Ekso vs. Linear
Linear is beautiful. Ekso is beautiful and profitable.
Everything Linear does, plus everything it doesn't
Financial intelligence, not just velocity
Linear tracks issues per sprint. Ekso tracks what those sprints cost. Attach job roles, rate cards, and cost centers to every piece of work — and see profitability by project, team, or client without a spreadsheet.
Helpdesk included, not excluded
Linear has no concept of customer support. Ekso includes email-to-ticket conversion, SLA tracking, business clocks, and customer replies — in the same platform your delivery team already works in.
Docs and knowledge base, built in
Linear doesn't do documentation. Ekso includes a full knowledge base — SOPs, runbooks, and guides that live inside the platform, vectorized and searchable by AI, with folder-level access control.
Enterprise controls that scale
Linear is lean by design — great until you need SLAs, data constraints, field-level permissions, or multi-process workflows. Ekso gives you custom processes, automation rules, and approval flows out of the box.
AI that reasons across everything
Every item, ticket, doc, and time entry in Ekso is indexed and searchable by meaning. Bring your own models from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Azure Foundry. Connect via MCP from Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot.
Your infra, your rules
Linear is multi-tenant SaaS with no deployment choice. Ekso runs on your own infrastructure — public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise. Your data, your region, your compliance posture. SAML/OIDC SSO and MFA come standard.
Switch from Linear in one command
The Ekso CLI ships with a built-in migrator. Pull your Linear teams, issues, comments, attachments, cycles, and labels into a local cache, preview with
--dry-run, then write everything into your Ekso tenant. Markdown bodies pass through unchanged. Original authors are preserved.
ekso migrate linear collect --config migration.config.json --team ENG ekso migrate linear apply --config migration.config.json --process <process-id>
- Teams become containers
Each Linear team maps to an Ekso DataContainer. Cross-team projects survive as
project:-prefixed labels. - Markdown preserved, cycles intact Linear’s markdown bodies pass through unchanged. Cycles map to Ekso cycles when the destination process supports them.
- Estimates round-trip
Linear’s first-class estimate becomes an Ekso process field via
--field-map. Auto-created if it doesn’t exist yet.
The features Linear says it won't build.
From the public reviews of Linear in 2026: “no custom roles or granular permission sets beyond the built-in roles” and “Linear doesn't allow you to build entirely bespoke workflows.” If you need approval flows, regulatory audit trails, or multi-process governance, Linear isn't built for that. Ekso treats those as table stakes — enterprise depth, configurable in clicks. Groups, Authentication, Process, and Rules all included, all manageable by your admin without a quarter of training.
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