Jira to Linear: What the Switch Actually Costs

Teams usually move from Jira to Linear for speed, not savings, and the numbers bear that out: on list prices, Linear often costs the same or more per seat. Here is what a 40-person engineering team actually pays to switch, and how much time Linear would need to save to cover it.

What each tool costs

Linear publishes flat per-user prices. Jira's cloud prices are progressive: the rate per user depends on how many seats you have, and Atlassian's pricing page calculates it for your team size. Check your own Jira invoice before relying on the figures below.

Sources: Linear pricing and Atlassian's Jira licensing page (Free plan limit, progressive pricing), checked September 2026. Atlassian's pricing page doesn't show a fixed per-user rate, so the Jira figures are from a July 2026 pricing guide that puts Standard at roughly $7.91 and Premium at about $14.54 per user per month; we rounded them. Atlassian has also announced list-price changes for Jira Standard, Premium and Enterprise effective October 13, 2026; an Atlassian partner's summary puts the rise at 7% for organizations under 5,000 seats.

The costs a price comparison misses

1. Your remaining Jira term

Atlassian bills cloud subscriptions monthly or annually. On monthly billing, your bill is based on the highest number of seats assigned during the billing cycle, so you can leave at the end of any month. On an annual subscription, the months you have already paid for are sunk: our calculator counts them as contract overlap. If you pay for Atlassian Marketplace apps, they follow the same cycle as Jira; the Marketplace billing rules keep the app tier and billing period in sync with the Jira licence.

2. What the importer leaves behind

Linear's Jira migration guide lists what comes across: summaries and descriptions (converted to Markdown), assignees, creators, priority, issue keys, comments, labels, estimates, due dates and created dates. Epics become Linear projects, parent and child issues become sub-issues, Jira issue types become labels, components become team-level labels, and statuses get a "best effort conversion." Images are imported as files, but other attachments arrive as links pointing back to the original file in Jira, so they stop working if you close the Jira site.

Two gaps matter for most teams. First, the guide says plainly that "custom fields will not import to Linear." If your reporting depends on custom fields, plan where that data will live before you migrate. Second, sprints aren't listed in the importer's field mapping, so plan for sprint history to stay in Jira. Keep a read-only Jira export, or a downgraded site, if you need that history or those non-image attachments.

How you import also matters. The API import keeps the most data and supports ongoing sync, but needs Jira admin permissions. The CSV import can bring in many projects at once without admin access, but produces static copies with no sync. Imported issues get a "Migrated" label and can be deleted within seven days if a test run goes wrong.

3. Team structure and the plan you actually need

The importer maps each Jira project to a Linear team, and Linear Basic allows five teams. A company with many active Jira projects will either consolidate them into fewer teams or need Business at $16 a seat. Decide this before you compare prices, because it changes the answer.

4. A period of running both

Linear's Jira Sync can keep new issues and epics in sync between the two tools in one or both directions. That makes a gradual move possible, for example when support or product teams stay in Jira for a while, but it also means paying for both tools during the overlap. Sync has its own limits: Jira issue types, components and required fields don't map cleanly, and an update that breaks a Jira constraint changes the Linear issue but not the Jira one.

5. People's time

For the example we assume 60 hours in total: about 20 hours for mapping projects to teams, test imports and cleanup, plus an hour per person for training and settling in. We value that time at $75 an hour. These are our assumptions, not vendor figures; replace them with your own.

Worked example: 40 engineers

All scenarios use the switching cost calculator with 40 seats, 60 hours at $75 ($4,500 one-time), no paid migration tool, no seat growth, and a 5% annual price rise on both sides.

Scenario A is the only one where the subscription saving pays for the move, and only just: $4.50 a seat recovers $4,500 of internal time in a little over two years. Switch with half a year of Jira Premium left and the saving never catches up within three years.

Scenarios B to D never break even on price, because Linear costs more per seat than the Jira plan being replaced. That doesn't make them bad decisions. It means the case has to rest on time saved, so it is worth putting a number on it.

How much time would Linear need to save?

Spread each scenario's three-year shortfall across 40 people and 36 months, at $75 an hour, and you get the time each person would need to save per month for the switch to pay for itself:

These are low bars, which is why the subscription price is rarely what decides this move. The harder costs are the ones that don't show up in the table: rebuilding reports that relied on custom fields, losing sprint history from the working tool, replacing Jira automations and Marketplace apps, and the weeks when some teams are in one tool and some in the other. If those are small for your team, the per-seat price difference probably isn't a reason to stay. If they are large, no per-seat saving will make up for them.

A checklist before you switch

1. Find your Jira renewal date and billing cycle, including any Marketplace apps, and plan the cut-over around it.
2. Count your active Jira projects. More than five teams' worth means Linear Business or some consolidation.
3. List your custom fields and decide, for each one, whether it becomes a label, moves to the description, or is dropped.
4. Download attachments, sprint history and reports you need to keep before you downgrade or close the Jira site.
5. Run a test import into an empty team; imported issues can be deleted within seven days.
6. Invite users first so the importer can match them by email; unmatched authors become external users who can't be assigned issues.
7. List automations and apps that need a replacement, with an owner for each.
8. Run the numbers in the calculator with your own Jira rate, hours and dates.

Related: Zoom to Google Meet (worked example), Slack to Microsoft Teams and HubSpot to Pipedrive (more worked examples), what vendor lock-in costs, and how long migrations take.