Jira to Linear

the import is the easy part

Linear ships a built-in Jira importer that handles issues, comments, attachments and assignees. It works. Most teams move their data in a day, and there aren't many gotchas beyond assignee matching by email.

So if you're here looking for the technical procedure, it's short: clean up first, import one project, check it, import the rest in batches.

The reason this guide is longer than that is that the technical migration isn't what makes these fail.

the actual risk is organisational

Linear is opinionated on purpose. A small fixed set of states. Little configuration. No custom workflow engine, no conditional transitions, no approval gates, no marketplace of plugins to add them.

That constraint is the product. It's why Linear feels fast and why teams stop having meetings about their issue tracker.

It also means the migration has a failure mode that has nothing to do with data: teams try to rebuild their Jira process inside Linear, fight the tool for a month, and end up with something slower than Jira and less capable. You get the worst of both.

Before you import anything, map your Jira statuses onto Linear's smaller set on paper. If you can do it and nothing essential is lost, you'll likely love the move. If you genuinely can't — if your process needs a twelve-state workflow with conditional transitions and sign-offs — that's real information. Some organisations need that, and for them Jira is correct and Linear is a downgrade dressed up as simplification.

the thing that breaks quietly

Your issue keys change.

Anything that parses PROJ-123 breaks: branch naming conventions, commit message hooks, CI scripts, deploy annotations, links in old documentation and Slack threads. None of this fails loudly. It just stops linking, and someone notices three weeks later.

Grep your automation for Jira key patterns before you cut over, and accept that historical links in Slack and docs are simply going to rot. That's an argument for keeping Jira readable rather than deleting it.

don't sell this internally as a cost saving

On licence price alone, Jira is cheaper: Standard lists at $7.91/user/month and Premium at $14.54, against Linear's $10/user/month billed yearly ($12 monthly) for Basic and $16 ($18) for Business.

Linear's cost argument is the stuff that isn't on the invoice — the admin time, the marketplace plugins, and the person whose job quietly became maintaining workflows. That's a real argument, but it's a productivity argument, not a procurement one. Pitching it as "we'll save money on licences" is both false and easy to disprove.

One point in Linear's favour that's genuinely underrated: AI agents are included on every plan rather than sold per seat, which is increasingly not the norm. The full tradeoff is in Linear vs Jira.

import less than you think

Most Jira instances are carrying a decade of closed tickets, dead projects and custom fields nobody remembers creating.

Don't bring it. Import active projects and recent history only, and leave Jira read-only as the archive. Linear is dramatically better when it isn't full of 2019, and the migration is the only moment you'll ever be given permission to throw things away.