Linear and Kavanah answer different questions. Linear asks how a software team can move fast with as little process as possible, and it answers that very well. Kavanah asks how a whole company, engineering included, can plan, track hours, work with clients and hand coordination to AI employees under controls. If your company is one engineering team, this comparison will mostly tell you to stay. If engineering is one team of several, read on.
1. Linear's Point of View
Linear is opinionated on purpose. Its method says productivity software needs to be designed for purpose, that tools should be built with the creators in mind, and that flexible software which lets everyone invent their own workflows eventually creates chaos as teams scale. That is why engineers like it. Cycles last 1 to 8 weeks and are deliberately not tied to releases, unfinished issues roll over, and the capacity dial for an upcoming cycle is calculated from the velocity of the previous three.
2. Where Linear Is Stronger
Linear's agent platform, MCP access and Linear Agent are on every plan, including Free. Linear Agent works inside your existing permissions and can find information across issues, projects, documents and code, create and update work, and start a coding session to fix a well-scoped issue. Third-party agents can open pull requests against issues and are not counted as billable seats. Linear says it holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001:2022. Kavanah has no agent that writes code or opens pull requests, and does not try to.
3. Where Kavanah Is Stronger
Kavanah is built for the work around the code. Time tracking is native on every plan, logged against tasks, where Linear's docs estimate in points or t-shirt sizes and its integrations directory offers Harvest to start a timer from an issue. Clients invited through Kavanah's client portal are not charged as seats; on Linear, guest accounts are on Business. AI employees work assigned tasks inside the projects and tools you choose, under safe mode, approval policies that make chosen actions wait for a person, an action ledger and undo.
4. Engineering in Kavanah
Kavanah is not a Linear clone, but engineers are not stranded. Every task carries a project key such as KAV-123, sprints have velocity, and the GitHub App links pull requests and commits that say fixes #123 or task 123 to that task with branch and state; two-way GitHub Issues sync is available per repository. There is a REST API with a published OpenAPI spec, the kvn command line, and an MCP server so Claude can use the workspace as a connector.
5. Price at Twelve People
Linear Basic is $10 per user a month and Business $16, both billed yearly; the server-rendered page we read showed no monthly figures. Twelve people on Business, the plan with guests and private teams, is $192 a month. Kavanah Basic is $3 a seat a month ($2 billed yearly), $36 a month for 12, with 100 AI credits per seat pooled, and Pro is $6 ($4 yearly) with 250. Pay as you go has no seat fee at all; you buy credits in packs from $10 per 1,000.
6. Running Both
A common split is engineers on Linear and everyone else in Kavanah. Be honest about the cost: Kavanah has no Linear connector or sync today, so the bridge is GitHub and people, not an automatic mirror.
Linear is excellent for a software team whose work is code; Kavanah is for a company that needs every team, and its clients, in one place. For the full dated comparison of Kavanah, Linear, Jira and ClickUp, see our Linear alternative page.
