The best Jira alternative depends on what made you leave

The best Jira alternative is the one that fixes the reason you're leaving. Too heavy for a small dev team: Linear. Self-hosting: Plane. Tracking inside the repo: GitHub Issues. Marketing and ops in the same tool: ClickUp or Monday. Coding agents doing much of the work: Radial, at $50 per user per year, flat, with agents not billed as seats and a first-party CLI and MCP server. On the 16 agent capabilities all three trackers can have, Radial's CLI scores 13.0 against 12.0 for Jira's acli, and Radial's MCP server 13.5 against 8.0 for Jira's Rovo MCP server (compared from docs) and 12.0 for Linear's (scored from its live tool list). For 10 people with 20 agents, Jira Standard costs $950 a year on its annual 10-user plan, Linear Basic $1,200, and Radial $500. If Jira Free fits your team of up to 10, it costs $0, and switching has a cost of its own.

This list sorts the field by the reason you are leaving, then compares Jira, Linear and Radial. Jira is compared from its docs; a live Jira trial is pending. Linear's MCP server and API ran live on 2026-11-02: its tool list, a scripted create-to-done flow and a claim race, with the full results in Radial vs Linear. Prices and limits were verified on Nov 2, 2026 on each vendor's official page. The few measured numbers come from scripted runs against a plain TODO.md and carry their n and evidence id (see Methodology).

#What the alternatives cost with agents

Radial is $50 per human per year, and agents are not billed as seats. Jira Standard is $9.70 per human per month for 1 to 100 users, or a flat $950 a year for up to 10 users. The $9.70 is Jira's price for new purchases from Oct 13, 2026; many guides still list the older, lower rate, and existing customers move at renewal. Linear Basic is $10 per human per month, billed yearly. GitHub Issues is free with any GitHub plan, and Plane has a free plan for 12 users plus a self-hosted edition. All verified on Nov 2, 2026.

Are agents billed as seats?

• Radial: no. Agents are workspace members marked as agents (is_agent) and never count as seats. No credits.
• Jira: not if they use a person's token or a service account. Service accounts "do not count towards your user limit"; Atlassian includes 5 free, and more need Atlassian Guard Standard at $4.35 per user per month (service accounts). Enriched Rovo MCP calls draw Rovo credits.
• Linear: no. "Agents are not counted as billable seats in Linear" (docs). Linear Agent's own coding sessions and Loops draw AI credits.

Download this table as CSV.

The chart shows yearly cost at four team sizes. At 1 human plus 3 agents: Radial $50, Jira Standard $116.40, Linear Basic $120. At 3 humans plus 5 agents: $150, $349.20 and $360. At 10 humans plus 20 agents: $500, $950 and $1,200. At 25 humans plus 50 agents: $1,250, $2,450 and $3,000.

Assumptions: list prices from the Jira and Linear pricing pages, verified on Nov 2, 2026, in USD. Jira bills either monthly or on an annual plan priced per user band (1 to 10 users pay $950), and we use the cheaper one at each size. Jira's page also shows $8.48 per user per month: that is the blended rate at 300 users, not what a team of 1 to 100 users pays. Linear publishes only billed-yearly prices, so its monthly figure is the yearly price divided by 12. We have not priced Monday or Azure DevOps here.

Extra costs to budget for:

• Jira Rovo credits. 25, 70 or 150 credits per user per month on Standard, Premium or Enterprise, pooled, then $0.01 per credit from December 3, 2026, with extra usage on by default (credits). Rovo MCP's search "may consume up to 10 Rovo credits per call", so up to $0.10 a call once the pool is spent. Writes and single-issue lookups are free.
• Jira MCP rate limits. Every Cloud plan gets the Rovo MCP server, at 500 calls an hour on Free and 1,000 on Standard (Rovo MCP).
• Linear plan limits. Free stops at 250 issues and 2 teams; Basic at 5 teams.
• Linear AI credits. Prepaid, for Linear Agent coding sessions (model tokens at provider rates plus $0.25 per 20-minute sandbox block) and Loops.

