Linear's 2026 free plan dropped from 250 members to 10 — Huly is an open-source, self-hostable tracker with the same keyboard-fast feel and no seat cap.
In February 2026 Linear cut its free plan hard — from up to 250 members down to 10 — while adding a higher “Scale” tier, so small teams that had been living comfortably on the free plan suddenly hit a wall at the eleventh seat. Huly is the open-source answer: a keyboard-driven issue tracker built in the Linear mold that you can self-host with no per-seat meter at all.
Huly gives you the fast issue workflow Linear people love — command-menu navigation, keyboard shortcuts, cycles and sprints, sub-issues, projects and roadmaps — and folds in documents and a virtual team office besides. Self-hosted, every seat is free, so a growing team is never punished for its eleventh or fiftieth member; if you would rather not run it, the managed cloud has its own free tier to start on.
The honest gap is maturity. Linear is faster and more polished, with years of refinement and a deeper integration ecosystem across GitHub, Slack and Figma. Huly is younger, so you will meet rough edges, fewer third-party integrations, and the operational cost of hosting and updating it yourself. A team that leans hard on Linear’s exact GitHub sync will feel those gaps most.
Expect a day or two to switch. Huly provides importers — including from Linear and from CSV — so issues, statuses and comments can come across rather than being retyped. Stand up the Docker stack, import a single project first to validate the mapping, wire up the integrations you actually use, and move teams over once the workflow feels right. Keep Linear’s free 10-seat tier as a fallback while you settle in.