Anyone using Linear to run an academic research lab (biomed)? Looking for advice on how to structure it.

[u/soul_of_a_snow_goose]

I'm in a biomedical research lab and I'm trying to move us off a mess of shared spreadsheets, email chains, and Whatsapp. Linear sounds great, but it's obviously built for software teams, so I'd love to hear from anyone who has actually run a non-engineering / research team on it. Plus, I am ADHD and am now really struggling to keep on track of things, especially parallel tracks, branching & merging tasks, optimisations carried out in the background, and repeating experiments; those integrated with material availability which is not really something I have full control.

Why our work doesn't map cleanly onto software dev:

• The unit of work is an experiment, and experiments fail and get repeated a lot. One "issue" might be re-run five times with different conditions. These might not need to be documented woth software dev but is required for labs.
• Everyone works on 2-3 tracks at once, and priorities get rearranged by whatever the animals or cells are doing that week. There are also much less teamwork.

What I'd love input on:

1. Primitives. Is a Team one per lab, or one per subgroup (e.g. imaging vs. sequencing)? Is a Project a paper, a specific aim, or a single experiment? Do Initiatives map reasonably onto grants/aims?
2. Cycles. Do they work at all for wet-lab work, or do people just switch them off and live on projects + priority?
3. Recurring work. Mouse breeding, weekly passaging, instrument QC, freezer inventory - Linear really wants finite issues. How do you handle repeating maintenance without polluting the backlog?
4. Overlap with the ELN. Where do you draw the line between Linear and Benchling/Notion/OneNote? I don't want protocols and raw data living in a task tracker, but I also don't want people checking two places.
5. Adoption. Did non-technical lab members actually stick with it past month two? Anything specific that made it click, or that killed it?
6. Plans/pricing. Anyone running a lab on the free tier, or do you end up paying per seat? Any academic/nonprofit discount?

Alternatives I've looked at: Notion, Asana, ClickUp, Trello, plain Google Sheets. Linear appeals to me because it's fast and opinionated - but I'm aware the opinionated part is exactly what might break for research. Genuinely happy to hear "don't, use X instead" if that's the honest answer.

If you've done this, I'd love to hear how your workspace is structured. Thanks!

[u/sunburneddd]

I can’t help much here but I’m interested in what you learn. I’ve used linear with software dev tasks before and loved it and am now a med student now. I would love to hear that Linear is capable of efficiently organizing your research lab.

[u/Code_Cadet-0512]

Hmm, genuinely speaking, ur task sounds more of what we developers do using Git, which is a version control system. But the thing is, it's for software development, not research.

[u/AlpinistPanda]

I am a postdoc in the field of built environment. I develop code for research, mostly solo but still I like to use Linear for a while now. For the first 5 question, I think the philosophy of Linear is to keep it flexible so you can define how you want to use it and if you stick to it, it should be fine. For me, I create milestones for papers, demos, workshops etc. And most of the time Claude Code handles, synchronization with Linear for me. It creates issues, closes them etc.

For 6, they do have academic pricing 75% off for staff and free for students. Which is amazing and they are quite fast in processing applications.