One person, four months, two thousand stars: how "open-source Linear + AI teammates" climbed step by step
What it is An open-source, self-hostable Linear alternative where AI agents are full members of the project with permissions and can be assigned work.
Why it took off It names itself directly after the old demand for "open-source Linear alternatives" and rides the "agents as teammates" trend. The author posted for months on Reddit, dev.to and Threads, and each time v1.0 shipped, 10-17 reposted it, or it hit GitHub Trending (10-20), there was another push.
BHow you could follow it Stop building yet another open-source Linear. Pick a SaaS category with no "open-source, self-hosted, agent-native" alternative yet, and copy its naming, README, directory-site and multi-platform posting rhythm.
- Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-07-14 · 2,212 stars · 7 days +98
GitHub · stars Data 2026-08-29 → 2026-11-08 (72 days, 21 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one
It's a Plan (croffasia/itsaplan) is an open-source project management tool built by a Ukrainian developer working alone. The pitch: "a self-hosted alternative to Linear and Plane, where AI agents and humans pick up tasks on the same board." The repo was created in Jul 14, and by Nov 6 it had 2189 stars and 285 forks. The idea isn't new; Multica, which makes the same argument, already has 55k stars. What's worth looking at is where the stars came from: each spike lines up with something the author pushed.
The Oct 17 post
On a Saturday in Oct 2026 17, author Andrii Poluosmak (online handle croffasia, based in Kyiv, has written full-stack code for 20 years) posted on Threads:
1.2K stars and 36 contributors, for an open-source Linear / Plane alternative I built for myself and open-sourced kinda randomly. never spent a cent on promo. all of it came from people sharing it.
The gist: he spent no money promoting the open-source project he built for himself, and it only spread because others reposted it. That post has 776 views to date, and his Threads account has 855 followers. He posts product screenshots almost daily.
The same day, the project gained 223 stars in one day (per Trendshift's daily data). That day, a Taiwanese user named James Chang reposted the README line "Open-source alternative to Linear, Jira, Trello, and Plane, with AI agents built in" verbatim on LinkedIn, and a post with the same title appeared on Reddit's r/BestGitHubRepos. The next day medevel.com ran a long review, and on the third day the Russian site devtrends.ru also wrote one. Which post actually drove the spike can't be determined from outside (inference: several stacked together).
"No money spent" is true. "Spread only because others reposted it" is only half right: the earliest posts were all written by the author himself.
What it is
A full-featured issue tracker: boards, tables, timelines, calendars, cycles, custom fields, dashboards, docs and whiteboards are all there. The difference is that agents are formal project members with roles and permissions, can be assigned tasks, and can be @-mentioned or triggered on a schedule. Agents can run on your server with your own model key, or through a small program called a runner that hands tasks to Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI or opencode on your own machine. It also has REST, MCP and webhooks, links PRs from 5 code hosting platforms, and the UI comes in 13 languages, including Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
The open-source edition is AGPL and free. Pro is paid per instance at $240 a year with no user limit.
The stars came up one step at a time
| Timeline | What happened | star |
|---|---|---|
| 07-27 | The author posted "self-hosted, open source alternative to Linear" on r/coolgithubprojects | Starting point |
| 08-04 | Show HN: 3 points, 0 comments; Product Hunt: 3 votes. 08-29 reposted to Show HN, 1 points | Didn't take off |
| 08-22 | Published "Officially: farewell to Linear, Jira, and Trello" on dev.to; daily.dev picked up two posts (198 and 25 views) | 08-29 total 385 |
| 09-15~16 | Shipped v1.0.0; +77 and +111 over two days | First tier |
| The following month | Only 5–14 a day | 10-09 total 911 |
| 10-17 | Threads post, LinkedIn repost, Reddit post: +223 that day | Second tier |
| 10-20~22 | On GitHub Trending's TypeScript daily chart at #16, #8, #11; 10-27 weekly chart #15 | 10-20 total 1474,10-22 total 1773 |
| Late October | A Chinese X account (@realfxw, one post with 1146 views), a Japanese account @superdoccimo (2713 views), and various auto-generated repo review sites followed | Aftermath |
| November | Back to +10~26 a day | 11-06 total 2189 |
(Star counts come from daily star records and Trendshift; Trending ranks come from the GitHub Trending page.)
When it hit Trending, the repo was just over two months old. One claim is that Trending doesn't include very new repos (inference, unverified). If true, the stars and content built up over the first two months paid off together on the day it crossed the line.
