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Pealboard and Linear

Linear and Pealboard both sit next to GitHub, and they sit next to it differently. Linear holds your issues and keeps them equal to GitHub's. Pealboard holds no issues at all: the object you open in Pealboard is the object in GitHub.

Which of these is you

Choose Linear

Your engineers want Linear as their primary tracker and are happy to work there rather than in GitHub Issues.
You want cycles, an opinionated planning model and a keyboard-first interface designed around them.
A GraphQL API and a broad webhook surface matter to you.
Everyone who touches the work is willing to hold a seat in the same tool.

Choose Pealboard

Your engineers are in GitHub Issues and should stay there without a synchronization to trust.
The people who need the work legible are product, support and business staff, not engineers.
You need customers without a GitHub account to submit and follow requests.
You would rather pay for four people who read and triage than for everyone who participates.

What was confirmed about Linear

Each line was read on Linear's own pages on the date in its source. Nothing about Linear appears on this page without one.

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: nested AND and OR filter groups, filter state shareable in 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 engineer-facing sync. Nothing in it is a way for a person without a GitHub account to submit or follow a request.^[7]

The difference, line by line

Pealboard	Linear
GitHub is the only database. There is no second copy of an issue to keep in step, because there is no first copy anywhere else.	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]
Engineers never sign in and are never counted. Billing covers the members who use Pealboard.	Every product in this research requires every participant, engineers included, to hold a paid seat in that tool.^[8]
A view is a named object with a URL: a saved filter, sort, grouping and layout that a colleague can open.	Filter state is shareable as a URL. No named saved-view object was found in the documentation.^[3]
Portals: a person with no GitHub account and no Pealboard account submits a request that becomes a GitHub issue.	No path for anyone without a GitHub account was found in the integration; it is sync between two engineer-facing tools.^[7]
Business is $20 per member per month, $16 billed annually — the same figure Linear publishes for its Business tier.	Business is "$16 per user/month", shown as the annual-billed rate.^[1]

What was not verified

These are gaps in the research, not findings about Linear. They are here because a comparison that prints only what was confirmed reads as though the rest was checked and found wanting.

Whether Linear has custom fields in the sense the rest of this category means. No fetched page confirmed them, and the research recorded that as 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 call it out, and the research recorded the likely answer as an inference rather than a fact.
Whether a separate monthly rate exists. Only annual-billed figures were rendered.

Sync is the whole difference

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

Pealboard does not have that problem to solve, because it has nothing to sync. A write goes to GitHub and only what GitHub returns is shown; if GitHub refuses, you see GitHub's 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 anybody edits.

The consequence a buyer can check: cancel Pealboard and every issue, comment, label, milestone and project field value is exactly where it was, because it never moved.

Look at your own repositories

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

Start free

Other 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.
rohan-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.
rohan-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.

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