LinearB alternative
LinearB publishes its price — and a 50-developer floor to go with it.
LinearB is the one Magic Quadrant Leader that tells you its price up front — and then applies a hard 50-developer minimum that makes the entry point a five-figure annual commitment, with no self-hosted edition at any price. If your team is smaller than the floor, or your data can't go to a vendor's cloud, Deckgauge is the source-available alternative you run yourself.
SELF-HOSTED · FREE AND UNCAPPED CORE · NO DEVELOPER MINIMUM
Where each one wins.
| LinearB | Deckgauge | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry point | $29 per developer per month with a hard 50-developer minimum — a $17,400/year floor. The free tier has been removed | $600/month published, from the first engineer — $13,200/year at 50. Self-hosted core free and uncapped |
| Where the data lives | LinearB cloud | Your Postgres and ClickHouse, on your hardware |
| Can you read the source? | No | Yes — FSL-1.1-ALv2, converts to Apache-2.0 in 2028 |
| Workflow automation | Yes — PR checks, branch-aging nudges, worker bees | No. Deckgauge measures and aligns; it does not touch your developers' workflow |
| The board itself | Metrics product beside your tracker | Monday-style board over all sources, roadmaps, alignment meetings on it |
| CapEx/OpEx for finance | Reporting capability | Derived from tracker history, no timesheets, contestable ledger |
| SOC 2 / analyst placement | Yes, Gartner MQ Leader | No. What we offer instead is the source code |
Every figure and its source is in the table on the pricing page.
Three reasons teams end up here.
- Under the floor. A 20-engineer organisation cannot become a LinearB customer at any price; the minimum is the product. Deckgauge's core is free at any size, and the paid plan bills from the first engineer.
- Data residency or a works council. LinearB has no self-hosted edition. If the answer to "can this leave our network?" is no, a cloud-only platform is disqualified regardless of its metrics.
- You want a board, not a sidebar. LinearB is a metrics layer that sits beside your tracker. Deckgauge is also the place you run your leadership meeting: one board over every source, decisions commented and re-prioritised in it, roadmaps generated from it.
What LinearB does that we do not.
- No workflow automation. LinearB's worker bees act on your pull requests and branches. Deckgauge deliberately does not — it observes, it does not intervene. If you want the nudges, LinearB earns its price.
- Five connectors (Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, calendar) plus Microsoft Graph — not a catalogue.
- No SOC 2, no analyst placement, no survey instrument. The substitute for the first is source you can read; the other two are gaps, stated rather than spun.
Nothing to export, and you can run both.
Both products derive their analytics from your tracker and your Git provider, both are read-only against them, and neither holds the original data. Switching to Deckgauge is a fresh install and a first sync — and because it runs on your hardware, you can stand it up beside LinearB for a month and compare the two on the same weeks of real work before any contract decision.
What people actually ask.
Is there a LinearB alternative with no developer minimum?
Yes — Deckgauge. LinearB publishes 29 dollars per developer per month, but will not sell below 50 developers, which makes its entry point a five-figure annual commitment. Deckgauge's self-hosted core is free and uncapped at any team size, and its published hosted/commercial plan starts at $600 / month from the first engineer.
Can Deckgauge self-host where LinearB cannot?
Yes. LinearB is a cloud SaaS with no self-hosted edition — your repository and tracker metadata are processed in LinearB's cloud. Deckgauge runs on your own infrastructure: Postgres, ClickHouse, Redis and Keycloak in Docker on your hardware, with read-only connectors to Jira, GitHub, GitLab and Azure DevOps, and the LLM inference for its advisor on the same box. For an organisation whose source-control history cannot leave its network, that is the difference that matters.
What does LinearB have that Deckgauge does not?
A Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader position, worker-productivity automations that intervene in your workflow (pull-request size checks, branch aging notifications), a large connector catalogue, and an organisation behind it. Deckgauge measures and aligns — one board, DORA, flow, review analytics, workload, CapEx/OpEx — but does not automate your developers' workflow, has five connectors plus Microsoft Graph, no survey instrument and no SOC 2. If workflow automation is what you want, LinearB is the better tool.
Is Deckgauge really free to run ourselves?
Yes — free at any size, commercially, forever, under the FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0 licence. There is no seat cap and no feature gate on the metrics. What you pay for, if you ever pay, is us hosting it or a commercial licence — and that price is published rather than quoted. The one licence restriction is reselling it as a competing hosted service.
How do we try it against our own data?
One command installs it (Docker, four commands including migrations), you connect a Jira project or a Git source read-only, and the first sync backfills history — twelve months by default on a GitHub source. There is also a hosted demo seeded with a fictional company if you want to see a populated board before installing anything. Run it beside LinearB on the same weeks of real data before you decide anything.
Try it on the live demo, read the licence, or write to support@codpal.com and a person will answer.