How to Migrate Away from Linear

The first move in any change to Linear is the least exciting one: make a complete copy of your data and put it somewhere the product cannot touch. Frustration is exactly the state in which people skip this step, and it is the step that decides whether a migration gone sideways costs you an afternoon or costs you the work itself. Independent copy first, everything else second.

What you can get out of Linear, and in what format, decides how painful the rest of this is. Export before you cancel anything, access to your own data often ends with the subscription. Check the product's own export or data-download page for the formats it offers, and pull the widest, most open one available rather than a format only it can read.

Before you compare feature lists, settle the two questions that decide whether a switch actually sticks: what each option costs at your real usage, and what you could take with you if you left it a year from now. Linear runs a freemium model, so compare its free ceiling against the free ceiling of each rival before you compare paid tiers at all. Weigh what its issue-tracking and product-development focus already gives you against whatever pushed you to look elsewhere. Our alternatives listings for tools & utilities are a reasonable place to draw that shortlist from, but confirm on each product's own site that you can export your work in a format something else can open.

Run the import as a rehearsal before you run it for real: pick a small slice that represents the whole, the awkward records as well as the tidy ones, and bring only that into the new tools & utilities tool first. Inspect how it landed, fix the mapping while the volume is tiny, and only then commit the rest, because a structural error at full scale is expensive to unwind and trivially cheap to catch on a sample.

Closing the Linear account is the last step, not a formality, so earn it with evidence: the counts on both sides agree, the specific items you rely on open cleanly in the new tool, and a spot check turns up nothing that vanished in transit. Until the replacement has carried genuine work long enough to earn your trust, leave the old account standing, downgraded is fine, gone is premature.