Kitemaker vs Linear

Both Kitemaker and Linear make it easy to manage your software development process.
See which one is right for you.

Why Linear?

Linear is a great peice of software and we are happy to send you their way if:

You want a well polished user interface ontop of an issue tracking system.

You follow a top down product management approach, with a focus on splitting product features into small tasks and tracking progress.

You want burn down charts.

Why Kitemaker?

Kitemaker is a also great piece of software. We’ll be better fit for you if:

You run an empowered product team rather than a feature team. If you subscribe to the likes of Marty Cagan and John Cutler we think you'll like Kitemaker.

You want to track work at the feature/deliverable level rather than the task level.

You want to get the engineers and designers involved earlier on in the process before "tasks" are created.

You want to manage your customer feedback in the same tool as your development process and link between feedback and the work that needs to be done.

Foundational requirements

See what Kitemaker and Linear both do extremely well

	Linear	Kitemaker
Blazingly fast
Keyboard shortcuts for everything
Custom workflows
Filters
Global command menu
An interface that gets out of your way
Issue/Work item templates
Collaborative discussions

Where two great tools start to diverge

Both tools will help you manage your software development process and have great features. So where are the differences?

Linear issues are the same as in traditional issue trackers. They are used to track the development work required to complete a feature. When an issue is too large, seperate sub issues can be created.

Kitemaker work items follow a different philosphy. They are large collaborative documents that should describe the feature in detail and provide all the context around it. Instead of splitting a work item into sub-work items to track development tasks, you can create todos along side the content.

Work items can have multiple assignees as they usually represent a large body of work. At a glance of the board, you can see what features different team members are working on and what the status of the deliverable feature is, rather than the status of individual development tasks.