Linear won the small-team mindshare war by being the tracker that doesn’t feel like Jira: fast, keyboard-first, opinionated. But speed isn’t the ceiling — information is. Linear still only knows what your team types into it. If your reason for looking elsewhere is “the board keeps drifting from the repo,” these are the nine options worth a serious look in 2026, and the trade-offs each one makes.
1. Kahoona — best if the drift is the problem
Your board, three sprints into the drift.
Kahoona takes a different bet: the board should read its status from the work, not from status reports. Connect your repo and it builds a populated project from your GitHub activity in ~30 seconds — commits, PRs, and CI stream in beside the tasks, next to a whiteboard for the thinking that happens before the tickets. $5/seat, free to start.
- For: small dev teams who want one workspace instead of tracker + whiteboard + status meetings
- Against: younger product; no sprawling plugin ecosystem, no Gantt-chart enterprise machinery
- Watch out for: if your workflow lives on Jira-style custom fields and workflows, this is intentionally not that
2. Height
Height pushes automation hard — it auto-triages, suggests statuses, and tries to reduce bookkeeping with AI. Closer to Linear’s spirit than Jira’s, and the free tier is generous.
- For: teams who like Linear but want more automation built in
- Against: still repo-blind; automation guesses, and guesses need supervision
- Pricing: free tier; paid from ~$6.50/user/mo
3. Plane
The leading open-source Linear-alike. Self-hostable, clean UI, cycles and modules that map to familiar concepts. If data control or procurement is your blocker, Plane is the obvious answer.
- For: teams who want Linear’s UX with open-source control
- Against: you own the hosting and the upgrades; integrations are thinner
- Pricing: free self-hosted; cloud from ~$6/user/mo
4. GitHub Projects
If the complaint is “the tracker is too far from the code,” the zero-migration answer is to move the tracker into GitHub. Issues and PRs are the same objects, so drift is structurally smaller.
- For: teams already living in GitHub who want less tooling, not more
- Against: the board UX is functional, not delightful; reporting is weak; no whiteboard
- Pricing: included with GitHub
5. Shortcut
The most direct Linear competitor from the pre-Linear era: stories, iterations, solid GitHub integration that actually links PRs to tickets.
- For: teams wanting Linear-like speed with more structure (epics, objectives)
- Against: the GitHub link records references; it doesn’t read status from them. Bookkeeping remains human-powered
- Pricing: free up to 10 users; paid from ~$8.50/user/mo
6. Trello
Still the simplest board alive. For a three-person team tracking a handful of streams, Trello plus discipline beats any tracker you’ll resent.
- For: very small teams with simple flow
- Against: you will outgrow it; cards know nothing about code; reporting is an add-on
- Pricing: free tier; paid from ~$5/user/mo
7. Notion
Not a tracker — a wiki that can cosplay as one. Works when the team genuinely needs docs and tasks in one place and accepts that both will be mediocre.
- For: doc-heavy teams whose tracking needs are light
- Against: databases-as-boards get slow and fragile; nothing streams in from your repo
- Pricing: free tier; paid from ~$10/user/mo
8. Asana
The generalist’s choice — great for mixed teams where engineering shares a tool with marketing and ops.
- For: cross-functional companies standardizing on one system
- Against: built for everyone, tuned for no one; dev teams usually find it heavy
- Pricing: free tier; paid from ~$10.99/user/mo
9. Basecamp
The anti-tracker: message boards, to-dos, and a strong opinion that most process is waste. If your real problem is meeting-and-tool overload rather than tracking fidelity, it’s a genuinely different answer.
- For: teams who want fewer tools and more writing
- Against: no sprints, no velocity, no dev integrations to speak of
- Pricing: flat ~$15/user/mo (free tier limited)
How to choose
Three honest questions cut the list fast:
- Is your pain the tool, or the truth? If the board’s content is fine but the UX is slow, pick Height, Plane, or Shortcut. If the board lies — cards drift from what merged — only a repo-connected option (Kahoona, GitHub Projects) fixes the cause instead of the symptoms.
- Do you need control? Procurement, data residency, or ideology → Plane self-hosted.
- Who else uses it? If marketing and ops share the tool, you’re in Asana/Notion territory, and engineering should keep its own board anyway.
We’d pick us, obviously — but the honest version of that pitch is Kahoona vs Jira and why tickets drift from truth. Read those, then try the 30-second setup and judge the drift claim yourself.
👉 Point Kahoona at your repo — free to start
Related: 9 best Jira alternatives for small dev teams · The $5-seat dev workspace