Amp vs Linear
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Amp and Linear.
🏆
Verdict: Linear wins
Linear scores 4.5/5, edging out Amp at 3.8/5. Product and engineering teams roughly 5-500 people that ship on cycles and want a fast, keyboard-driven tracker with strong GitHub/GitLab integration and light-touch AI triage.
Amp AI coding agent by Anthropic alumni | Linear Fast issue tracking built for software teams | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 3.8 (1 review) | 4.5 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best For | Senior, terminal-comfortable developers who want unattended agents on remote machines and are happy to fund them with linked subscriptions and their own keys. | Product and engineering teams roughly 5-500 people that ship on cycles and want a fast, keyboard-driven tracker with strong GitHub/GitLab integration and light-touch AI triage. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tierbyok | free tierteam featuresapi access |
| Visit Amp → | Visit Linear → |
Amp
Pros
- + Orb workflow is real: I dispatched an environment-setup and test-green task to a remote orb, closed the laptop, and resumed from another machine with the work done
- + No Amp token fees or limits — BYOK and linked ChatGPT/Claude/X subscriptions run at subscription cost, and self-hosted orbs and own runners are free on every tier
- + Teams workspaces add SSO (SAML/OIDC), shared billing, pooled credits and shared BYOK routing at no extra seat charge
- + Transparent per-action economics: credits at provider API prices with no markup for individuals, published tier allowances (45,000 minutes on Megawatt), and clearly stated orb sizes
- + Genuinely unattended parallelism — agents in separate orbs with their own repo clones and tooling, so no worktree juggling or port conflicts in my runs
Cons
- - Orb minutes burn while agents idle: a slow install consumed my allowance at the same per-minute rate as active work, and I found no per-workload spend cap
- - Hobby has no included orb time or agent usage — 'free' means your tokens and your own machines
- - Custom endpoint URLs and gateway routing (OpenRouter, Bedrock, Azure Foundry) are early access for paid tiers behind an experimental flag, with no public rollout date
- - Homegrown vocabulary (orbs, portals, the Dial) and a terminal-first surface make onboarding deliberately steep for GUI-oriented developers
- - Amp's published 60–65% average usage discount is a vendor claim without a stated basis; included usage does not roll over month to month
Linear
Pros
- + Speed is real and measurable: ~5.4s issue creation vs 47s for Jira Cloud in GAX's May 2026 benchmark, and the keyboard-first flow matched that direction in my own use
- + Triage Intelligence does useful work — 73/81/84% assignee/project/label accuracy in one third-party test, and duplicate bug detection cut clutter in my runs
- + GitHub/GitLab integration auto-closes issues on PR merge (94% auto-link success in the same benchmark) so board state stays honest without manual updates
- + Free plan allows unlimited members, so the whole company can watch the board at $0, and paid entry (Basic $10/user/month yearly) removes the 250-issue cap
- + Structured discounts are real: 75% off for nonprofits and university staff, a free year for students, up to 6 months of Business free for partner-affiliated startups
Cons
- - Opinionated constraints bite at scale: one project and one assignee per issue, no multi-step approval gates, limited custom field types
- - No issue-level Gantt and no native release/fix-version management — teams approximate releases with labels, a common complaint in reviews
- - Reporting is thin below Business (Insights is $16/user tier) — no custom dashboards or multi-project rollups without BI export via API
- - Guests are billed as full members and there is no read-only viewer role, which inflates cost when stakeholders need visibility
- - Cloud-only with no self-hosting, no Linux desktop app, a thinner mobile app, and 2026 forum reports of slow first loads and sync bugs on rapid edits
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Amp or Linear?▼
Linear scores higher at 4.5/5 vs 3.8/5 for Amp, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Amp and Linear?▼
Amp: Amp is a coding agent and development environment from Sourcegraph that runs unattended tasks in the cloud or locally through a CLI. Linear: Linear is issue tracking and project planning for software teams, built around keyboard-driven speed and a strict, opinionated workflow.
Is Amp or Linear more affordable?▼
Amp starts at €0/mo, Linear starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
Stay in the loop
Get weekly updates on the best new AI tools, deals, and comparisons.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.