Radial is one plan: $50 per user per year, flat, agents not billed as seats, nothing metered. See Radial pricing, the head-to-heads in Radial vs Jira and Radial vs Linear, or eight trackers side by side in what is a cost-effective issue tracker.

#The shortlist, sorted by why you're leaving

Jira earned its place. It is powerful, configurable, and built to run hundreds of teams across engineering, support and operations. If you need that breadth, none of these match it, and you should stay.

It's too slow and heavy for a small dev team. Linear is keyboard-first and built for engineering teams that want to move without administrative setup. The trade is flexibility: you do it Linear's way. If you are a 2 to 10 person startup choosing your first tracker, project management for a startup with coding agents prices five options at 2, 5 and 10 people and lists what to skip at each size.

You want to self-host or own your data. Plane is an open-source Jira and Linear hybrid you can run yourself. OpenProject leans toward classic planning with Gantt charts. The trade is that you run the infrastructure.

You want the tracker glued to your code. GitHub Issues keeps tracking in the repo, tied to branches and CI. It is light by design, and you outgrow it when a flat list stops being enough.

Non-engineering teams share the tool. ClickUp and Monday are the "work OS" options, with docs, whiteboards and heavy customization. The trade is weight and a learning curve that rhymes with the one you're leaving.

Your coding agents do much of the work. If Claude Code or Codex picks up issues, builds them and opens the pull requests, the tracker's heaviest users are agents. Radial is built for that: agents use the radial CLI (every command that returns data takes --json) or the MCP server, each issue keeps the agent's build record and its HTML prototypes, and people review in the web app. The head-to-head is Radial vs Jira.

You're thinking of dropping the tracker for a TODO.md. It is the cheapest option per call, and the numbers below show where it breaks.

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#Jira, Linear and Radial, compared from docs

Download this table as CSV.

The coverage score is ours: 19 things a coding agent does in a tracker, scored yes = 1, partial = 0.5, no = 0. Radial is scored from its source, Jira from its docs, and Linear from the tool list its MCP server returned live plus its docs. Three rows (prototype preview, session logs, done-proof) are features only Radial ships, so the table above uses the 16 shared rows. On all 19, Radial's CLI scores 16.0 and its MCP server 15.5, Jira's 12.0 and 8.0, and Linear's MCP server 12.0. The full table, with the arithmetic, is in Radial vs Jira.

#The option of no tracker at all

A shared TODO.md in the repo costs nothing and needs no auth. We scripted it on 2026-11-02 to see where it breaks.

The chart shows merge conflicts when two branches edit the same TODO.md, n=10 per case: both append a new task, 10 of 10 conflicted; both close adjacent tasks, 10 of 10 conflicted; both close tasks 8 lines apart, 0 of 10 conflicted.

• Merges: two branches that each append a task conflicted 10 of 10 times (E-BASE-MERGE-both_append_new_task). Closing adjacent tasks: 10 of 10. Closing tasks 8 lines apart: 0 of 10. A merge=union rule in .gitattributes would remove the append conflict.
• Claims: two agents claiming the first open task in one checkout lost a claim silently 20 of 20 times (E-BASE-RACE-shared-lost). In separate clones, git rejected the second push 20 of 20 times and the loser hit a rebase conflict 20 of 20 times. The script always takes the first open task, so 20 of 20 is one deterministic outcome repeated.
• Whole-file read: reading the task and decision files whole grows from 7,325 bytes at 50 decisions to 144,451 bytes at 1,000 (E-BASE-SCALE-*). This is a different metric from the resume figure in the session logs post.

