Radial vs Shortcut: same BYO-agent thesis, a price that never moves

Most "Shortcut alternative" lists are written by tools that are not really in Shortcut's category. You search for a dev-first tracker and get GoodDay, Wrike, Asana, and a Trello comparison, which is how you end up evaluating a marketing work platform against the tracker your engineers actually live in.

So here is the version written by a competitor who will concede the part most comparison pages skip: Shortcut is good, and on the thing most trackers are still catching up to, agents, it is already ahead of most of the market. If you are shopping, you should know that before you know anything about Radial.

#What Shortcut gets right

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) is one of the few genuinely developer-first trackers, and the closest peer to Radial in temperament. Three things are worth stating plainly.

It is fast, and built for engineers. Stories, epics, iterations, and a keyboard-driven interface, without the configuration ceremony that makes Jira a project in itself. Teams that left Jira for Shortcut usually got exactly what they came for.

Its agent story is real, and it is free. Shortcut for Agents lets you assign third-party coding agents as Story owners and have them progress the work, and it is included in every plan, including the free one. There is an official open-source MCP server and a REST API. If your requirement is "my coding agent should be able to drive the tracker without me paying for the privilege," Shortcut already satisfies it.

The base price is lower than ours. Shortcut is roughly $8.50 per user per month on the Team plan and $12 on Business, billed yearly, and it is free up to ten users. Radial is $50 per user per year. At list price on a small team, Shortcut can come out cheaper, and this post is not going to pretend otherwise.

That is a real product with a real answer to the agent question. "Your agent rides free over MCP" is not a differentiator in 2026; Shortcut ships it, Linear ships it, most of the field ships it. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a feature the whole category already has.

#Where the two diverge

The difference is not the feature list. It is what each company has to become.

Shortcut is building Korey, its own AI product manager, sold separately from the tracker. That is a reasonable business decision, and it is also the decision that defines the next few years of the product. Once a tracker has its own AI product to sell, three things tend to follow: the AI surface grows inside the tool, the pricing page grows a line item for it, and the roadmap starts answering to the AI story rather than to the tracker.

Radial made the opposite bet, and wrote it down so it is not just a mood.

There is no AI in the product, and no plan for one. Not a copilot, not a summarizer, not an AI PM. The intelligence in your workflow is your agent, which you already pay for, pointed at a tracker over a real CLI, REST API, and MCP server. Agents are clients of the API, never billed seats. That part Shortcut matches; we are conceding it, not claiming it.

One flat number that does not move. Radial is $50 per user, per year, flat, billed annually, locked at the rate you join. No AI add-on tier, no credit balance, no usage meter, because there is nothing in the product to meter. The claim is not that Radial is the cheapest tracker. It is not, and Shortcut's base seat is lower. The claim is narrower and more useful at renewal: the number you sign up at is the number you keep.

A pledge that costs us if we break it. The Plain Software Pledge: the day Radial ships a copilot, meters your usage, or charges you for AI you didn't ask for, your subscription is free. A tracker that is actively building and selling its own AI PM cannot write that sentence, because the AI is the growth story. That is the whole asymmetry, and it is a business-model asymmetry rather than a feature one.

A first-class CLI, not just an API. Shortcut ships an MCP server and a REST API but no official CLI. Radial's CLI is a primary surface with 30 commands, the same one your CI and your agents use. Anything the interface does, the terminal does.

#Moving work over

Shortcut's REST API exports cleanly, and Radial takes issues over its own REST API or CLI, so a migration script is a short afternoon rather than a project. To be exact about what is and is not shipped: radial import --from currently supports Linear and Jira only. There is no one-command Shortcut importer. What you get instead is a plain REST endpoint with human-readable fields, no GraphQL layer and no SDK required, that a script or an agent can loop your exported stories through:

curl -X POST https://api.radial.build/v1/issues \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $RADIAL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"title":"Rate limiter drops requests under burst load","team":"ENG","priority":"high"}'

Note what the wire format is: ENG, not a workspace uuid; high, not an enum id. That is deliberate, and it is why pointing a coding agent at the migration works without a mapping table. The same call is one radial create away in the terminal, and the same operations exist as MCP tools at mcp.radial.build if you would rather have your agent do the whole move.

