Switch to Linear

For years, conventional wisdom held that small teams started on Linear for speed while large enterprises needed Jira for governance and customization. Over the past eighteen months, public companies, regulated healthcare providers, and multi-thousand-person engineering organizations have walked away from active Jira contracts and twenty-year setups.

Salesforce76,000+ employees

Yahoo8,000+ employees

Cars245,000 employees

Coinbase3,800 employees

Figma2,800 employees

Klaviyo2,400 employees

Oscar Health2,400 employees

Opendoor1,500 employees

For most of these teams, the trigger was the shift to coding agents. Rather than bolt AI onto years of custom Jira workflows, they chose to start fresh on Linear so people and agents could build in one shared system.

Linear lets engineers assign issues directly to Cursor, Codex, or Claude like teammates. Projects and roadmaps stay the human layer, while issues become shared state where agents post their live progress and pull requests, leaving a clear trail from git blame back to the original product decision.

That workflow breaks down in Jira, which buries ticket descriptions in deeply nested JSON and mandatory custom fields that trip up agent tool calls. Linear stores every issue, project, and spec in clean Markdown with native MCP tools, so agents can read context and update work in a single call.

Cars24

While preparing for an IPO across its 5,000-person organization, Cars24 walked away from a newly renewed multi-year Jira contract after weeks. Jira forced engineers to leave Codex and Claude to update tickets by hand. After connecting Linear through MCP, engineers started assigning issues directly to coding agents like teammates, leaders began querying Claude for live shipping risks straight from Linear, and several teams dropped daily standups.

Coinbase

Across its 3,800-person engineering organization, Coinbase turned Linear issues into the shared context layer for its internal coding agents. Product requirements, designs, bugs, and team ownership live in Linear so agents can read them without brittle API parsing. A bug reported in Slack becomes a labeled Linear issue, an internal agent picks up the context to open a pull request, and engineers wake up to review code drafted overnight.

Enterprises stay on Jira assuming a thousand-person organization needs custom fields and bespoke screen schemes for governance. In practice, every team invents its own workflow until statuses stop matching across departments, forcing product operations to stitch roadmaps together in Productboard, Monday, and spreadsheets.

Linear gives every team the same underlying data model for cycles, projects, and initiatives. Progress rolls up automatically from individual issues and pull requests into company-wide roadmaps without a dedicated Jira admin team maintaining schemas.

Klaviyo

Across its 2,400-person company, Klaviyo retired twenty years of custom Jira workflows across product, support, and engineering. Every team had configured Jira differently and tracked roadmaps across Sheets, Docs, and Productboard, making company-wide execution impossible to see. Moving onto Linear’s standardized data model gave leadership a real-time view of every initiative and let PMs delegate support bugs straight to Cursor.

Brex

Across its 1,200-person organization, Brex consolidated four disconnected planning tools into one company roadmap. Engineering worked in Jira, project tracking lived in Atlassian Atlas, business teams used Monday, and leaders reconciled updates in spreadsheets. After a six-week pilot, Brex retired all four tools and moved the entire product organization onto a single shared roadmap in Linear.

Engineering leaders put off switching because they picture a nine-month migration of ten-year-old Jira tickets and custom fields. None of the enterprises on this page migrated their full backlog.

Teams either leave historical tickets in a read-only Jira archive and start the quarter clean, import only active projects with the migration assistant, or run a phased pilot with two-way Jira sync so cross-functional dependencies keep working while teams move over.

Oscar Health

Across its 2,400-person regulated healthcare organization, Oscar Health left one of the world’s three most complex Jira instances in just over a month. Oscar’s Jira setup had accumulated so many hundreds of custom fields that it hit Atlassian’s hard ceiling, forcing teams to repurpose fields from unrelated workflows. Oscar left the custom fields behind, imported active projects, and moved over 600 people across engineering, product, data science, IT, and security in weeks.

Opendoor

During a public-company turnaround across its 1,500-person organization, Opendoor moved 500 seats off Jira in two weeks with a clean-slate weekend setup. New leadership had asked what product teams were working on and got outdated Jira boards and on-the-spot spreadsheets. One PM configured Linear over a weekend, and the entire organization switched without migrating legacy clutter.