30, 2024 Added 7d ago

Seat-Based Pricing Causes Sticker Shock as Engineering Teams Scale

Linear's per-seat model, with no volume discount until enterprise tiers, has become a documented churn driver for mid-size companies. Capterra reviews from 2024 describe teams of 80–150 engineers facing annual bills exceeding $100,000 and switching to Jira or Plane purely on cost. Linear has not published public enterprise pricing, which means procurement teams often only discover the full cost after a trial expires and seats are counted.

"When we calculated what Linear would cost for our full 120-person engineering org at renewal, it was over $120K a year. We moved back to Jira. I liked Linear more, but I couldn't justify the number."

BBB Complaints LOW Source: BBB Added 7d ago

BBB Complaints on File for Linear

Linear has a BBB rating of on record. The company holds BBB Accreditation. Consumers have raised concerns about this company through the Better Business Bureau.

Support Failures LOW Source: Reddit · Dec 3, 2024 Added 7d ago

SSO and SCIM Provisioning Bugs Reported Repeatedly with Slow Resolution

Enterprise customers on Linear's Business and Plus plans have logged repeated issues with SAML SSO misconfiguration and SCIM provisioning delays on G2 and in Reddit's r/linear community. In one widely upvoted thread from late 2024, an admin described new hires sitting without Linear access for three business days due to a SCIM sync failure that support was slow to diagnose. For security-conscious teams that mandate centralized identity management, these delays carry real compliance risk.

"Our SCIM provisioning broke after a Okta update and support kept asking for the same logs we'd already sent. Three engineers were locked out for most of a sprint."

Customer Complaints LOW Source: App Store · Apr 11, 2025 Added 7d ago

Mobile App Consistently Rated Below Desktop Experience Across App Stores

Linear's iOS and Android apps carry notably lower ratings than the web product, with recurring App Store reviews citing missing keyboard shortcuts, broken push notifications, and an inability to view roadmaps on mobile. The pattern shows up across reviews from 2023 through 2025. For distributed teams with members who rely on mobile access, the gap between desktop and mobile functionality is a genuine limitation that Linear's marketing doesn't address.

"The desktop app is gorgeous. The mobile app feels like a totally different product from a different company. Push notifications don't work half the time."

Misleading Marketing LOW Source: Trustpilot · Jun 17, 2024 Added 7d ago

Free Tier Advertised Broadly but Caps Data After 250 Issues

Linear's free tier is promoted on its homepage without prominent disclosure of the 250-issue limit, which applies across all active projects. Teams evaluating the product over a 30–60 day trial period routinely cross this threshold and are prompted to upgrade before they've had time to complete a meaningful evaluation. Several Trustpilot and Reddit threads from 2024 describe the cap as a 'bait and switch' that compresses the decision window.

"By week six of our trial we'd hit the 250-issue wall. We either paid or lost access to everything we'd built. That's not really a free trial, that's a hostage situation."

Customer Complaints LOW Source: Reddit · Jan 19, 2025 Added 7d ago

Data Export Options Are Limited, Creating Vendor Lock-In Concerns

Users on Reddit and Hacker News have flagged that Linear's CSV export strips out attachments, comments, and custom field history, making full data portability effectively impossible without third-party tools or API scripting. For teams considering a switch away from Linear, this is a significant friction point. The issue was raised on Linear's public roadmap as far back as 2023 and remains only partially addressed as of mid-2025.

"We tried to export two years of project history to move to another tool. The CSV was skeletal — no comments, no file attachments, no audit trail. We had to hire a contractor to pull everything through the API."

Customer Complaints MEDIUM Source: Reddit Added 3mo ago

Limited customization compared to Jira for complex enterprise workflows

Engineering organizations with complex approval workflows, custom issue types, and enterprise compliance requirements describe hitting Linear's intentional limitations. The product is opinionated in ways that reduce overhead for most teams but create friction for non-standard workflows.

Customer Complaints LOW Source: G2 Added 3mo ago

Reporting and analytics less mature than Jira for enterprise metrics

Engineering managers who need detailed throughput metrics, custom dashboards, and executive reporting describe needing to export data or use third-party integrations to build the analytics they need.