To be fair to the file: a scripted claim took 35 ms, with no account, auth step or network. No tracker beats that per call. A plain assign does not solve the claim race either: it is last-write-wins, so two agents can both get a success. Radial's claim (radial claim, the claim_issue MCP tool) is one conditional write that assigns only if nobody holds the issue, so the second agent gets a 409 naming the holder; it is live in production, and its evidence is Radial's unit and integration race tests, not a live multi-identity run. Neither Jira nor Linear documents a conditional assign. Raced live, Linear told more than one of 20 workers "claimed" in 10 of 10 rounds, with 183 claims overwritten silently (L-LIVE-RACE, one Linear API key).

#The reason the shortlist skips: the bill that moves

Every option above except the self-hosted ones bills per seat, and the newer ones bill AI work on top.

• Jira is per seat per month. Rovo MCP, the server your agents use, runs on every plan at 500 calls an hour on Free and 1,000 on Standard. Enriched calls such as search draw Rovo credits (25, 70 or 150 per user per month by plan), with overage billing at $0.01 per credit starting December 3, 2026 (credits).
• Linear is per seat, billed yearly, and does not bill agents as seats. Its own Linear Agent coding sessions and Loops require AI credits, with admin spend limits since October 2026. Third-party agents calling Linear's MCP server or API draw no credits, per the pages we read.

None of that is wrong as a business model. It means the number you sign up for is not always the number you pay, if your team uses the vendor's own AI features.

The screenshot shows the Radial pricing page at radial.build/pricing: $50 per user, per year, flat, one plan billed yearly, with coding agents not counted as seats and never charged credits.

Radial has one plan: $50 per user per year, flat, billed annually. Agents are not seats and no credits are charged, because Radial runs no LLM inference on your behalf. The Plain Software Pledge states that the day Radial ships a copilot, meters your usage, or charges you for AI you didn't ask for, we refund your subscription in full. Details on pricing.

#Moving off Jira

Export your issues to JSON with Jira's REST search API, paging until the last page, then dry-run and import:

radial import --from jira export.json -t ENG --dry-run   # counts and warnings, nothing written
radial import --from jira export.json -t ENG
cursor=""; total=0                                       # verify: --all adds archived, it does not page
while :; do
  page=$(radial list --team ENG --all --limit 100 --json ${cursor:+--cursor "$cursor"})
  total=$((total + $(jq '.issues | length' <<<"$page")))
  cursor=$(jq -r '.nextCursor // empty' <<<"$page")
  [ -z "$cursor" ] && break
done
echo "$total issues"                                     # compare with the dry-run count

What comes across from Jira: titles, descriptions (Atlassian Document Format flattened to plain text), statuses (by name, then category), priorities (Highest becomes urgent, Lowest becomes low), assignees by email, labels, parent issues, issue links (blocks, duplicate, related), comments (flattened to plain text) with their original timestamps, due dates, created timestamps, and updated timestamps (except on sub-issues, where linking the parent sets the updated time to the import time). Jira projects and story points are not mapped: issues land in the team you pass with --team.

What does not: attachments, sprints, custom fields, change history, watchers, and comment authors (imported comments are posted under the importing user's name). An assignee email with no matching member is left unassigned, with a warning. How to produce export.json is in Radial vs Jira and the Jira migration guide.

#What you can verify before you buy

These come from Radial's terms, privacy policy and source code. We do not publish an uptime figure, a status page or a support response time yet, so none is claimed here.

