Linear tracks the tickets.
This is where they come from.

Not Linear. It replaces the scattered pile of tools that hold the pre-ticket stage: a whiteboard file nobody can find, a folder of reference screenshots, a doc with three competing plans in it, a slide deck built to explain the project to a stakeholder, and the meeting where all of that gets re-explained. Those things end up disconnected from the tracked work, so the reasoning behind a ticket evaporates. Storyflow puts all of it on one infinite canvas that stays open beside whatever tracker you ship from.

No, and it is not trying to become one. There are no cycles, no triage queue, no sprint burndown, and no engineering velocity metrics, because building a worse version of Linear would help nobody. Storyflow is a visual planning canvas: cards, boards, images, documents, research, and AI that reads the whole board as context. If a page tells you a canvas tool replaces a mature issue tracker, be suspicious of the rest of that page too.

Because Linear is opinionated in a way that makes it excellent for engineers and foreign to everyone else. Issues, estimates, cycles, triage states, and a keyboard-driven interface encode a specific way of working that a software team internalises quickly and a marketer, a client, or a founder does not. That is a feature, not a flaw. It just means that when the people who need to see a plan include people outside engineering, a visual board with cards and images gets read and a backlog does not.

Yes, and it is the setup we would actually recommend. Do the shaping on the canvas: the research, the options, the sketch of how it fits together, the scope conversation. When the plan settles, the deliverables are specific enough to become issues, so you create them in Linear and ship from there. The canvas stays as the reference for why the work looks the way it does, which is the thing that is normally lost the moment a ticket is written.

If what you need is enterprise reporting, configurable workflows, permission schemes, and an audit trail that satisfies a PMO or a compliance requirement, then yes, Jira is the tool built for that and it is genuinely deeper than Linear on those axes. The tradeoff is well known: that configurability is why Jira takes an administrator to run and why smaller teams find it heavy. Linear is faster and cleaner, Jira is more configurable, and neither is a visual planning canvas.

For issue tracking specifically, GitHub Issues and Trello both cover a lot of ground at no cost, and they are the honest recommendation if budget is the whole problem. Storyflow is paid-only during early access, with plans starting at $9.99 a month, and a Free plan launches before the end of 2026. One thing that already helps: anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so stakeholders, clients, and collaborators do not each need a paid seat to see the plan.

Storyflow is paid-only during early access with plans from $9.99 a month, and a Free plan arrives before the end of 2026. We are not going to quote anyone else's pricing here, because it changes and you should check it yourself. The structural difference worth knowing is that invited collaborators join a paid member's board free, so the cost of letting a client, a freelancer, or a colleague from another team see the plan is zero rather than another seat.

It gives you a first draft to argue with, which is a different and more useful thing. Describe the project and the AI lays out a board of cards with phases, workstreams, and open questions already placed. Because it reads the whole canvas as context, you can then ask what a launch plan is missing or how to break a phase down and get an answer about your project rather than a generic checklist. The judgment stays with you, which is the only arrangement that produces a plan worth following.

You can plan them, and many teams do. A roadmap laid out spatially, with the bets, the dependencies, and the research behind each one visible at once, communicates far better than a filtered issue list. Sprint planning works the same way: lay out candidate work as cards, move them around until the shape is right, then create the actual tracked issues in Linear or Jira. What Storyflow does not do is run the sprint for you, because burndown, capacity, and velocity belong to your tracker.

No. Share a view-only link and anyone opens the whole board in a browser with no account and no login, which is usually the fastest way to end a status conversation. If you want someone to contribute rather than just look, invite them to the board and they join free as a guest of a paid member. You can also export the board as a high-quality image or PDF when the plan needs to live in a deck or a client review.

Then Linear was probably never the right shape for you, and a lot of the friction you have been feeling is that mismatch rather than anything you are doing wrong. Marketing, design, video, editorial, and agency work is visual, exploratory, and full of reference material, which is exactly what an infinite canvas holds well and what an issue tracker flattens. Start with the plan on a board, and add a lightweight tracker later only if you find you genuinely need one.