Rilbo vs Linear
Linear is a well-made hosted tracker, and for a lot of teams it is the right answer. Rilbo is built on a different premise: the tracker is a binary you run, and the workspace is a file you own. This page sets the two side by side so you can decide which premise suits you.
Comparison accurate as of 3 August 2026. Linear's plans and features change; every Linear claim below is sourced from Linear's own public pages, listed at the bottom. If you spot something out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
At a glance
| Rilbo | Linear | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | One SQLite file on a disk you control, ~/.rilbo/rilbo.db by default | Linear's hosted cloud. You pick a workspace region — United States or European Union — at creation; workspace, account and API-key data is always stored in the United States |
| Pricing | Free tier, £0 forever, is the complete single-user tracker. Pro and Team tiers are announced but prices are not published yet | Free $0 (250 issues, 2 teams, unlimited members); Basic $10 per user/month billed yearly; Business $16 per user/month billed yearly; Enterprise custom, annual billing only |
| Agent tooling (MCP) | MCP server built into the same binary, over stdio and Streamable HTTP — 39 tools, with scope allowlists, a read-only mode, propose-instead-of-apply writes and dry_run | Official MCP server, centrally hosted and managed, at https://mcp.linear.app/mcp (and a read-only endpoint) |
| Programmatic API | REST under /api/v1, with an OpenAPI 3.1.2 document served at /api/v1/openapi.json, plus an SSE event stream | GraphQL — "Linear's public API is built using GraphQL" |
| Native mobile apps | None. Responsive web UI, plus Web Push notifications | Native iOS and Android apps, built in Swift and Kotlin |
| Third-party integrations | No directory. A GitHub webhook in, and Slack, Telegram, generic webhooks, SMTP and calendar feeds out | An integration directory spanning categories including Essentials, Engineering, Agents, Customer Experience and Analytics, with a documented route for third parties to submit their own |
| Getting your data out | rilbo export writes portable compressed JSON, and rilbo backup snapshots the database. Neither is licence-gated | CSV export (Markdown and PDF in places). Members can export up to 250 issues at a time, admins up to 2,000; guest users cannot export |
| Outbound network connections | None, unless you configure a notification channel. Checked on every change: one build step fails if source outside the notification sinks can open a socket, another runs the release image with egress blocked and requires an outbound connect to fail. Publishing an image is gated on both | Not a question a hosted tracker can answer the same way — your workspace lives on Linear's servers, so the connection to them is the product, not an optional channel (see "Where your data lives" above) |
What Linear offers that Rilbo does not
Worth being straight about, because for many teams one of these is decisive:
- Native mobile apps. Linear ships iOS and Android clients. Rilbo has a responsive web UI and Web Push, and no native app.
- A real integration ecosystem. Linear has a published directory and lets third parties submit integrations. Rilbo has a short, fixed list of first-party channels.
- Somebody else runs it. Linear is hosted: no server to provision, back up, patch or upgrade. With Rilbo, that is your job — which is the point, but it is still a job.
- Enterprise administration. Linear's Enterprise plan advertises SAML/SCIM, granular admin controls, migration support and account management. Rilbo's SSO/SCIM story is a conversation, not a shipped feature.
- You can buy it today. Linear's paid tiers are purchasable now. Rilbo's Pro and Team tiers do not have published prices yet, so multi-user seat management — which is built — is not something you can currently pay for.
What Rilbo does differently
- The workspace is a file. Everything lives in one SQLite database on your machine. Copy it, back it up, put it in a private repo, keep it on an encrypted volume — it is an ordinary file.
- One binary, nothing else. Web UI, REST API, MCP server, migrations and assets are compiled into a single Rust executable. No Node, no database server, no container runtime needed to run it.
- Licensing that works offline. A licence is a signed JSON file, verified locally against an Ed25519 key built into the binary. No licence server, no activation call; it works air-gapped.
- Expiry that does not take hostages. When a licence lapses, premium actions pause and the app reverts to the Free feature set. The database is never locked, nothing is deleted, and
rilbo exportandrilbo backupkeep working regardless. - Zero egress by default, and we prove it. No telemetry, in the app or on this site — and no update check or licence call either. The only outbound calls Rilbo can make are ones you configure yourself: your SMTP relay, your webhook, your Slack hook, Telegram, your subscribers' push service. That is checked on every change rather than asserted once: one check fails the build if any source outside those sinks can open a socket, and another starts the release image on a network with no route off it and fails the build unless an outbound connection is refused. Publishing a release image is gated on both. The egress-blocked deployment profile CI uses is the one we ship you, so you can verify the claim rather than believe it — the network egress section has the destinations, the recipes and the caveats.
- Agents are a first-class client, not an add-on. The MCP server runs in the same process as the tracker, so an agent works your issues through the same code paths the UI does, with guard rails you set.
Moving issues across
Rilbo has a Linear importer built into the CLI:
rilbo import linear-json issues.jsonIt reads a JSON array of issues (or an object with an issues array) and maps title, description, priority, labels, state, assignee and comments onto Rilbo's normal issue-creation path, so identifiers, search indexing and activity history all come out the same as a native create.
Two honest caveats. The importer is deliberately best-effort: rows it cannot accept are skipped and counted with a reason rather than aborting the run. And Linear's built-in export is CSV, not JSON — so today you will need to produce JSON yourself, most straightforwardly from Linear's GraphQL API. There is a rilbo import github-issues command with the same shape for GitHub Issues.
The quickstart covers getting Rilbo running first; configuration covers the importers and backups.
Sources
Linear-side claims on this page were checked by hand on 3 August 2026 against:
- https://linear.app/pricing — plans, prices, billing periods, Free plan limits, Enterprise features
- https://linear.app/docs/api-and-webhooks — GraphQL API
- https://linear.app/docs/mcp — hosted MCP server and endpoints
- https://linear.app/mobile — native iOS and Android apps
- https://linear.app/integrations — integration directory and categories
- https://linear.app/docs/security — data regions and storage location
- https://linear.app/docs/exporting-data — export formats and limits
Rilbo-side claims are traceable to Rilbo's own source and to the documentation published on this site.
Linear is a trademark of Linear Orbit, Inc. GitHub is a trademark of GitHub, Inc. Rilbo is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by either.