The task and project management app Height, which we use daily to run our business and agency, is closing in September.
This means we needed to find a replacement for it. And we looked at many different apps – well-known ones and new ones.
Here is the list of tools we checked out:
and a few others I cant remember.
Before testing the apps, we created a list of features we evaluate against:
After a quick check of the above tools list, Linear and Plane were selected for the shortlist.
Both apps are similar to Height. Linear focuses on product teams, while Plane is more open to other departments. For example, tasks in Linear are “issues” (a term used in software development), while tasks in Plane are called “work items” (which signals a broader use case).
Plane also has more features when it comes to visualizations (calendar, table view, and more), or documents.
So from the point of a marketing agency Plane should be the solution to go with.
What made us decide against it?
Overall user experience: Linear is very performant and responsive, both on mobile and desktop. Fewer features mean faster navigation. Searching, navigating around, and using keyboard shortcuts—Linear does not get in your way once you’ve adapted to it.
Future-proof: Linear is around for multiple years, valued at $400m, while Plane is relatively new (launched 2 years ago)
(You can self-host Plane, but I do not buy too much into the open source message – if the for-profit company Plane fails, that does not mean development of the open source project will continue)
Repeating tasks: Very important for us. We have a long-term relationship with our clients and thus many repeating tasks, like “update monthly reporting”, or “put together weekly newsletter”, etc. While it’s on the roadmap for Plane, there is no date.
Features we would like to have in Linear:
- View subtasks in a tree structure, like we have it in Height today
- A calendar view (we fixed this by creating it by ourselves with Replit)
- Read receipts on comments
- The option to create docs on team-level
The migration from Height.app to Linear.app is still ongoing. We are still tinkering with the best way to organize our work there. But we are happy with the decision so far, and the team is discovering new features day by day that can speed up things.
There are many agency-focused project management apps out there. These all come with features for time tracking, invoicing, CRM, and many other features we do not need. We were looking for a no-BS Task Management app and found it with Linear.
