Yokka vs Linear and Jira: a simpler board for coding agents

When people want a simple issue tracker, they usually mean Linear. It’s fast, it looks good, and next to Jira it feels light. We like it.

But “simple” depends on the job. Linear is built for product teams: people who plan quarters, run sprints, triage customer feedback and write specs. This year it added agents on top of all that. Jira is the same idea at a bigger scale. If your day looks like write down what you want, hand it to Claude Code or Codex, answer its questions, review what comes back, most of that is surface you’ll never touch. And every field you don’t need is still something to configure, something to fill in, or something an agent can fill in wrong.

Yokka is smaller on purpose. This post covers what we left out, what’s left, and when you should use Linear or Jira instead.

Count the decisions

Look at what each tool asks you to decide before work starts.

Jira: an issue type, then whatever fields your project’s workflow requires, then a status from a workflow your admin designed. Sprints, story points, components and fix versions come next if your team uses them. All of that is useful in a large organisation and heavy for one developer with three agents.

Linear: a team, and then the properties an issue can carry: priority, assignee, estimate, labels, project, cycle, milestone, due date, parent issue. Each one is optional and quick to set. Together they still add up to a planning system, with Triage, Cycles, Projects, Initiatives, Roadmaps, Documents, Customer requests and Insights around it.

Yokka: a title and a brief. The brief says what you want, why, and what done looks like. Add a checklist if you want to spell out acceptance criteria. That’s it. add_card, the tool agents use to file work, needs nothing but the title.

Not having fields isn’t the point. The point is that a brief is what an agent needs. Agents don’t read story points. They read the paragraph that tells them what you want, and they do better work when it’s a good paragraph rather than a one-line title surrounded by metadata.

One board, not a planning system

A Yokka workspace has projects. A project has a board. The board is split into swimlanes by kind of work, each with its own lanes:

You get Features and Bugs when you sign up, and can rename, add or remove lanes later. There are no cycles to plan, no roadmap to keep current and no hierarchy above the board apart from optional epics. You can see everything that’s happening on one screen, because there isn’t anything else.

The board updates itself

This is the part that makes Yokka feel simple day to day. You don’t drag cards to keep the board honest. The agents’ work moves them.

When an agent claims a card, it moves to Working and shows who has it. When the agent asks you a question, the card moves to Needs you. When it finishes, the card moves to Review with a summary of what changed. If an agent goes quiet for 30 minutes, the card is flagged. If its session ends without finishing, the card goes back to be picked up again, with a note saying why.

None of this relies on the agent remembering to update a status. Flow rules run in the same transaction as the agent’s call, so the board can’t fall behind what the agent actually did. Connect GitHub and a merged pull request moves the card to Shipped too.

With a general-purpose tracker reached over MCP, moving the issue is a separate tool call the model has to choose to make. Sometimes it does. We covered what goes wrong when it doesn’t in Trello MCP server vs Jira and Linear.

One place to look

When you run several agents, you mostly need to know one thing: does anything need me right now?

• Needs you is an inbox of every question an agent is waiting on, across all your projects. Agents can offer two to six options, so most answers are one tap, on your phone too.
• What happened (press N) sums up everything since you last looked: one line like “1 needs you · 3 shipped · 4 claimed by 2 agents”, then the cards behind it.
• Notifications reach your phone, your browser, or your team’s chat when an agent asks something or a run finishes.

You don’t need to keep a terminal in view or read through the board. If nothing needs you, you can get on with something else. We wrote more about where people belong in the loop in Human-in-the-loop for AI coding agents.

Setup is one command

In Claude Code, you install the plugin with your token and you’re connected:

claude plugin marketplace add yokka-ai/plugins
claude plugin install yokka@yokka --config token=<token>

Codex, Cursor, VS Code, the Claude app and ChatGPT connect with a link or a one-click install. Your first project comes with a “Say hello from your agent” card. Ask your agent to pick it up, and it adds a short section to your repo’s AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md so future sessions know which project to use. The quickstart takes about five minutes.

There’s no workflow to design first. Agents arrive already knowing the loop: claim a card, read the brief, plan with a checklist, report progress, ask when stuck, complete with a summary. The server sends those instructions when an agent connects.

Your agents, on your machine

Linear’s answer to coding agents is to run them itself. Since June 2026, coding sessions run Claude Code or Codex in Linear’s cloud, against your GitHub repository, paid with AI credits on the Basic plan and up. That’s convenient if you want everything inside Linear. It’s also one more agent to set up and one more budget to watch.

Yokka works with the agents you already use, on the subscriptions you already pay for. Any MCP client can work the board. If you want cards to start their own agents, the open-source runner runs on the computer that has your code. Press Start on a card, from the board or your phone, and it launches Claude Code or Codex there, in place or in its own git worktree.

What you give up

We’d rather you pick the right tool than the wrong one, so here’s what Yokka doesn’t have:

• No sprints or cycles, roadmaps, initiatives or milestones. Epics group related cards and show progress. That’s the extent of the planning.
• No intake system. No customer requests, no support-tool intake, no triage queue for feedback. The Bugs swimlane’s Triage lane is just a lane.
• No documents. Project notes hold short decisions and conventions agents should know, not specs.
• Lighter reporting. Insights cover throughput, cycle time, work in progress, how long agents wait for you, and what each agent cost. No custom dashboards.
• Fewer integrations. GitHub, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, webhooks and a REST API. No GitLab yet.

If you’re a product organisation with a roadmap, support tickets coming in and people who plan in sprints, Linear or Jira is the better fit.

You don’t have to choose one for everything, though. Plenty of teams keep the roadmap in Linear or Jira and put the work agents pick up on Yokka. Import brings issues over from Linear, GitHub or Trello when you want to try it.

Side by side

FAQ

Is Yokka a Linear alternative?

For agent work, yes. If you mostly hand work to coding agents and review the results, Yokka replaces the tracker. For product planning with roadmaps, cycles, specs and customer feedback, it doesn’t, and many teams use both.

Is Yokka a Jira alternative?

For a developer or small team running agents, yes. If you need Jira’s custom workflows, sprints and reporting across many teams, no.

Can I move my issues from Linear to Yokka?

Yes. Import brings over issues from Linear, as well as from GitHub issues and Trello.

Does Linear work with Claude Code?

Yes. Linear has an MCP server that Claude Code can connect to, and Linear’s own coding sessions can run Claude Code in Linear’s cloud. Over MCP, though, updating an issue is a tool call the agent has to choose to make. On Yokka, claiming, asking and completing move the card themselves.

Is Yokka free?

There’s a Free plan with one editor, two projects and 100 open cards. Finished cards don’t count toward that. Pro adds unlimited projects, runners, GitHub and notifications. See Plans.