8 Best LinearB Alternatives & Competitors on the Market Now

Although LinearB is a popular engineering management tool, it’s certainly not the best choice for every organization. In fact, there’s a wide range of options on the market to overcome many of the limitations of LinearB and provide an ideal experience to engineers, managers, and business leaders.

Read on to learn why it’s important to consider LinearB alternatives and how to choose the right engineering management platform for your organization. We’ll also provide an overview of the top eight LinearB alternatives currently on the market.

Why Look for an Alternative to LinearB?

LinearB might be a commonly used tool, but there are some limitations that lead organizations to look elsewhere. Here are some of the reasons many companies choose to adopt an alternative:

• Limited Customization for Certain Metrics: While LinearB provides various engineering metrics, customization options for specific team needs may be limited, particularly for more advanced or niche use cases.
• Steep Learning Curve: For dev teams unfamiliar with engineering analytics tools, there can be a learning curve in understanding and properly utilizing all of LinearB’s features and functionality.
• Limited Benchmarks and Historical Data: Some users have noted that LinearB doesn’t provide extensive historical data or external benchmarks, which can make it harder to assess long-term performance trends relative to industry standards.
• Dependency on Git Integration: As LinearB is heavily dependent on Git-based workflows, engineering teams that do not rely on GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket may find limited value in the tool’s features.
• Lacks Advanced Engineering Management Features: LinearB excels in engineering metrics but may not be as robust as full project management tools like Jira. Therefore, engineering teams might still need to use a separate tool for comprehensive project tracking.

Reporting Capabilities to Look for in an Engineering Intelligence Platform

1. DORA Metrics: Measuring the performance of a software team starts with metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, change error rate, and time to resolution. It’s crucial that an engineering management platform tracks these core DORA metrics as KPIs.
2. Cycle Time: An engineering intelligence platform should measure cycle time across various stages of the SDLC, from planning to pull requests (PRs) to deployment, to help reduce workflow bottlenecks and accelerate velocity.
3. Pull Requests and Code Review Metrics: Tracking code changes through pull requests and code review is crucial for identifying development bottlenecks and improving code quality.
4. Financial Data: A comprehensive engineering management platform should provide accurate financial data to help leaders forecast growth, plan capacity, and build realistic budgets.
5. Product Management: The data collected by an engineering management platform should enable product leaders to align product strategies, initiatives, and roadmaps to actual engineering capacity and delivery timelines.

Key Considerations for Engineering Managers, CTOs, and DevOps Leaders

• Workflow bottlenecks: If an engineering management platform has robust reporting capabilities, it’s easier to uncover areas where development processes are slow. Identifying and addressing these workflow bottlenecks can improve development velocity.
• Developer experience and automation: An effective engineering management platform should automate repetitive tasks to improve the developer experience. This can optimize the overall performance of development teams.
• Integration with existing tools: Adopting an engineering management platform successfully requires seamless integration with existing workflows. This means choosing a solution that supports popular tools like Jira, GitHub, Slack, and Bitbucket out of the box.
• Real-time metrics and actionable insights: An ideal engineering management platform tracks real-time metrics related to development workflows and team performance. Actionable insights empower technology leaders to make informed, data-driven decisions to optimize development processes.
• Custom dashboards and notifications: Every software team has different workflows and requirements, so it’s important that an engineering management platform includes customizable dashboards to better align management and engineering.

The 8 Best LinearB Alternative Solutions for Engineering Management

1. Jellyfish

Jellyfish enables engineering leaders and managers to measure, improve, and communicate the investment and effectiveness of their team’s efforts. With comprehensive insights into workflow inefficiencies, time management, budget utilization, and much more, Jellyfish empowers DevOps to optimize workflows, improve the software development life cycle, and deliver value faster.

As important as it is to use these software development analytics to improve the internal workings of an engineering team, Jellyfish also provides insights vital to communicating with other stakeholders across the organization. Using cost modeling and scenario projections, DevOps can help inform business strategy, resource allocation, and other business outcomes.

Key features of Jellyfish:

• Comprehensive engineering metrics contextualized with business data.
• Straightforward integrations with leading tools engineers are already using, like GitHub and Slack.
• Customizable reports and visualizations to keep teams informed.

Why do users choose Jellyfish over LinearB? Customers say:

• Easily digested engineering metrics useful across the entire organization.
• Ensuring alignment between engineering and the C-suite.
• Valuable tool to make JIRA data easier to consume.

2. Waydev

Waydev is a software engineering intelligence platform for accelerating development velocity and aligning business priorities. This platform focuses less on overall business outcomes, prioritizing code-level support and software development analytics. Other use cases include code review workflow, benchmarking, activity tracking, delivery management, and more.

Another interesting feature of Waydev is that it provides both cloud and on-premise deployments, offering more control over infrastructure and security, albeit at a higher price point.

Key features of Waydev

• Tracks DORA metrics in real time.
• Integrates with the entire engineering stack.
• Measures team performance against industry benchmarks.

