Several products on the free plan
Linear's Free plan allows 2 teams and 250 issues; Basic, at $10 a user a month billed yearly, allows 5 teams and unlimited issues. In Gatherd a product is a project, and Free has every product and unlimited tickets for one person. Gatherd's plans count people, never products or tickets.
No AI credits
Linear runs models of its own: Linear Agent is on every plan, and its coding sessions and Loops, on Basic and above, are paid from prepaid AI credits that no plan includes. Gatherd runs no model and sells no credits. You bring Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or ChatGPT, and Gatherd charges only for the tracker.
Agents on the board
Both have an MCP server, and in both an agent can act under its own name. In Linear an agent is an app user that a workspace admin installs, and it is delegated an issue while a person stays the assignee; Linear calls that API a developer preview. In Gatherd an app signs in with Gatherd the first time it calls and works as its own agent, named after it, and claiming a ticket makes it the assignee.
What agents file
Linear's Triage collects issues from integrations and from people outside a team, on every plan, and its Triage Intelligence, which suggests owners and labels, is on Business. In Gatherd everything an agent files waits in Triage until a person accepts it or declines it with a reason the agent reads back, unless you mark that agent trusted.
Pull requests
Both move a ticket from a pull request. Linear links one by a word such as Fixes ENG-123 and by default moves the issue to In Progress when it opens and to Done when it merges, with a status you can choose for each stage, and works with GitLab too. Gatherd moves the ticket to In review when the pull request opens and to Done when it merges, with GitHub only.
Where Linear is ahead
Cycles, initiatives and roadmaps, apps for iOS and Android, a large directory of integrations, insights, and SAML and SCIM on Enterprise. A team that plans in cycles and works through those integrations will find Linear the better fit.
Sources
Everything said here about the other product comes from its own pages, read on . If one has changed, write to support@gatherd.dev and we will correct this page.