A Linear alternative for agencies

Linear is the tool many engineers ask for by name. It is fast, keyboard-first and opinionated, and its coding sessions can take an issue to a draft pull request that you merge from Linear. If you are a product company with one team and one roadmap, it is hard to beat.

Agencies are different. You have clients, budgets, contractors paid by the hour, PMs and QA people who aren't engineers, and a release that has to go out on a client's schedule. That is where we hear Linear stops fitting agencies: it isn't intuitive for non-engineers, and time tracking and budgets live in other tools.

Tengu is built for that agency shape. This page is an honest comparison.

Who this is for

• Software agencies of 10 to 60 people whose engineers like Linear but whose PMs, QA and finance people don't.
• Teams already using Claude Code on client work who want the loop around it: review, QA, merge, release.
• Founders who need hours, budgets and payroll next to the tickets, not in another tool.

Linear and Tengu side by side

List prices, October 2026, per user (Linear) or per seat (Tengu) per month, billed annually.

Where Linear is better

• Speed. Linear is known for it, and deserves to be. Tengu is keyboard-first too, with optimistic updates, but we won't claim to be faster.
• Polish and opinions. Linear's workflow is well thought out for product teams. If you want a tool that tells you how to work, it does.
• Engineering adoption. Engineers already like it. That is worth a lot.

We also won't claim a better coding agent. Linear's coding sessions and Tengu's Run in Claude Code both put an agent on a ticket. The difference is what happens around the agent's work.

Where Tengu is different

The loop around the pull request

A pull request is half the job at an agency. In Tengu, Run in Claude Code opens a draft PR with its plan, talks with your team on the PR, and Tengu copies that conversation onto the quest. The quest moves to review when the PR is ready. A Vercel preview link lands on it. QA with Claude tests the preview in a browser and posts findings with screenshots. Your QA person passes it or sends it back with a reason. Release people merge it, then Ship opens a release PR from your base branch to production with a customer changelog, a QA checklist, a rollback plan and a risk level. When production deploys, the quest goes live.

The agent writes the first draft. Your people review, merge and ship it.

A real review role

The To review queue shows every quest waiting on the lists you review, oldest first, never your own. Two buttons: Pass, or Send back with a one-line reason that goes to the assignee. QA can start a Claude QA run from the same place.

Built for non-engineers too

PMs get four verbs, one key each: create, reassign, change the due date, change the priority. The morning scroll shows each person what came back from review and what is due.

Time and money, without surveillance

On Studio, a timer on each quest, weekly timesheets with approvals, pay periods and a payroll export. Budgets per client or project that pause timers at 100%. An admin-only Capacity Hub with margin per client. No screenshots, activity levels or idle detection, ever. Members see only their own hours and pay.

Billing per seat, with no minimum

You pay per seat for the people on the team, upfront, with no minimum. Remove a contractor between projects and their seat stays open for the next person until the renewal. Client guests and agents never take a seat.

How to move from Linear

Tengu imports a Linear team, or one project in it, into a new list. It is a one-time copy that only reads: nothing changes in Linear.

1. Make a personal API key in Linear (Settings › Security & access) and paste it into Tengu's importer. Tengu shows the teams and projects the key can read.
2. Pick a team, and a project if you only want that one's issues. Choose whether archived issues come too.
3. Name the new list and pick its statuses: Tengu's flow from backlog to live, or the statuses of a list you already have.
4. Let it run. Close the tab and it keeps going. If Linear's rate limit runs out, it waits and carries on.

What comes over:

• Statuses, by their type in Linear. In Tengu's flow, triage and backlog go to backlog, unstarted to to do, and started to in progress, or to in review, blocked or rework when the name says so. Completed goes to live (passed when the name says passed or approved), and canceled to cancelled.
• People, by email. Assignees and creators are matched to the members whose sign-in email is the same. Someone who isn't a member here keeps their name on the quest and its comments.
• Sub-issues become subtasks of their parent, when the parent comes too.
• Comments, attachments and files. Every comment comes with its author and date, and Linear's attachments come as links. Files dropped into issues and comments are copied into Tengu, up to 25 MB each; bigger ones stay links to Linear.
• Linear's keys. Each quest keeps its Linear key, like ENG-142, as its ticket key, with a link back to the issue. Priority, due date and estimate come too, and labels are listed in the description.

Importing is silent: no notifications and no XP.

Check the counts

When it finishes, Tengu shows the issues, comments and attachments Linear had beside what Tengu holds, and each Linear status beside the Tengu status it went to. It lists anyone it couldn't match to a member, and anything that didn't come, with the reason. Tengu deletes the API key when the import finishes, fails or is cancelled.

If an import stops, or you cancel it, carry on from the list's page with a key: it picks up where it stopped, and nothing comes twice. Import again after it finished and Tengu reads Linear from the start: new issues come along, and the ones already here are updated in place.

Coming from Jira instead? The Jira importer works the same way, with your Jira Cloud address, your Atlassian email and an API token. Issues keep their Jira keys, descriptions and comments are converted from Jira's format to Markdown, and the same count check runs.

The Free plan covers up to 5 people, invites and admins included, on native lists, with the importers, Run in Claude Code, QA with Claude and Ship, so a small team can try this without a contract.

What Tengu doesn't have yet

Custom fields of its own, docs, whiteboards, forms and a mobile app.