What are some limitations of Waydev?

• Can be slow [and] does not sync with Jira well.
• [Cons:] Customer onboarding support and product configuration.

3. Pluralsight Flow

Pluralsight Flow is a software engineering intelligence platform that helps organizations optimize their software delivery. The solution is more process-centric, focusing its analytics on individual performance and historical data with a heavy emphasis on retrospective analysis. This is great for engineering teams looking to understand their unique strengths and weaknesses but is less helpful for connecting DevOps to greater business outcomes.

Key features of Pluralsight

• Tracks key engineering metrics.
• Connects with popular tools that engineers use.
• Provides detailed reports and visualizations.

What are some limitations of Pluralsight Flow

• Good for high-level detail but does not provide drill down on metrics.
• Flow metrics are helpful but UX isn’t so good.
• Lack of actionable reports.

4. Allstacks

Allstacks is a value stream intelligence platform that helps organizations track and improve software delivery. This tool emphasizes predictive analytics and risk identification, helping DevOps teams anticipate and mitigate problems before they arise.

Overall, Allstacks prioritizes ease of use over having the most robust features. It’s known for having quick time-to-value and offering intelligence that is “just right” without overwhelming users with data.

Key features of Allstacks

• Consolidates data from numerous software delivery tools.
• Leverages machine learning to analyze team activity and make predictions.
• Includes appealing UI and powerful data visualization capabilities.

What are some limitations of Allstacks?

• The delay in reading data is a bit of a hindrance.
• Getting the integration with Jira to pull in the correct metrics has been finicky.
• It’s painful that Jira items don’t automatically get pulled in to Allstacks.

5. Code Climate Velocity

Code Climate Velocity is a software engineering intelligence platform that provides comprehensive visibility to improve productivity and efficiency. This is another solution that focuses on increasing value through code-level insights.

Code Climate Velocity may be one of the more affordable options on this list, but according to G2 customer reviews, this translates into a lack of ease, customer support, and functionality.

Key features of Code Climate Velocity

• Provides numerous features related to productivity.
• Compares team members against company and industry benchmarks.
• Offers cloud-based SaaS and on-premises option.

What are some limitations of Code Climate Velocity?

• Great potential, but limitations make it difficult to get maximum value.
• Dashboards lack functionality of competitors.
• Can be hard to understand at first, need guidance on metrics.

6. Cortex

Cortex is an internal developer platform for continuously improving software. As you might guess, this solution centers the developer rather than greater business strategy. Its “Engineering Intelligence” prioritizes contextual analysis, including software health, recovery times, security posture, and more.

Key features of Cortex

• Integrates with developer tools and centralizes information.
• Provides scorecards to track alignment to best practices.
• Allows full customization of the UI with plugins.

What are some limitations of Cortex?

• Great potential, awaiting a smoother experience.

7. Swarmia

Swarmia is a software engineering intelligence platform for improving the developer experience, developer productivity, and business outcomes. However, this solution leans more toward optimizing the developer workflow than high-level metrics to guide alignment with business objectives.

Key features of Swarmia

• Measures proven engineering metrics related to performance.
• Gives business leaders the visibility they need to make informed decisions.
• Automates manual processes and feedback loops for developers.

What are some limitations of Swarmia?

• I wish the org setup was easier and more intuitive.
• It’s a bit slow to load most of the time.
• Great product, ridiculous pricing.

8. Haystack

Haystack is a delivery analytics platform for building software faster, better, and more predictably. It places a strong emphasis on being developer-friendly and optimizing the software development lifecycle but doesn’t offer robust code-level analytics like Code Climate Velocity, for example.

Key features of Haystack

• Tracks DORA metrics and analyzes data from GitHub.
• Provides clear visualizations and dashboards.
• Delivers AI-generated software release notes.

What are some limitations of Haystack?

• The web interface works slow sometimes.
• Some of the stats are not very actionable and it’s not clear how to use them to help empower the team.
• I use it just because I have to, not because I want to.

Note: A few of these tools offer free trials, but for the most part, players in this space do not currently publish their pricing structure. If you’d like to learn more about their costs, contact a sales rep.

Jellyfish – The #1 LinearB Alternative.

“Jellyfish helps our entire organization understand where our development teams are investing their time and energy holistically. Best of all, I can quickly and easily provide clarity to our executive team and our board of directors… Simply put, Jellyfish allows me to focus on the strategy and the people rather than the administration.”

– Alex Thompson, CPO

Jellyfish is the only engineering intelligence solution on the market that surpasses LinearB in terms of both tangible, real-world opportunities for improvement and high-level business strategy. It empowers DevOps to drive real, measurable value for the entire business.

In short, dev teams run better with Jellyfish – the leading Engineering Management Platform that enhances strategic planning, team health, and predictive delivery – all without the security risks and other downsides of LinearB.

Are you ready to maximize the impact of software engineering? Schedule a demo to see if Jellyfish is right for your team.