Linear is a relatively new issue-tracking and project management app. It promises to offer increased speed and efficiency by stripping away a lot of the feature bloat that has slowed down other tools over the years.
Asana, on the other hand, started in 2011 and the developers have been slowly adding and refining features ever since to make it one of the most popular project management solutions available.
So how do these two very different tools stack up against each other and which one excels where the other falls behind? Below, we’ll go over both Linear and Asana to help you decide which solution can work best for your team.
What is Linear?
Linear is a dedicated issue-tracking tool specifically designed for software development teams. It focuses on an ultra-simplified interface and opinionated framework that is fast to implement and has a very short learning curve.
Being an opinionated framework, Linear forgoes many of the extensive customization options that have been popular with project management tools over the last several years. Instead of letting you do anything you want, Linear offers a tighter workflow that adheres to a strict methodology.
The benefit of this approach is simplicity and that’s where Linear really shines. The interface is sleek and never feels cluttered or like it’s out of control, even with larger projects.
Performing functions is very intuitive, especially if you have experience with other issue-tracking project management tools. Because of the reduced options, you can simply hover over many commands and get the exact keyboard shortcut you need.
This allows someone to become very fast and adept with Linear after only an hour or so.
Features
Linear has a shorter list of features than some other project management tools. But that’s the whole point. The features that are there are optimized and streamlined for a fast workflow.
Two Main Views
Linear offers two main views for projects and various tasks. There is the standard or default view, which works like a traditional folder-type listview found in many project management tools. You have your menus on the left-hand side, and then the expanded entries, tasks, and other information are displayed in the main workspace.
You can use a host of different filters to enhance this view to show only what you need at a given time. Applying filters only affects your own workspace view and not the view of others. You can also save certain groups of filters to apply them all at once whenever you need them.
Next up, there is the card view which is a Kanban-style view. This turns items in your workspace into cards that are placed into the columns related to your other chosen project parameters.
You can instantly switch between these views by clicking a dedicated icon at the top of the interface.
Importing Data From Other Apps
Linear makes it very easy to switch from other platforms such as GitHub or Trello. The import options are built-in and with just a few clicks, you can automatically import your current issue-tracking board into Linear. Everything is formatted into the Linear workspace and you can transition from there.
For the most part, this works very well. There are two methods for importing. The first is a command-line style method which uses a CSV file. The next is an import wizard or “concierge” type interface that walks you through the process.
The concierge interface does give you more options and more control over the entire process. So if you need help with how to import your files, we suggest using this method first.
Roadmaps
Roadmaps allow you to roll up smaller initiatives into a larger overall vision. Like most other operations within Linear, this is very simple and can be done with a few keyboard shortcuts or clicks.
You will instantly get a traditional list view or a timeline view. The list view contains the critical tasks and teams for each item at a glance but you can drill down into any area to see the full details.
The quick timeline view is also great for setting up dependencies or spotting project bottlenecks that may pop up along the way.
Task Management
Linear allows extended task management features that some popular project management platforms don’t offer. For example, Linear allows you to assign more than one person to individual tasks or sub-tasks. You can add additional team members through mentions or simply adding them from a drop-down and they will be notified as the task changes status.
You can also quickly break up any task or issue into sub-tasks or group them into parent tasks at any time. This allows you to make changes on the fly as tasks change or evolve and need more attention.
API Access
Teams using Linear can build their own custom integrations through Linear’s API. Linear does have dozens of integrations already, but that is less than something like Jira. So there is flexibility if you need a custom integration not already offered.
Integrations
Speaking of integrations, Linear does have ready-made solutions for most of the popular development and productivity apps used by a majority of teams. The total list may be smaller than some other project management tools, but there are still nearly 100.
The most common Linear integrations include:
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Sentry
- io
- Zendesk
- Slack
- Loom
- Discord
- Google Sheets
- YouTube
Communication & Collaboration
Due to its simplicity, Linear doesn’t have the extended collaboration tools found in project management tools designed to work with every possible type of team. Instead, it focuses on notifications that are smart and don’t overwhelm your inbox every morning just because someone replied to a comment with an emoji (We’re looking at you, Asana).
Communication is limited to what is necessary to work with tasks and keep everyone updated. There are also integrations with Slack or Discord that can be set to create notifications from within Linear if needed.
It’s a stripped-down approach that works well but it’s something to be aware of if your team requires highly collaborative tools along with your issue tracking.
Issue Templates
Linear allows you to set up different templates for issues. This makes it easier to ensure all the needed information is entered and reduces errors or omissions which can slow down progress.
It also helps make onboarding new team members to your workflow easier.
Simple Pricing
It may be strange to include pricing as a feature, but it’s justified in this case.
To go along with the simple interface, Linear offers one of the easier-to-understand pricing plans out there. If you’ve shopped around for project management or other SaaS products, you already know that pricing plans can be a little confusing. Features are often intentionally fenced behind higher tiers that include other options you may not need.