Momentum is fading now: the last 7 days added 117, and the 7 days before that added 299. Once the event passed, it fell back to a dozen or so a day, which suggests word of mouth among users hasn't formed on its own yet.
What it got right
Name and description are written for search demand. "Open-source / self-hosted Linear alternative" is a long-running search term; Plane built its audience on it, with 62k stars. The itsaplan description opens with three "⭐️⭐️⭐️" and the topics include linear-alternative and jira-alternative. The site has comparison pages like /linear-alternative, /jira-alternative and /asana-alternative, and it's listed in directories of open-source alternatives such as openalternative, opensourcealternatives.to and libhunt. On Oct 31, the author also forked an open-source alternatives list repo (inference: to submit a PR adding the project).
It rode the "agents as teammates" wave. In 2026, Linear's CEO said 25% of their issues were created by agents, and Multica reached 55k stars in half a year. itsaplan packaged the story into a complete project management tool and paired it with a punchy title: "farewell to Linear, Jira, and Trello."
It looks credible, and others can copy it. In 4 months it shipped 30 releases (from 11-05 up to v1.10.0). The README is tidy and includes the line "if you find it useful, star it so others can find it." It deploys in one click on Railway, Coolify, Docker and Helm. Anyone who reposts can copy a paragraph from the README and have a recommendation. In October, on 22 and 23, more than 5 security reports came in (privilege escalation, command injection in the runner), which suggests people are actually deploying it and reading the code.
It kept going after HN and PH fell flat. Two Show HN posts and one Product Hunt launch didn't take off. The author kept posting on Reddit, dev.to, daily.dev, Threads and LinkedIn until others reposted it and Trending amplified it.
Who it's competing with
| Project | star | How it differs |
|---|---|---|
| Multica | 55,029,7 days +774 | Almost the same pitch ("humans and agents as one team"), but it's source-available (not OSI open source) and only covers coding agents. |
| Plane | 62,028 | An established open-source Linear alternative, now also pitched as "for humans and agents," with Pro priced per seat. |
| Huly | 28,054 | An all-in-one big platform where agents aren't the main pitch. |
| vibe-kanban | 28,601 | A local board for coding agents, not a team project management tool. |
| kanzo | 1,029,7 days +864 | Created 10-25, a 4.5MB single file, "shared board for humans and agents." Its growth is already faster than itsaplan's. |
| Linear, Jira, GitHub | — | Linear has Linear for Agents, Jira is pushing "Any agent," and GitHub can assign issues directly to Copilot. |
(Star counts as of 11-06.) The category is crowded. itsaplan came later and has roughly 4% of Multica's stars, and kanzo has since squeezed in with a lighter form.
If it were you
Bottom line: don't build another "open-source Linear + agents." That path already has Multica, Plane and kanzo. What's worth copying is the playbook: the "open-source X alternative + agents as teammates" framing, plus one person pushing it personally across channels for months.
- Who it suits: developers who can finish the core features of a SaaS on their own and are willing to post consistently for months. Much of itsaplan's 2 thousand stars came from the author's persistence.
- Who it doesn't suit: people who expect one HN post to bring the traffic. Its HN and PH posts only reached single digits. What actually worked were slow, steady channels like Reddit, dev.to and Threads, plus passive reposting afterward.
- How to do it: pick a SaaS category that doesn't yet have a credible "open-source, self-hosted, agent-native" alternative (customer support tickets, CRM, forms, internal knowledge bases, and so on; you'll need to search GitHub yourself to find which one is still empty). Name the project, write the description and set the topics as "X alternative". Write the README so others can copy it straight into their posts. Offer a multilingual UI (its Chinese and Japanese users did repost it). Have Docker and one-click deploys ready.
- How to get it seen: in the first week, post on r/coolgithubprojects, r/selfhosted and similar subreddits, and write a "farewell to X" article on dev.to. Build /x-alternative comparison pages and submit the project to open-source alternative directories and awesome lists. Push again with every major release. Aim for a Trending spike around the two-month mark.
- When to move: "agents as teammates" still feels new, but big vendors are already adding the same features to their products. You have about three to six months before the pitch stops feeling novel.
