Hold up, did I miss something? Fall into a time hole? Why are we talking about Jira like it’s Visicalc? Not currently working for an IT company, so maybe I missed something cataclysmic in the past two years…
Asana, Notion and Linear have major penetration in small companies.
Jira is usually pushed by more corporate types who want to “control” what gets done, not understand it.
It came with its share of paper cuts too, like going from 4.x to 6.x or literally anything challenging to the rickety boxes of OFBiz and wholly-different products skinned for looks-maxxing.
Those engineers dipped out a while back and took their $280 shares with them.
By far and away, linear.
The task tracking features you actually use, it’s fast, you don’t waste a billion years playing “who knows how to do this and has the permissions hell” that you would with Jira. The integrations work properly. The layout and UX makes sense, and all the nontechnical people I’ve used it with liked it and had no issues with it.
Linear is quite seriously one of the best products (in any category) I’ve ever used.
They have a first class MCP server, and you can basically run a project from your agent. Implementing something, and you find out there's more to do later on in a separate issue? Agent creates the issue for you and off you go. It works very nicely, and also has a great UI but I mostly using it from my agent.
Well one of the problems anyway. It's also unimaginably slow, and has weird limitations like issues can't be parents of other issues.
Given a highly configurable system, users will find ways to (unintentionally) tie it into knots, so adding some guardrails can help reduce complexity demons down the line (both in the technical implementation and the user experience).
I guess I prefer to give people making things the benefit of the doubt.