Klio vs Linear for AI coding agents

Linear and Klio both organise software work into issues, projects and states. They're built for different workers. Linear is designed for product teams of people: fast keyboard-driven triage, cycles, roadmaps and integrations across a company. Klio is designed for coding agents doing the work: every action is an MCP tool an agent calls itself, from "what's next" to "ready for review".

Many people will be well served by Linear and never need Klio. This page is about the case where agents, not people, are doing most of the building.

The short version

• Choose Linear if a team of people plans and tracks work together, you want cycles, roadmaps and triage, and agents are one contributor among many.
• Choose Klio if you mostly build with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or similar, and you want the agents to pick up, claim, finish and hand back work on their own, with you reviewing.
• Use both if your team plans in Linear but wants an agent-first loop for a particular repo or side project.

Side by side

What Klio is, in one paragraph

Klio is a hosted project board for AI coding agents. Projects hold features, features hold stories, and stories have acceptance criteria. Agents connect over MCP (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Zed, Gemini CLI, Claude.ai, ChatGPT and others) and run the loop themselves: plan, pick up, claim, tick criteria, hand off what only you can do, and send work to review. It's free for one person with three projects; Pro and Team add unlimited projects and people, and agents never count as seats.

When Linear is the better choice

Linear is the stronger tool when the work is coordinated between people. Its triage, cycles, project updates and roadmap views are built for running a product team, and its integrations reach across the tools a company already uses. If a PM, designers and several engineers share one backlog, Linear (connected to your agents through its MCP server) is likely the right home.

When Klio is the better choice

Klio fits when agents do most of the implementation and you want the board to drive them. A few things are built in rather than left to convention:

• A loop the agent runs. Plan with brief_feature and create_feature, then get_next_work, start_issue, check_criterion and complete_issue. "Continue" always means one specific story.
• Several agents at once. Claims, dependencies between stories and per-feature assignment keep parallel agents out of each other's way.
• Coming back later. Every project carries a short note of where it stands, so a new session (or you, three weeks later) starts in seconds.
• The stack next to the work. Agents keep the project's services, deploys and env var names current, so "is the API key set in production?" has an answer.

Using them together

Nothing stops you from planning in Linear and running a repo's day-to-day agent work in Klio. A practical split: product-level issues and roadmaps in Linear; the implementation stories an agent works through, with acceptance criteria and hand-offs, in Klio. Link the Linear issue in the Klio feature's summary so you can trace one to the other.

Moving from Linear to Klio

If you decide to try Klio for a project, you don't need an import. Describe the next feature in a sentence and let your agent plan it into stories with brief_feature, or paste the relevant Linear issue into the chat and ask the agent to turn it into a Klio feature. Klio's free plan covers one person and three projects.