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Pealboard and Linear

Linear and Pealboard both sit next to GitHub, in different ways. Linear holds your issues and keeps them matched to GitHub’s. Pealboard holds none of them. The issue you open in Pealboard is the one in GitHub.

Which one fits your team?

Linear is a better fit if…

Your engineers want Linear as their main tracker and are happy to work there rather than in GitHub Issues.
You want cycles, an opinionated planning model and a keyboard-first interface built around them.
A GraphQL API and a wide range of webhooks matter to you.
Everyone who touches the work is happy to hold a seat in the same tool.

Pealboard is a better fit if…

Your engineers stay in GitHub Issues. There is no sync to trust and nothing to reconcile.
Product, support and business staff can read and triage the same work without a developer tool.
Customers without a GitHub account can send requests and follow them in a portal.
You pay for the few people who read and triage, not for everyone who takes part.

What Linear offers

Every line below comes from Linear’s own pages. Each footnote names the page and the date we read it.

Free is $0, with unlimited members, 250 issues, 2 teams and a 10 MB file upload limit.^[1]
Basic is shown as $10 per user per month and Business as $16 per user per month. Both appear only as the annual-billed rate; no separate monthly rate was found on the page.^[1]
Google single sign-on is on the Business tier. SAML and the audit log are Enterprise only.^[1]
Filtering is strong. There are nested AND and OR filter groups, filter state you can share as a URL, and a natural-language filter. No named saved-view object was found in the documentation.^[3]
Notifications are an in-app inbox, with desktop, mobile and Slack notifications sent in real time and email as a digest or immediately.^[4]
A GraphQL API — the same one Linear uses internally — plus webhooks over issues, comments, attachments, documents, reactions, projects, project updates, cycles, labels, users and issue SLAs.^[5]
The GitHub integration links pull requests and commits to Linear issues by issue ID, and for GitHub Issues it syncs comments, status, labels and assignee in both directions.^[6]
That integration is sync between two tools for engineers. Nothing in it lets a person without a GitHub account submit or follow a request.^[7]

Side by side

Pealboard	Linear
GitHub is the only database. There is no second copy of an issue to keep in step.	The issue lives in Linear and is synchronized with GitHub in both directions. Two systems hold the same object, and a sync keeps them equal.^[6]
You pay for the members who use Pealboard. Engineers never sign in and are never counted.	Every product in this research needs a paid seat for every participant, engineers included.^[8]
A view has a name and a URL. It holds the filter, sort, grouping and layout, and a colleague opens exactly what you saw.	Filter state can be shared as a URL. No named saved-view object was found in the documentation.^[3]
Someone with no GitHub account and no Pealboard account sends a request in a portal. It becomes a GitHub issue.	No path for anyone without a GitHub account was found in the integration. It is sync between two tools for engineers.^[7]
Business is $20 per member per month, or $16 billed annually. That is the same figure Linear publishes for its Business tier.	Business is "$16 per user/month", shown as the annual-billed rate.^[1]

What we could not check

We could not confirm these details on Linear’s own pages, so we make no claim about them either way.

Whether Linear has custom fields in the sense the rest of this category means. No page we fetched confirmed them, and that is an absence of evidence rather than a finding.
Linear’s keyboard shortcuts and its import and export. Both documentation pages returned 404, so neither was confirmed, although keyboard-driven navigation is widely known to be central to the product.
Bulk edit, and global search beyond property filters.
Whether the GitHub integration is available on the Free tier. The pricing page does not say, so the likely answer stands as an inference rather than a fact.
Whether a separate monthly rate exists. Only annual-billed figures were rendered.

Nothing to sync

A two-way sync is real engineering, and it is still two systems. Both hold the issue. Both accept a write. Something has to decide what happened when both were written at once.

Pealboard has nothing to sync. A write goes to GitHub, and you see what GitHub returns. If GitHub refuses it, you see the refusal and nothing changed anywhere. Pealboard keeps a copy for reading, kept current by webhooks and repaired every hour, and that copy is never the thing you edit.

You can check this yourself. Cancel Pealboard and every issue, comment, label, milestone and project field value is exactly where it was, because it never moved.

Try it on your own repositories

The Free plan connects three repositories and needs no card. Nothing is imported. Nothing in GitHub changes.

Start free

More comparisons

Sources

linear.app/pricing — Free at $0 with "Unlimited members", 250 issues, 2 teams and a 10 MB upload; Basic at "$10 per user/month" and Business at "$16 per user/month", both shown only as the annual-billed rate; Google SSO on Business; SAML and the audit log on Enterprise. Fetched 2026-09-09.
linear.app/features — "custom issue workflows" and an AI Agents feature; no dedicated no-code rule-builder page was found. Fetched 2026-09-09.
linear.app/docs/filters — nested AND/OR filter groups, filter state shareable in a URL, an AI natural-language filter; no named saved-view object found. Fetched 2026-09-09.
linear.app/docs/notifications — an in-app inbox; "Desktop, mobile and Slack notifications are sent in real-time"; email as a digest or immediately, with per-channel toggles. Fetched 2026-09-09.
linear.app/docs/api-and-webhooks — a GraphQL API — the same one Linear uses internally — and webhooks over issues, comments, attachments, documents, reactions, projects, project updates, cycles, labels, users and issue SLAs. Fetched 2026-09-09.
linear.app/integrations/github — "Link PRs and commits to Linear issues by using the issue ID in the branch name or PR title"; for GitHub Issues, "Comments, status, labels and assignee sync bi-directionally". Fetched 2026-09-09.
platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md §2.1, §2.5 — the report's finding that Linear's GitHub integration is engineer-facing sync with no path for people without GitHub accounts. Fetched 2026-09-09.
platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md §3.2 — the report's own synthesis across the ten general work-management tools it examined. Fetched 2026-09-09.

Our notes are in platform/research/category-and-table-stakes.md and platform/research/portals-and-feedback-tools.md. Linear is a trademark of its owner. Pealboard is not affiliated with it.