- Signs you've picked the wrong bet: if large projects like Multica or Plane already offer an agent version in your category, or if after two months your stars are still in the low hundreds and no stranger has reposted it unprompted, the demand or the pitch isn't strong enough there. Switch categories rather than forcing it.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Multica Open source 2026-01 55,029 stars, 7 days +774 Almost the same pitch, but it's source-available and focused on coding agents; itsaplan is AGPL, a full general-purpose PM tool, priced per instance. Plane Open source 2022-11 62,028 star Long-running open-source Linear alternative, now pitching "humans and agents"; Pro is priced per seat. itsaplan's agent execution chain is deeper and charges $240/year per instance Huly Open source 2021 28,054 star An all-in-one big platform where agents aren't the main pitch. Linear (incl. Linear for Agents) Other 2019 Industry-benchmark SaaS Cloud only, per-seat pricing; itsaplan is self-hosted and not per-seat Jira / GitHub Copilot assigning issues Big-company features 2025-2026 Huge Big vendors already have built-in agents picking up tasks; itsaplan's edge is only self-hosting and price vibe-kanban Open source 2025-06 28,601 star A local kanban for coding agents, not a team PM tool kanzo Open source 2026-10-25 1,029 star A minimalist single-file kanban shared by humans and agents, lightweight, and currently growing faster than itsaplan - Where users come from
- Verified Author posting on Reddit: 07-27 self-posted in r/coolgithubprojects; r/BestGitHubRepos has a post with the same title
- Verified Show HN / Product Hunt: 08-04 Show HN with 3 points, PH with 3 votes; 08-29 second Show HN got 1 points (hackernews/producthunt tables). Didn't work
- Verified dev.to / daily.dev / Threads / LinkedIn content: dev.to 08-22 articles; daily.dev two posts (198 and 25 views); Threads 855 followers, posting almost daily; the author claims they never spent a cent on promo
- Inferred Reshares and auto-content sites: 10-17 LinkedIn reshare by James Chang, +223 that day; medevel 10-18, devtrends 10-19, starlog 10-22 wrote posts
- Verified GitHub Trending: 10-20~22 TypeScript daily chart #16/#8/#11,10-27, weekly chart #15 (github repo trending table)
- Verified SEO and alternatives directories: the site has /linear-alternative and /jira-alternative comparison pages; listed on openalternative, opensourcealternatives.to (Featured), and libhunt; 10-31 forked the open-source-alternatives list repo
- Verified Chinese and Japanese X alt accounts self-recommending: @realfxw, @n7wb1l, @xiaoanlab, @superdoccimo, 10-21~31, each post getting a few hundred to 2700 views (X live search)
Why It's a Plan (croffasia/itsaplan) managed to take off
Channel: GitHub · Research day 2026-11-06 · Data card: 115 days 2189 stars / 285 forks, last 7 days +117 (first 7 days +299), single-day peak 10-21 +212 (our github repo)
Bottom line
A veteran Ukrainian developer (Andrii Poluosmak, 20 years full-stack, Kyiv) building solo an "open-source self-hosted Linear/Plane alternative with AI agents as teammates." It took off not because the idea is new (Multica, which makes the same pitch, already has 55k stars), but because three things stacked: first, it rode the evergreen demand for "Linear/Plane alternatives"; second, it caught the 2026-year wave of "agents in the kanban"; third, the author kept posting about it himself on Reddit, dev.to, daily.dev, Threads, LinkedIn, and various "open-source alternatives" directories. Stars came in steps: a bump at the v1.0 release, another in mid-October from reshares and media write-ups, and another after holding the GitHub TypeScript daily chart for 60 days. Revenue is already public on TrustMRR (30 days: $869), and momentum is fading.
1. What it is
- A full issue tracker: board / table / timeline / calendar views, cycles, custom fields, dashboards, docs, whiteboards, public sharing. Plus agents: agents are project members with roles and permissions and can be assigned tasks. Built-in agents run on the instance with any model you choose; external agents are handed off to Claude Code / Codex / Copilot CLI / opencode on your own machine via
@itsaplan/runner. Triggers include @mentions, assignment, and schedules. Also REST + MCP + webhooks, with PR integration for 5 code hosting platforms. The UI supports 13 languages, including Simplified and Traditional Chinese. (Source: README) - Tech stack: Bun + Elysia + Next.js + shadcn + Drizzle/Postgres. It is not the same codebase as Plane (Django).
