Pragma vs Linear
Fast is table stakes. Pragma makes plans answerable.
Pragma is built around the question a tracker does not try to answer: what is this work for, and what breaks if it slips? Deliverables, requirements and tasks are different things joined by typed edges, the bill is flat however many people join, and your agents work the same graph your team does. Linear is opinionated and built around issues and cycles.
Where Pragma wins
- Work that traces to a promise. Deliverables, requirements and tasks are different things linked by typed edges — not one issue type wearing labels.
- Computed answers. "What happens if this slips?" and "what can start right now?" are queries over the dependency graph, not a judgement call.
- Everyone in the plan. €0, €29 or €149 flat per organization, and clients and contractors join as free puppets rather than paid seats.
- Beyond engineering. Risks, decisions, questions and controls are first-class, so the plan holds what a delivery review actually asks about.
- European by construction. Application, database and files in eu-west-1, a French operator, a signed DPA, EU-region analytics and email — or on-premise, on Enterprise.
What Linear does better
- Integrations. A longer catalogue of native integrations with the tools an engineering team already runs.
- An opinion that works. Cycles, triage and a small vocabulary let a product-engineering team adopt it in an afternoon and argue about nothing.
- Focus. Linear does software delivery, and does not try to be your wiki, your CRM or your PMO.
Side by side
Linear data last checked on September 26th, 2026. Sources: pricing, security.
| Pragma | Linear | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat, per organization. €0 Starter, €29 Team, €149 Business — adding a person costs nothing to decide. | Per user, per month on Basic and Business; Enterprise is custom, annual. |
| Free plan | 5 members, 5 puppets, 3 projects, 200 work items, unlimited connected agents. | Unlimited members, 2 teams, 250 issues, agent platform access. |
| People who only do the work | Puppets: assignable, time-tracked people with no account and no seat. Free on every plan. | A contractor you assign work to is a user on the plan. |
| Shape of the work | Eleven item types — requirement, deliverable, risk, decision, question, control and more — each with its own lifecycle. | Issues, projects, initiatives and cycles — deliberately few. |
| Why work exists | Typed graph: task answers requirement answers deliverable, with orphan and gap detection on the structure itself. | Issues roll up to projects and initiatives; the relationship is containment, not a typed answer chain. |
| Analysis on the plan | Critical path, impact analysis, bottlenecks, cycle and unschedulable-plan detection from real dependency edges. | Blocking and blocked-by relations, plus progress and cycle analytics. |
| AI agents | 80+ MCP tools behind OAuth 2.1, the analysis layer included. Unlimited connected apps on every plan, never metered. | Hosted remote MCP server over OAuth, plus an agent platform for delegating issues. |
| Hosting | EU only: AWS eu-west-1 (Ireland) for application, database and files; EU-region analytics and email. On-premise on Enterprise. | Hosted by Linear. Workspace data in the US or the EU, chosen at creation; account information always stored in the US. |
Choose Pragma if…
…the people asking you questions sit outside engineering — a client, a sponsor, an auditor — and the answer has to be a chain rather than a status. Or if your agents do enough of the work that they need the plan itself, not a list of issues.
Stay on Linear if you are a product-engineering team shipping on cycles and the tracker's only job is to keep out of the way. Linear is excellent at that, and a team that needs nothing more will be happy paying per seat for it.