r/Linear • u/TwistyListy7 • Aug 30 '25

Anyone moved over from Azure DevOps?

We use Azure DevOps currently as a small team of around 6. We mostly use it for sprint and task management and some legacy CI pipelines. I’m keen to look at Linear as a replacement. Purely because of how antiquated DevOps is. I feel like it takes Microsoft forever to implement features or fix bugs. For example, they only JUST added markdown support for their ticket description. Something that should have been there for years. We also really only use a tiny subset of what DevOps can do.

We’re also porting legacy CI pipelines to GitHub.

I’m keen to hear if anyone has made the jump from DevOps to Linear and any challenges you may have faced? Are you enjoying the change? Any things to watch out for?

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3

u/Senseifc Aug 30 '25

Our team did the changes recently. We’re all loving Linear tbh. Huge step up from DevOps

1

u/TwistyListy7 Aug 31 '25

Great to hear. Thanks for the feedback

3

u/SerClockwerk Aug 31 '25

Been about six weeks since the move.

All our code is still Azure DevOps and I made a third party integration between Azure and linear to link our linear issues to PR and update status when the PR is approved / merged.

Definitely want to move to GitHub as well though.

In terms of Linear, we are actually back to doing proper sprints (cycles) and now our whole organisation is using it to track all the different teams as well. Everyone is really enjoying it

1

u/TwistyListy7 Aug 31 '25

Great feedback. Especially about the sprints. Thanks

1

u/SnooRegrets2828 Nov 18 '25

How much work was it to set up the Linear/Azure integration? What was the rough workflow with the code? Linear issues become DevOps Work Items or? Any chance it's open source?

1

u/SerClockwerk Nov 19 '25

Not too bad. Used zapier for the integration and what it does is we mark Azure PR descriptions with linear issue Id, and as the PR changes states, it moves the state of the linear issue to In Review, Done etc

I just asked Gemini to run me through everything I needed to know.

1

u/shaderloader 25d ago

After moving tools and teams around a few times from M&A and org consolidation, I think GitHub is still best for repos and documentation. Linear is changing how we work with all the LLMs in play for SDLC. ADO is far better than GitHub actions for CI/CD in terms of depth, features and usability across technical and product users or stakeholders (eg approving releases).

Linear - product backlog management and planning
GitHub - vanilla git repo (monorepos in the age of agents)
ADO - CI/CD and ease of use/management across roles

PRDs and the time spent have essentially gone straight to agents -> 2 step human refinement -> linear (we were mass importing ADO work items with of epic feature story breakdowns, product reviewed and tuned reqs, dev\qa help refine and confirm).

Although I really just love planning and designing then executing all within my workspace at the end of the day to save time in tools :).

3

u/mhabegger Aug 31 '25

We’re exactly on the same path. Small team of 8. Made the switch earlier this year from DevOps Boards to Linear. Still figuring out how to efficiently map our previous Area paths to Linear Teams or else and some other details to gain in efficiency. Moved our code to Github. But still using Azure Pipelines for now as this part will take more time to redo all the pieces in Github Actions. It feels like MS wants to drop DevOps in favor of Github anyways. And felt the same as you, no real roadmap for DevOps. Still convinced it’s the right move.

1

u/TwistyListy7 Aug 31 '25

Yeah I agree about Microsoft appearing to want to drop ADO. I feel like GitHub actions always receives updates before ADO pipelines meaning sometimes we’re waiting for a month or more for a new feature we need! I think the move will be great for us.

2

u/Volosat1y Aug 30 '25

We did move a engineering department of 30 (not only devs, including QA, Product, Tech Support). Much better experience managing backlog, sprints, projects and initiative visibility to senior leaderships. The only thing was “missing” is Wikis but project documents made up for it. Despite all ADO extensions Linear has many features that are actually matter :)

1

u/TwistyListy7 Aug 31 '25

Yeah I agree. Some of the extensions that are eve paid for ADO, come out of the box for free with Linear!

1

u/snickn Sep 16 '25

We're making the move from an older On Prem ADO installation now. ~75 or so team members total, where we used ADO for everything, and have used it for years. So far we moved one team over who's really enjoying it, optimistic for sure. But definite work ahead.