- Business model: Community edition is free under AGPL-3.0; Pro is $240/year (or $24/month), priced per instance with unlimited users. Positioning: "87% cheaper than Linear, 66% cheaper than Plane Pro." (itsaplan.dev/pro)
2. Growth timeline (evidence)
| Timeline | Event | Star reaction |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-04 | The author forked makeplane/plane (visible on the GitHub account), then created itsaplan 10 days later; the description's "⭐️⭐️⭐️" also copies Plane's "🔥🔥🔥" opening style | — |
| 07-14 / 07-22 | Repo created / v0.1.0. Releases have been frequent since; by 11-05 it reached v1.10.0, with 30 releases total | — |
| 07-27 | The author posted in r/coolgithubprojects himself: "self-hosted, open source alternative to Linear" (Reddit) | Small |
| 08-04 | Show HN got only 3 points and 0 comments; the Product Hunt launch got only 3 votes (our hackernews / producthunt tables). A second Show HN got 08-29 points 1 | Failed |
| 08-22~29 | The author posted "Officially: farewell to Linear, Jira, and Trello" on dev.to and two posts on daily.dev (with 198 and 25 views) | 08-29 total 385 stars (github table) |
| 09-15~16 | Released v1.0.0; +77 / +111 over two days (Trendshift daily table) | First wave |
| 09-17~10-16 | Normally only 5–14 new per day | Plateau; 10-09 total 911 |
| 10-11 | Listed on opensourceprojects.dev | — |
| 10-17 (Saturday) | Single day +223. The same day, Taiwan's James Chang reshared the README copy verbatim on LinkedIn ("Open-source alternative to Linear, Jira, Trello, and Plane, with AI agents built in"); r/BestGitHubRepos has a post with the same title; 10-18 medevel.com wrote a long review, and 10-19 devtrends.ru wrote a piece | Second wave (which specific post drove it is unverified) |
| 10-20~22 | Hit the GitHub Trending TypeScript daily chart at #16 / #8 / #11; 10-27 weekly chart #15 (our github repo trending table). The repo had to be 60 days old to qualify, and it crossed that threshold just in time | 10-20 +190, 10-21 +111/+212 (the two sources count differently) |
| 10-20~31 | A batch of alt accounts followed: Chinese X account @realfxw (1146 views), @n7wb1l, @xiaoanlab, Japanese account @superdoccimo (2713 views), plus daily GitHub digest account @lunkertw (X live search, 2026-11-06, about $0.005 this round); along with auto-generated repo review sites like starlog.is, thedailyorb, and mrkeyoor | Aftermath |
| 10-22~23 | 5+ security advisories were filed (privilege escalation, command injection in the runner, etc.), showing people are actually deploying and reviewing the code | — |
| After late October | Back to +10~26 a day | Cooling off |
The author said on Threads (around 1.2K stars): "never spent a cent on promo. all of it came from people sharing it," meaning no promotion budget, everything came from others resharing. (Threads) This is half true: no money was spent, but the earliest posts were all the author's own. The Threads account has 855 followers and posts product images almost daily.
3. Competitors
| Competitors | Form | Launched | Scale | Differences from itsaplan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multica(multica-ai/multica) | Open source / cloud | 2026-01 | 55,029 stars, last 7 days +774 (github table) | Almost the same pitch ("Make humans and AI agents work as one team," agents as teammates, connecting to local coding CLIs), but it is source-available, not open source in the OSI sense. It focuses only on coding agents, with team and cloud offerings. itsaplan is a full-featured general project management tool under AGPL, also suited to marketing, support, and other non-dev work |
| Plane(makeplane/plane) | Open source / cloud | 2022-11 | 62,028 star | A veteran open-source Linear alternative; its homepage tagline is now "Work infrastructure for humans and agents," and Pro is priced per seat. itsaplan prices per instance, and its agent execution chain (runner) goes deeper |
| Huly(hcengineering/platform) | Open source | 2021 | 28,054 star | An all-in-one big platform where agents aren't the main pitch. |
| Linear | SaaS | 2019 | Industry benchmark | Has Linear for Agents, but cloud only and priced per seat; itsaplan's pitch is self-hosting and not charging per user |
| Jira / GitHub Projects | Big-company features | — | Huge | Jira already promotes "Any agent"; GitHub can assign issues directly to the Copilot agent. Big vendors are building this too, and itsaplan only wins on self-hosting and price |
| vibe-kanban(BloopAI) | Open source | 2025-06 | 28,601 star | This is a local kanban for coding agents, not team project management |
| Tegon, kandev, tsk, kanbots, etc. | Open source | 2024–2026 | 200–1,900 star | Either stalled (Tegon 7 days 0 growth) or just terminal or local mini-tools |
| kanzo(emanuele-em/kanzo) | Open source | 2026-10-25 | 1,029 stars, 7 days +864 | "Self-hosted, sharable kanban for humans and agents," a 4.5MB single file. Its pitch overlaps with itsaplan's and it is growing faster right now, making it a late entrant |
Bottom line: this category is not empty, it's crowded. itsaplan is a late entrant that has only won about 4% of the stars of category leader Multica.