• Price and billing: $50 per user per year, billed annually. No monthly plan, no free tier, no trial.
• Who counts as a user: every human member of the workspace, whatever their role. Agent members never count.
• Seats mid-term: adding a person is invoiced at once, prorated. Removing one is not refunded pro rata for the rest of the term.
• Cancelling: any time, in the billing portal or by emailing support@radial.build; it takes effect at the end of the term. Payments are non-refundable except where the law requires. Renewal is at the then-current price.
• If a subscription lapses: the workspace becomes read-only after a grace period, and the data stays readable and exportable.
• Export: radial export --format json returns every issue, every comment, and the workspace's statuses, labels, cycles and members, plus its teams and projects that are not archived. --format csv returns issues only. Attachment files, issue relations, file comments, activity history, and build records and sessions are not in that export today; attachments come per issue through radial attachments or the API, and builds through radial build export <ISSUE>.
• Where data lives: processed and stored in the United States, primarily in an AWS US region.
• Security basics: TLS in transit, tenant isolation by Postgres row-level security, API keys stored as SHA-256 hashes, Git provider tokens and webhook secrets encrypted with AES-256-GCM.
• API limit: 120 requests per minute per credential, burst 120, enforced per server instance.
• Support: support@radial.build. Radial is operated by BrainGrid AI, Inc.

#Where Radial is behind Jira

• No portfolio or initiative layer, no Gantt roadmap, no burndown or velocity dashboards, no app marketplace, no cross-department workflow engine.
• No SAML SSO or SCIM, no per-project agent permissions, no webhooks API, no bulk edit from the CLI.
• No free tier.

If you run fifty teams with fifty workflows, Jira is built for that and Radial is not.

#Methodology

Interim benchmark phase 1, run 2026-11-02 against Radial commit 9126321 (CLI 1.3.0) with git 2.47.3. Merge cases: two scripted branches merged into main, n=10 each. Claim race: two scripted agents on one TODO.md, n=20 per setup. Coverage: 19 rows, Jira compared from its docs (read on Nov 2, 2026), Linear scored from its live tools/list (L-LIVE-MCP-TOOLS), Radial from source. Live Linear runs on 2026-11-02: the tool list, the create-to-done flow over MCP (n=5, L-LIVE-T1T4) and the claim race (L-LIVE-RACE). Every evidence id is indexed, with its raw file, in evidence.json. Live Jira runs (round trips, credit draw, rate limits under load) wait on a trial; nothing here claims Radial is faster per task than Jira or Linear.

#FAQ

#What is the best Jira alternative in 2026?

It depends on why you are leaving. For a lighter engineering tracker, Linear. To self-host, Plane or OpenProject. To stay in the repo, GitHub Issues. For cross-functional teams, ClickUp or Monday. For a team whose coding agents do much of the work, Radial: a first-party CLI and MCP server for agents, a web app for people, and $50 per user per year, flat, with agents not billed as seats.

#Jira is overkill for our small dev team. What should we use instead?

A focused tracker with sane defaults: Linear or Radial for most small engineering teams, GitHub Issues for the lightest option inside the repo. A five-person team on Radial pays $250 a year with no usage line; on Jira Standard it lists at $582 a year on monthly billing (5 x $9.70 x 12, verified on Nov 2, 2026), or $0 on Jira Free with the Rovo MCP server capped at 500 calls an hour. For a step-by-step setup for a small team with coding agents, see project management for a startup with coding agents.

#What is a good Jira alternative for a team that uses AI coding agents?

One your agents can drive directly and that shows you what they did. On the 16 shared rows of our agent-capability matrix, compared from docs, Radial's CLI scores 13.0 and its MCP server 13.5, against 12.0 for Jira's acli and 8.0 for Jira's Rovo MCP server. Radial also records each agent build on the issue and does not bill agents as seats or charge credits.

#Is there a free version of Jira?

Yes. Jira Free covers up to 10 users. Rovo MCP, the server coding agents connect to, works on Free at 500 calls an hour (Rovo MCP), and agents can also use the REST API or acli. Radial has no free tier: it is $50 per user per year from the first user.

#Can we just use a TODO.md file instead of a tracker?

You can, and per call it is the cheapest option. In our scripted runs, two branches appending tasks conflicted 10 of 10 times, and two agents claiming from one checkout lost a claim silently 20 of 20 times. A tracker gives agents and people one live state, and with an atomic claim (radial claim) the second agent to reach an issue is told it is taken instead of silently overwriting the first.