Project management for software studios: Linear, Jira, Plane and Atrix compared for client work

What makes studio work different from product work

A product team has one backlog and one repository. A studio has five of each, and the five clients must never see each other's work. That changes what you need from a tool:

• Hard separation per client. One client's board, pages and people must be invisible to another client's guest account.
• Several repositories, several cadences. Client A ships every two weeks; client B is a fixed-scope build with a deadline. Sprints per client, not per company.
• A record of what was agreed. Scope creep is the studio's biggest margin leak. You need a frozen list of requirements and a way to show what changed.
• Exportable records. When the engagement ends, the client expects the issues, the docs and the decisions, not a screenshot.
• Low admin. A studio of eight has no project management office. If the tool needs a full-time admin, it costs a seat you cannot bill.

Cost matters too, but less than people think. A tool that saves one disputed invoice a year pays for itself at any price in the table below.

The four tools, as of October 2026

Prices are the figures each vendor shows on its own pricing page in October 2026. Linear's page only lists yearly-billed rates. Jira's page shows per-user figures without stating the billing cycle, and its rates step down past 100 users, which does not affect a studio. Linear's free plan is capped at 250 issues and 2 teams; Jira's at 10 users; Plane's at 12 seats. Atrix has no free plan: a 7-day trial with a card.

Linear: the fastest board, and the one clients like to look at

Linear is the tool most studio engineers would pick for themselves. Issues are fast to create, cycles are built in, and the GitHub integration is the best of the four: a branch named after an issue moves it to In Progress, and a merged PR closes it.

For client work the structure is teams. One team per client works, and guests (on Business, $16 per user per month billed yearly) can be limited to one team. What Linear does not have is a record of agreed scope. Project documents are good, but nothing tells you that requirement 14 was dropped in week six. You keep that in a doc and check it by hand.

Where it costs: a studio of 10 on Business pays $160 a month, before any client guest that needs more than viewer access.

Jira: the one your enterprise client already uses

If your clients are large companies, there is a good chance they run Jira, and the cheapest way to work with them is often inside their instance rather than yours. When you run your own, Jira's permission schemes give the hardest client separation of the four, and the GitHub for Jira app links commits, branches and PRs to issues.

The costs are time and sprawl. Jira needs someone to own the configuration: workflows, schemes, issue types. Documents live in Confluence, a second product with its own per-user price. For a studio of eight with no admin, Jira is usually more tool than the work needs, and the hours spent configuring it do not appear on any invoice.

Plane: open source when you want to own the data

Plane is the open-source option. The cloud free plan covers 12 seats, Pro is $6 per user per month billed yearly, and you can self-host the whole thing. For a studio that signs data-residency clauses, running Plane on your own server is a real answer rather than a workaround.

The trade-off is maturity. Workflows, Wiki and integrations are on paid plans, and the feature set moves quickly, which is good for the roadmap and less good for a process you want to stay still for a year. Check the current plan table before you commit: the free plan lost features in 2026 compared with a year earlier.

Atrix: one product per client, with a requirements audit

Atrix takes a different shape. Each client engagement is a product inside your workspace, and every product carries its own board (five views), backlog, cycles of one to four weeks with a goal and burndown, coloured labels, milestones, and a nested tree of pages. A guest invited to one product sees that product and nothing else. You see all of them in one place, which is the view a studio owner actually wants on a Monday.

Two parts matter for studios specifically:

1. Requirements audit. You write or generate the requirements, freeze them as a baseline, and the audit shows for each one whether work is missing, in progress or done, and flags anything added or dropped since the freeze. This is a requirements audit, not a code audit: Atrix does not read your repository or run static analysis. When a client asks for a code audit, that is a human job, and our agency side does it separately. The requirements audit page spells out the difference.
2. Records that leave with the client. The whole workspace exports to a ZIP, so handover is a file, not a screen-share. The MCP server (85 tools) and REST API (90 endpoints) let a technical client pull their own data.

The GitHub link is honest but limited. You connect a repository to a product and the product page shows whether the code is moving: last push, open pull requests, commit counts over 7 and 30 days. Atrix makes no write requests to GitHub and does not move issues when a branch is pushed. Private repositories are capped at 1 on Builder and 10 on Studio, which is why Studio is the studio plan. The GitHub integration page lists exactly what is read.

Pricing is flat: Builder $39 a month for 5 seats, Studio $149 for 15, yearly 20% off. Founding teams that subscribe before 31 December 2026 keep unlimited seats. The awkward size is 6 to 12 people, where Studio costs more per head than Linear Basic.

How to choose for your studio

1. Count clients, not people. Three or fewer concurrent clients and a product-style team: Linear. Five or more, with scope disputes you want to end: Atrix or Jira.
2. Ask who your clients are. Enterprise clients on Jira: meet them there. Startups and SMBs: anything in the table.
3. Check the handover clause. If contracts say the client owns the records, test the export before signing the first one.
4. Decide who owns the tool. No admin capacity means no Jira.
5. Price the whole stack. Add docs, chat and time tracking if the tool does not include them. The stack cost calculator does this sum.

FAQ

What is the best project management tool for a small software agency?

For a small agency with several concurrent clients, pick a tool that separates each client's work and keeps a record of agreed scope: Atrix (one product per client plus a requirements audit) or Jira (permission schemes). Linear is the better choice when the agency runs one or two long engagements that behave like product teams.

Can clients see each other's projects?

Not if the tool is set up correctly. Linear limits guests by team, Jira by project permission scheme, and Atrix by product. Test this with a dummy guest account before inviting a real client.

Does Atrix integrate with GitHub?

Yes, read-only at the repository level. A linked repository shows last push, open pull requests, issues and commit counts on the product page. Atrix does not write to GitHub, does not move issues on branch push, and does not scan code.

What is a requirements audit?

A comparison between a frozen list of agreed requirements and the work in the backlog: covered, in progress, missing, added or dropped since the freeze. It is a scope record, not a security review.

Is Jira overkill for a team of eight?

Usually. Jira rewards a dedicated admin and a long configuration phase. A studio of eight with no admin tends to end up with workflows nobody understands. Linear, Plane or Atrix need less setup.

Next step

Read how Atrix is set up for software studios, then compare it feature by feature with Linear and Jira before you start a trial.

Sources

Prices checked on each vendor's pricing page in October 2026: Linear, Jira, Plane, Atrix.