Alternatives
Looking for an alternative to your tracker?
Five honest shortlists — for teams leaving Jira, Linear, Shortcut, GitHub Issues or Asana. Each names why teams actually leave, four or five destinations including ones that are not us, and the question worth answering before a migration you cannot easily undo.
Read this first
Most teams looking for a new tracker are solving one of two different problems, and only one of them is a tracker problem. If items arrive at engineering well specified and the tool holding them is slow, heavy or expensive, a lighter tracker is the fix and these pages will point you at one. If the queue is in front of one person turning decisions into items an agent can execute, a faster tracker moves unwritten work more quickly.
What are you leaving?
- Jira alternativesLeaving the incumbent. Four destinations, and why a faster tracker often solves the wrong half.
- Linear alternativesLeaving the best-made tracker. Usually a structure, cost or authorship problem — and they need different answers.
- Shortcut alternativesLeaving the middle ground. The useful question is whether you want more process or less.
- GitHub Issues alternativesOutgrowing issues in the repo. Almost always a planning problem rather than a tracking one.
- Asana alternativesMoving engineering out of company-wide work management, usually without moving everyone else.
How these differ from the comparison pages
These pages are shortlists. They assume you have decided to leave something and do not yet know what to, so they name why teams leave, list four or five real destinations — most of which are not us — and say when staying put is the better answer.
The comparison pages are head to head. They assume you have narrowed it down and want Laimonade set against one named tool, dimension by dimension. Every page here links across to its comparison, and every comparison links back.
Neither set claims the other tools cannot reach a coding agent. Atlassian, Linear and GitHub all ship MCP servers and GitHub can assign an issue to its own agent. What differs is who writes the item and what it carries — which is why one of the five options on each shortlist is a different category rather than a lighter tracker.
The check worth running before any migration
It takes about an hour and it decides whether a new tracker will help:
- Count clarification questions. Of your last twenty items, how many needed a question answered before work could begin? Above a third is a backlog problem, not a tool problem.
- Time ten items to ready. From prioritised to ready to start, against how long each took to build. Whichever is larger is your real constraint.
- Label last month’s rework. Bad code, or bad criterion. The ratio tells you whether to invest in review or in specification.
The arithmetic behind those hours is set out in what a product owner costs a small engineering team.
All product names are trademarks of their respective owners, none of whom are affiliated with Laimonade. These shortlists were last checked on 2026-09-12.