LinearB Reviews & Product Details

LinearB has been transofmrational for our organization, by increasing efficiency, transparency, and quality in our software delivery processes.

Prior to LinearB adoption, we had challenges with feature delivery predictability. Knowing when a release will hit, gauging the timeframes, and planning accuracy are all crucial to us. With LinearB, our releases have become more like clockwork, with surprises (the undesirable ones, at least) becoming a thing of the past.

LinearB ensures that our end product is nothing short of top-notch. With its comprehensive engineering quality metrics, we've observed a significant improvement in engineering core metrics such as PR sizes, New Code/Refactor/Rework ratios and more. We are also now starting to leverage WorkerB which is a fantastic bot that sends meaningful and purposeful pieces of information to teams and individuals. The information is very contextual and it reduces cognitive load on engineers that is requred as they progress through the development cycles.

LinearB has a really nice UI and it is very easy to use. The dashboards and visualizations provide a clear overview of our projects at a glance via GitHub and Jira integrations, allowing for quick decision-making.

We couldn't be happier with our experience, and most certainly recommend LinearB to any organization looking to elevate their software delivery management. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Areas for Improvement:

While LinearB shines in many areas, there are a couple of aspects that could benefit from fine-tuning:

While LinearB works seamlessly with Github and Jira, which are the platforms we use, broader integrations could elevate its value even further. However, we feel like LinearB provides us with all the best industry benchmarks already, and we constatly guided by that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Using LinearB presents us with combined insights from multiple data sources that we did not have before. This enables teams to take action, ideally proactively, to improve their ability to create and deliver valuable outcomes for customers. From the moment we started our PoC LinearB helped us identify that which we otherwise would not have known, meaning action could be taken by our teams.

Continuous improvement activities in teams can be directly linked to LinearB metrics with cause-and-effect visible. Hence, improvements that are not yielding positive change can quickly be re-assessed, and those that are yielding benefits sustained and enhanced.

Additionally, any service is only as good as the customer service it provides. This, because rapid resolution of issues, and clarification of uncertainty, is what enables adoption of tooling. LinearB's team is incredibly easy to work with: they are engaged, thoughtful and a breath of fresh air! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Certain features were not available to us initially due to our company's toolset. This was not a fault of LinearB, and we engaged with them to resolve these one-by-one. This shows just how good LinearB's support has been as they've helped shape the tool to our needs.

Not a "dislike" as such, but worth noting : you have to get buy-in from top to bottom in an organisation for a tool like LinearB to bed in and be useful. This, to avoid it becoming management-by-statistics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that I have a tool that shows me allocations and key metrics without needing to compute by hand. LinearB has allowed me to focus on key metrics like the DORA metrics to understand how my team is doing. I've also been able to accurately figure out where we're spending our time from a resource allocation perspective.

Prior to signing up with LinearB I spent a lot of time and energy trying to calculate this information with spreadsheets and manually updating data from our ticketing system. The integrations between our code repository and ticketing system makes those calculations happen automatically. This is allowing us to work cross-functionally within my organization to make sure we focus on the right thing.

The ability to drive a software team with accurate DORA metrics contributes to changing the culture in our organization. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'm not sure there's much to put here that's not super nitpicky. It would be amazing if the data refreshed instantaneously when I make team or configuration changes. With the amount of data we generate I can't fault the system for taking a few minutes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

LinearB has given our business critical telemetry and attribution for our engineering teams. In the past 6 months the wins enabled by the tool include the following.

1. 90% reduction in time to release resulting in a massive reduction in cycle time for our organization.

2. Cycle time for teams has been reduced by 66% from an average of 6 days to deliver value when we started using LinearB to an average of 2 days now.

3. Team planning accuracy has been very useful for retros to speak with the product manager and engineering manager.

As we have improved our pracitce around planning our ability to hit delivery dates has improved significantly. Prior to having LinearB we were constantly experiencing rollover work and pushed deadlines due to poor practices around planning. While we are still very much in the process of tackling this problem, and LinearB gives us the visiblity we need to manage the improvement. In the past 6 months we have gone from an org avererage of ~50% and have improved to around 70% today. The result is immideate and is allowing us to better time when major feature work will ship and coordinate the business as a whole. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While the product has progressed signficantly in the past year I am still very excited for more granular analytics views where I can more easily switch between mean and average values at a per-team level. It's not a significant issue, but it's something that will be nice to have when they implement this feature. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

LinearB integrates with out git repositories and Jira and give us, in BigID, a full picture of the work that is done.

Jira can present some KPIs, but in LinearB it's integrated with git and shown in a friendly way to the users.

Some of our most viewed features in LinearB are:

Cycle time - help identify bottle necks

Work breakdown - helps us see what % of refactor was done and if additional testing is needed or perhaps a retro to why this happened

High interaction MRs

Review request hanging

Projects: Planning & Capacity accuracy. This helps the teams plan better, understand better the work with Jira and adds motivation when they see the accuracy rise :)

Also, we get from time to time a report that shows how the work is distributed over the week and over the day, which is very insightful.

The support team are great. Always quick to respond and very helpful.

And the team of CSMs that we work with are the best. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The tool is designed to Saas products, which is great.

But it would be great if the cycle time could have been configurable (i.e. remove the Deploy part in our case). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I tested and compared numerous other tools such as Haystack, WayDev, etc, and by far, LinearB was the best one as it combines all the required metrics in a nice tool to use every day. In addition, their engineering and support team is top-notch and friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As I work in a tech consultancy, we need to manage multiple instances of LinearB. While multiple organization features work, it is not that smooth and introduces some frictiosn. These are not deal breakers but it could be better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

LinearB offers several positive features that can greatly benefit development teams and projects. More than a KPI tracking tool, it really helps in building better coding practices and culture.

It can be a great help in coaching and growing the skills of your Team Leads, as it is simple to use and customize.

On top of that, you can clearly see that they are working a lot on the product, and listen to their customers. They release useful new features every quarter, if not every month. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While it tries to provide single pan of glass from the developer level up to the C level, it doesn't quite achieve this goal yet.

I can see it could greatly benefit on the developer eduction side and on the C level reporting. Hopefully will come soon! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

LinearB enables you to collect information from your source control system and task management tool and visualize the data. It helps an engineering manager to understand where his org can improve, what metrics he should focus on and take actions to improve them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

LinearB provides a lot of dashboards and metrics, and you can customize them. I was missing the ability to push information to managers / team leads, through a weekly email or slack message. Adding this would make it easier to get people's focus on the metrics that are important, and act to change and improve them, faster. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

LinearB provides great information to engineering leaders for understanding objectively how their teams are performing and how to improve it. I think it does a great job at presenting the information and provides also good tools for leaders to take action on that data. I also like a lot the Dev Interrupted community and the Interact events, I think they are a great complement to LinearB. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'd love to see industry benchmarks in more metrics. Also I think it would be great to have better tools to take action on metrics, and the possibility to have goals set on any metric. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One standout aspect of LinearB is their exceptional customer support. Whenever we encountered a challenge their team is quick to respond and assist. They offer a regular stream of new product features and are happy to take user feedback into consideration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

New features often feel rushed into production, leading to usability issues that have required feedback/iterations before they became fully functional for our needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.