A Linear alternative for work nobody assigned you
Linear is the best issue tracker made, for a team. Brassdeck is for the person with a pile of half-started things and nobody chasing them. Different problems, and this page says which is yours.
Start here: if you are shipping software with a team, use Linear, not this. It is the best issue tracker there is and nothing on this page argues otherwise. People end up searching for a Linear alternative for one of two reasons, and only one of them leads here.
Two reasons people leave
The first is cost or team size, and the answer to that is a cheaper issue tracker, of which there are many. The second is that Linear assumes things about your work that are not true: that it is assigned, estimated, done in cycles, and closed. If you are one person with side projects, a business, some writing and a house move, none of that is true, and every field Linear asks you to fill in is a small lie you have to tell to use it.
Brassdeck assumes the opposite. Nobody assigned you anything. There is no cycle. The hard part is not velocity, it is remembering what you cared about in March and being honest about whether it moved.
Side by side
| Linear | Brassdeck | |
|---|---|---|
| Assumes | A team, a backlog, cycles, an assignee. | One person and a pile of half-started things. |
| The unit | An issue: estimated, assigned, closed. | A card: an intention worth keeping, with steps under it. |
| Pressure | Deliberate. Velocity and cycles are the point. | Deliberately absent. No ranking, no score, no streak, nothing red. |
| Stopping | Cancel the issue. It leaves the board. | Park it or drop it. It stays, with the reason, because a decision is worth keeping. |
| Best for | Software teams shipping on a cadence. | Side projects, a business, writing, anything with a life beyond this week. |
If you have an assignee field and it is always you, that is the tell.
Using both
Plenty of people should. Linear for the product you ship with your team;Brassdeck for the six other things you started that have no team and no tracker and are quietly going cold in a notes app. They do not overlap, and they are not trying to.
What it costs
Free is 4 cards with 20 steps each, and it stays free. Every new workspace gets two weeks of the paid tier with no card asked for, and when that ends nothing is deleted or locked. See pricing for the rest, or read the manual first; it is public and there is a PDF.
Also compared: Trello, Notion, and all of them at once.