Leaving is symmetrical, by design. Radial ships one-command full workspace export, JSON or CSV, always available. There is only one plan, so there is no tier where your own data goes behind a paywall. We would rather you be able to leave in a minute than feel locked in for a year.

#Where Radial is honestly not for you

Stay on Shortcut if the base seat price is the binding constraint. Under ten users Shortcut is free and Radial is not, and Radial has no free tier and no trial. That is a real gap for a two-person team, and no amount of pledge language closes it.

Stay on Shortcut, too, if you want your tracker to bring the AI. If a built-in AI product manager that writes and grooms your stories sounds like the thing you are shopping for, Korey is aimed at you and Radial is deliberately not. We are betting the opposite way.

And Radial ships less than a work-management suite on purpose. There are no burndown or velocity dashboards, no roadmap timeline, no portfolio or initiative layer, no docs or whiteboards. What it has is issues, triage, board and list layouts, Cycles (time-boxed sprints), estimates, projects, Git integrations, and the CLI, REST, and MCP surface over all of it. If reporting dashboards are load-bearing for your team, better to find that out here than in a bake-off.

#FAQ

#What is the best Shortcut alternative?

It depends on why you are leaving. If Shortcut felt too light on structure, Jira is the heavy end (we wrote an honest guide to picking a Jira alternative) and Linear is the polished middle. If you want open-source or self-hosted, Plane and OpenProject are the honest picks. If you are leaving because your tracker is growing an AI product you did not ask for, and you want one flat price with a written no-meter guarantee, that is the specific case Radial is built for. Note that most general "Shortcut alternatives" listicles rank work-management suites like GoodDay, Wrike, and Asana, which are a different category from a dev-first tracker.

#Is Shortcut project management free?

Shortcut is free for teams of up to ten users, then roughly $8.50 per user per month on Team and $12 on Business, billed yearly. Radial has no free tier and no trial: it is $50 per user per year, flat, from the first user. For very small teams Shortcut's free plan is genuinely cheaper, and we say so above.

#Does Shortcut work with AI coding agents?

Yes, and well. Shortcut for Agents lets third-party coding agents be assigned Stories and progress them, included in every plan, and there is an official open-source MCP server. Agent access is table stakes across the category now, so it should not be the deciding factor between modern trackers. What differs is whether the tracker also sells you its own AI, and how the price behaves once it does.

#What is the difference between Shortcut and Radial?

Both are fast, developer-first trackers where your own agents ride free. The divergence is business model. Shortcut is building Korey, its own AI product manager, sold separately. Radial ships no AI at all, holds one flat locked price of $50 per user per year with no meter, and backs it with a pledge that makes your subscription free if we ever break it. Shortcut also has a lower base seat and a free tier; Radial has a first-class CLI, which Shortcut does not ship.

#Can I migrate from Shortcut to Radial?

Yes, but not with a single flag today. radial import --from supports Linear and Jira; there is no Shortcut importer yet. The practical path is to export from Shortcut's REST API and post the stories into Radial's REST API or radial create, which is a short script because the wire format uses readable team keys and status names rather than uuids. Export out of Radial is one command, JSON or CSV, always.

#The short version

Shortcut is a good tracker that already answered the agent question, and its base seat is cheaper than ours. If that is the whole decision, stay.

The reason to move is what happens next. Shortcut is building its own AI product manager, and a tracker with an AI business eventually prices like one. Radial ships no AI, holds one flat locked number, and puts a pledge behind it that pays you if we ever change our minds. Your agents drive it over a real CLI, REST API, and MCP server, and they never count as seats.

See the one number on pricing, or read the manifesto for why a tracker should stay a tracker. If you are comparing the fast trackers head to head, the Radial vs Linear breakdown is the other honest one.