Notion is genuinely good at being a wiki. The trouble starts when a small dev team tries to make it the engineering tracker too. Tasks drift out of sync with the code, the GitHub integration shows links instead of state, and someone ends up maintaining a second source of truth by hand. We’ve watched three separate teams do this. It always ends with a spreadsheet.
What if I told you… the wiki is a spreadsheet.
Disclosure: we build Kahoona, and it’s on this list. We’ll flag its weaknesses like everyone else’s. This list is for teams of roughly 2–15 developers who live in GitHub and want the board to reflect reality.
The short list
- Kahoona — dev workspace with whiteboard, board, and live GitHub activity
- Linear — fast, opinionated issue tracker
- GitHub Projects — free, lives where the code does
- Height — AI-assisted task tracking
- Plane — open-source Jira/Linear hybrid
- Shortcut — story-based tracking built for software teams
- Jira — the enterprise default, for better and worse
- Basecamp — calm, opinionated, not dev-specific
- Trello — the simple kanban everyone already knows
1. Kahoona
Kahoona is a whiteboard, project board, and your GitHub activity in one workspace. Point it at a repo and it builds a real, populated project in about 30 seconds; commits, PRs, and CI status stream in beside the tasks afterward. Free to start, $5 per seat after.
Where it wins: the board stays honest because it’s wired to the repo, not to what people remembered to type. Where it loses: young product, no enterprise compliance, small integration ecosystem. If you need SAML and audit logs, keep scrolling.
2. Linear
Linear is the polished one. Blazing fast, keyboard-first, beautiful defaults. Trade-off: it’s a tracker, not a workspace — no whiteboard, docs are minimal, and per-seat pricing (~$8/user) climbs quickly past the free tier.
3. GitHub Projects
Free, and it lives where your code does. Issues and PRs are first-class objects. Trade-off: it’s deliberately minimal. No real views beyond tables and boards, weak reporting, and anything non-GitHub (design tasks, client work) fits awkwardly.
4. Height
Height leans into AI: auto-triage, auto-categorization, smart summaries. Trade-off: the AI features are the pitch and the price (~$7/user). If you don’t want an algorithm touching your backlog, the value case weakens.
5. Plane
Open source and self-hostable — a genuine Jira/Linear hybrid you can run on your own box. Trade-off: you own the ops. The cloud version is cheap, but the ecosystem and polish trail Linear by a visible margin.
6. Shortcut
Built by and for software teams: stories, epics, iterations, decent GitHub integration. Trade-off: starts at ~$8.50/user with no meaningful free tier for real teams, and the docs side is thin — you’ll still need a wiki somewhere.
7. Jira
Included for completeness. Unmatched configurability and marketplace. For a small team it’s usually too much: admin overhead, slow UI, features gated behind tiers. We wrote a whole honest comparison: Kahoona vs Jira.
8. Basecamp
Flat pricing (~$299/mo unlimited, or $15/user), calm philosophy, great for mixed teams. Trade-off: not a dev tool. No real issue model, no GitHub awareness. Engineers will route around it within a month.
9. Trello
Still the fastest kanban to explain to a non-technical stakeholder. Trade-off: cards are just cards. No repo state, weak automation on the free tier, and Atlassian’s roadmap for it has been quiet.
How to choose
Ask one question: should the board describe the work, or be the work? If your team’s truth lives in GitHub, pick something wired to the repo (Kahoona, GitHub Projects, Linear with its integration). If engineering is one department among many, Notion with a real tracker beside it — or Basecamp — will serve you better than forcing one tool to be both.
👉 Kahoona builds your first project from your repo in ~30 seconds — free to start: kahoona.app
Related: 9 Best Jira Alternatives for Small Dev Teams · 9 Best Linear Alternatives for Small Dev Teams