Linear has a relatively straightforward pricing with minimal fencing to force you into higher tiers. It’s a refreshing approach and one that makes deciding or upgrading much easier
Pricing
Linear has one of the more consumer-friendly pricing structures you’ll find in the world of SaaS products. There are only three tiers, and each one is straightforward and easy to compare with the others.
Free Plan: $0/Month
- Unlimited members
- 250 Issues (Unlimited archiving)
- Importing and exporting with other platforms
- All integrations, webhooks, and API
Standard Plan: $8/Month – Per user
- Everything in the Free Plan
- Unlimited issues and attachments
- Guest accounts and private teams
- Admin roles
Plus Plan: $14/Month – Per user
- Everything in the Standard Plan
- SSO
- Linear Insights and SLAs
- Linear Asks
- Priority support
*Enterprise customers can contact Linear directly for customized features and rate plans.
What Is Asana?
Asana is a do-everything project platform that can work just as well for a small home candle business as it does for a large software development team.
Of course, being a jack-of-all-trades means that for strictly issue tracking, it can be a bit bloated. This causes certain tasks to take more time and effort than if using a dedicated tool.
However, for those teams that also want extended project management features in the same place as their issue tracking, Asana can fit the bill well. Compared to Linear, the collaboration features are far more extensive and can allow for product development and other complex tasks.
Despite being able to cover so many types of projects and collaboration environments, the interface is kept clean and simple.
You also get access to virtually every project view you need to go along with whatever methodology your team uses. Individual team members can also choose their own views and easily switch back and forth as needed.
It’s this customization that really sets Asana apart from Linear. Project dashboards can be displayed in many ways to fit a variety of teams and initiatives. It really does give you the feeling that you have complete control over projects and teams and can view everything as needed in real-time.
Of course, all that customization and those extra features means more complexity. Asana will have a longer learning curve than Linear in most cases. Working with tasks, projects, and views all take more steps to set up.
There are also fewer keyboard shortcuts, so you are more tied to the mouse when managing Asana than you are with Linear.
These drawbacks aren’t really a negative though as it’s simply a result of the increased capacity built into Asana. To its credit, Asana does a good job making all of these features as simple as possible and you never feel like you’re stuck menu-diving to find what you need.
Asana really shines with creative teams that may use a variety of project management workflows and methodologies. It also works well if your team uses different methodologies for different projects within the same organization.
Asana will allow your teams and your entire organization to implement the project management framework that works best for their specific initiative. Whether it be issue tracking or developing a new product, Asana can handle it all within the same platform.
Although Asana has a generous free plan, it’s disappointing that many of the extended project views and other desirable features are locked behind higher-priced tiers. So if you want all the views, you need to be on one of the highest-paid tiers.
Features
Asana has strong project management features combined with extended collaborative and customization tools that make it highly adaptable to almost any development or creative situation.
Project Views
Being a fully-featured project management solution, you get every common project view with Asana (Starter Plan or higher). This includes common views like Timeline or Calendar, but you also have access to Gantt views, Kanban views, lists, and portfolio views.
Users can customize their own views to match their preferences. The admins and project owners can also set the global default view that works best for that specific situation.
Switching between each view is easy and the Asana interface provides simple menus to access the view controls.
Custom Dashboards
Not every user on the team needs the same information and Asana’s customizable dashboards allow each team member to set up their dashboard to provide them the most critical information at a glance.
This helps project managers and other admins always be on top of projects, team members, and tasks without having to scroll through list views or menus.
Collaboration Tools
This is where Asana really shines. Asana places a focus on collaboration which is perfect for creative teams or remote teams that need a centralized hub for their communication and documentation.
The collaborative tools are also very flexible and can work for anything from creating marketing campaigns to software development.
PDFs, JPEGs, other document formats, and videos are all supported and can be linked or embedded from right within cards shown in the project views. There are also extensive integrations available to include many third-party collaborative or communication tools your team already uses.
One downside of all this integrated collaboration is that the notifications can quickly get out of control. Almost every action has a notification attached to it. So the default settings will have you receiving countless emails once the project is underway.
These alerts can be customized, but each user will have to do it for themselves.
Agile Management
Asana supports traditional Agile management workflows like sprints. Linear puts its own spin on Agile workflows to simplify its overall design but Asana sticks with traditional sprint planning and other Agile project management methodologies.
For developers, this allows them to easily transition to Asana and they can also incorporate issue tracking or roadmaps with the tools provided.
Asana also allows you to create custom fields for tasks or cards. Linear has preset fields that you have to use. This makes Asana more flexible for teams that have unique workflows that may stray from traditional Agile methods.
With Asana, you can create different priority levels, assignees, or other fields that fit your team. Linear doesn’t allow for this.
