At Splotch, we’re a remote product team building a design feedback platform. Our engineering team is lean, just four developers, and we run weekly sprints. We need to move fast, stay aligned, and minimize overhead.
Like a lot of startups, we started out using Jira. And like a lot of startups, we eventually hit a wall.
After months of struggling with friction, bloat, and slowdowns, we made the switch to Linear and we haven’t looked back.
Here’s why.
Jira: Built for Enterprises, Not Startups
Jira is incredibly powerful. It was built to handle the complexity of massive software organizations. Think hundreds of engineers across multiple time zones, with deeply interdependent workflows.
But we’re not that. And chances are, if you’re reading this, neither are you.
For us, Jira quickly became more of a burden than a benefit. It was glitchy. It was slow. It took forever to log bugs or sort tickets. Simple tasks felt heavy. We’d find ourselves managing spreadsheets on the side just to avoid using it, the irony wasn’t lost on us.
To be fair, Jira can do almost anything. But when your team is small, speed and clarity matter more than configurability. We didn’t need a Swiss Army knife. We needed a scalpel.
Why Linear Made Sense for Us
We switched to Linear because it’s built for teams like ours; small, fast-moving, and focused on shipping.
It doesn’t try to reinvent how software gets built. It just makes the core workflows smooth, fast, and enjoyable. That’s surprisingly rare.
Here’s what stood out:
1. Speed That Actually Changes Behavior
Linear is fast. Not just “loads quickly” fast, blazing fast.
Logging bugs, reordering tickets, switching views; it’s all near-instant. And when you’re deep in product work, that responsiveness changes how you work. You stop hesitating. You capture more detail. You stay in flow.
With Jira, we dreaded logging bugs. With Linear, we don’t think twice.
2. Clean UX That Doesn’t Get in the Way
Linear’s interface is modern, minimal, and refreshingly intuitive. There are no clunky modals, no strange error states, no digging through layers of settings. It’s software that feels good to use, and that matters when you’re in it all day.
Jira, by comparison, often felt like legacy software retrofitted for the cloud. Linear feels like it was built for the way modern teams actually work.
3. Just the Right Amount of Structure
Linear is what you’d call opinionated software. But it picks its battles wisely.
It enforces strict sprint schedules, for example, our sprints start every Wednesday and end Tuesday night, no exceptions. That kind of enforced cadence helps us avoid the common trap of “just extending the sprint a few days” when we fall behind. It keeps us honest.
But outside of that, Linear stays flexible. Whether you’re running Scrum, Kanban, or your own flavor of agile, it gets out of the way.
4. Notifications That Don’t Annoy You
Linear’s real-time notifications, especially on mobile, are sharp, relevant, and well-timed. It’s easy to stay looped in without being overwhelmed. You get the information you need, when you need it.
That’s essential for a remote team working across different locations and time zones.
5. No Frills, No Bloat, Just What You Need
Linear doesn’t try to pack in every feature under the sun. It focuses on the basics: issue tracking, sprint planning, prioritization, collaboration, and nails them.
That constraint is what makes it feel fast and focused. There’s no fluff to navigate around. No plugin you need to install to make the basics work. Just a sharp set of tools that feel like they were built by people who’ve actually built software before.
We’re Shipping Faster and Talking Less About Tools
Since switching to Linear, we’ve noticed something subtle but important: we talk about our process less. Not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s just working.
Sprint planning is faster. Bug triage is smoother. Our backlog is actually usable. There’s less overhead. Less frustration. More flow.
And when something’s not working, it’s not the tool’s fault, it’s ours. That’s a good place to be.
Jira isn’t a bad product, it’s just not the right product for small, fast-moving teams like ours. It’s built for complexity. Linear is built for clarity.
If you’re part of a modern product team, especially one that’s remote, lean, and sprint-driven, Linear is worth a serious look. It won’t solve your process problems for you. But it’ll give you a clean, fast, reliable foundation to build on.
That’s more than we can say for a lot of tools we’ve tried.
Looking for a Better Way to Build?
We’re not affiliated with Linear. We just use it every day at Splotch to build software we’re proud of and we think other small teams might benefit from it too.
If you’re still stuck in Jira and wondering whether it’s time to try something different, we’ve been there. Linear made the switch easy.