Role Assignments
Asana allows for team members to be assigned to tasks and sub-tasks. One downside here is that you can only assign one team member per task or sub-task. To assign more than one person, you have to create a duplicate task, which can be cumbersome, especially if you need to do this regularly.
Linear allows you to add different users to any task, either assigned to the task or just as a viewer who gets updated.
Other than that drawback, Asana offers complete roll customization so you can have your team’s duties clearly defined across the entire project.
Integrations
Asana also shines with over 200 integrations including the most popular apps for software development such as GitHub. You can also build your own integrations using the Asana API.
Templates
With Asana, you get over 140 templates for common business projects and campaigns. These can help you quickly get started without having to build out your entire workspace from scratch.
Each template can be easily modified as if you created it, so you aren’t locked into any preset workflows or views.
Simply browsing the templates and loading them is also a great way to get acquainted with the features and capabilities of Asana. You may also get some ideas for how to structure your own workspaces and projects more efficiently.
Automation
Asana offers logical automations that can be set up around any project. These automations use triggers, conditions, and actions to set up complex automations for repetitive tasks or events.
Linear does provide a more basic set of triggers but these are mostly for notifications. They are also generally geared toward your own personal project views and settings.
Asana definitely pulls ahead when it comes to automation support. You can easily set up simple automations to auto-populate fields or checkboxes. You can also create more advanced automations that move and reassign tasks as conditions change.
Budgeting
Asana has built-in budget tracking for your projects. The overall implementation is sufficient although it’s more of an overview that keeps you up to date as the project moves along. However, it still works well for most projects and you can also use third-party integrations if you need more granular budgeting and cost estimations.
Dependencies
Dependencies are a key part of project management and Asana helps you automatically update tasks as conditions change. Dates and other parameters can be set up to change automatically as tasks are completed.
You can either use a drop-down style editor to add dependencies to your tasks or you can use a visual editor to draw in dependencies. This method uses a simple connector that you click and drag between items.
Overall, Asana’s functions for setting up dependencies are easy to work with and offer a lot of flexibility.
Pricing
Asana has a generous free plan, but to access all the features, the higher-priced plans are more expensive than many other close competitors.
Personal Plan: $0/Month
- Up to 10 users
- Unlimited tasks
- Unlimited projects
- Unlimited messages
- Unlimited activity log
- Unlimited file storage
- Unlimited assignee and due dates
- List view projects
- Board view projects
- Calendar view
- Time tracking via integrations
- Basic search filters
Starter Plan: $10.99/Month – Per user
- Everything in the Personal Plan
- Up to 500 users
- Timeline view
- Gantt view
- Asana Intelligence
- Workflow Builder
- Project dashboards
- Advanced search
- Global custom fields
- Forms
- 250 Automations/month
- Start dates and times
- Custom project templates
- Admin Console
- Private teams & projects
- Unlimited free guests
Advanced Plan: $24.99/Month – Per user
- Everything in the Starter Plan
- Up to 500 users
- Workloads
- 25,000 Automations per month
- Forms branching & customization
- Approvals
- Proofing
- Lock custom fields
- Advanced Reporting
- Builtin time tracking
- Scaled security
Linear Vs. Asana: Comparison
Linear and Asana both approach what they do from completely different angles. Linear focuses on a highly opinionated framework that forces you into specific issue-tracking and project-management workflows. However, strict adherence to a preset design allows for extreme simplicity.
It also allows for fast deployment and onboarding regardless of previous experience with similar tools.
Asana on the other hand looks to provide a complete project management solution that includes extreme flexibility and customization. You can set up Asana to work however you want or however your team likes to work.
Of course, this means you have to spend more time setting things up, so Asana is slower in that regard. While Asana is easy to use considering what it offers, it’s still more complex than Linear in almost every way.
Asana is best for creative teams or software development teams that need to manage a host of different projects in addition to dealing with issue tracking. Asana will cover all of these bases and allow it all to happen on one centralized platform.
Linear really shines as a strict issue-tracking tool that is designed from the ground up to be as simple, fast, and intuitive as possible. You’re rarely diving through menus or excessively mouse-clicking when using Linear. In fact, most tasks can be done via keyboard shortcuts which make it feel almost effortless.
Even with its minimal design, you still get functions such as roadmaps and other essential project management elements.
Linear Vs. Asana Review & Wrap Up
Overall, these are two different tools designed for two different applications. Linear gives you one of the cleanest issue-tracking tools currently available. Its closest competitor is probably Jira, but for those who find Jira has become too slow and bloated, Linear will fit your team perfectly.
Asana can handle your issue tracking, albeit slightly less efficiently, but also adds a host of collaboration, communication, and project management tools that can do so much more.
Asana definitely has more competitors than Linear which all work similarly. Asana’s relatively simple interface and strong integrations do help it stand out in a crowded field though.
You really can’t go wrong with either of these well-refined solutions. The key is to decide whether you want to give up some control and customization for an opinionated workflow that puts speed and efficiency above all else.