4. Where users come from (acquisition)
- The author posted across many platforms himself (confirmed): Reddit r/coolgithubprojects, Show HN twice, Product Hunt, dev.to, two daily.dev squads, Threads posted almost daily, Facebook and LinkedIn. HN and PH didn't take off; what worked was Reddit and the long tail of people resharing it.
- "X alternative" SEO and directory sites (confirmed): the site has comparison landing pages like /linear-alternative, /jira-alternative, and /asana-alternative; openalternative.co, opensourcealternatives.to (marked Featured, though I couldn't verify whether that is a paid slot), and libhunt all list it; the author also forked an open-source-alternatives list repo 10-31, most likely to submit a PR adding themselves.
- Reshares and auto-content sites (confirmed, but the trigger wasn't verified): 10-17's LinkedIn reshare, medevel, devtrends, and various AI-generated repo review sites.
- GitHub Trending (confirmed): on the TypeScript daily chart 10-20~22, and the weekly chart 10-27, which amplified the second wave.
- Multilingual UI drives overseas spread (inferred): there is demand for Chinese and Japanese interfaces, and Chinese and Japanese X accounts posted recommendations on their own.
- Railway one-click deploy button with referralCode (confirmed): this is monetization, not acquisition. Railway pays template authors a cut, and the Pro license fee adds to revenue.
- Paid acquisition: no evidence found.
5. How many people have seen it
- Revenue is public: verified on TrustMRR via Stripe, $869 over the last 30 days (2026-11-06). As of 10-09 the search snippet still showed $535. Team of 1, domain rating DR 6. (TrustMRR)
- No big accounts or mainstream media have covered it: HN and PH both failed, X only has a few small accounts with thousand-view-level reach, and none of the five X circles in our database has a single post.
- So it's "spreading in small circles," but revenue is already public, and the whole category is already taken by Multica, Plane, and big companies.
6. Why it took off
- The demand is already there: "open-source / self-hosted Linear alternative" is a search need that has existed for years, and Plane reaching 60k stars proves it. itsaplan's name, description, and topics all target this need directly, and it puts "⭐️⭐️⭐️" at the start of the description to grab attention.
- Rode the "agents as teammates" wave: 2026 years ago Linear's CEO said "25% of issues are built by agents," and Multica reached 55k stars in half a year. itsaplan puts this story into a full-featured PM tool, and its clickbait copy ("farewell to Linear, Jira, and Trello" and "I might have built the best Linear alternative") hits exactly that point.
- Fast releases make it look solid: 30 releases in 4 months, a tidy README, many one-click deploy options (Railway, Coolify, Docker, Helm), and 13 languages. Anyone resharing it can turn it into a recommendation post on the spot.
- The author kept pushing it: after HN and PH failed, he didn't stop. He kept posting on Reddit, dev.to, daily.dev, and Threads, and held on until a second round of reshares and a full 60 days on Trending.
- The star growth spikes match specific events: v1.0 (09-15), the second round of reshares (10-17), and Trending (10-20). After the buzz faded it went back to a dozen or so a day, which suggests it never built word-of-mouth momentum on its own.
7. Differentiation
- Versus Multica: truly open source (AGPL) + a full general-purpose PM (docs, whiteboards, cycles, dashboards, help desk) + per-instance pricing. Multica is more like a "dispatch console for coding agents," while itsaplan is more like "Linear with agents."
- Compared with Plane and Linear, agents are first-class members here: they have permissions, can be assigned work, run on schedules, and get cost and budget tracking. A runner then hooks up local coding CLIs. Pricing is $240/year per instance, not per seat.
- Is this differentiation why it took off? Only half of it. "Linear alternative + agents" gives it a line that spreads well, but "agents as teammates" was already pitched by Multica, and louder. The 2k stars it got came mostly from the author's own promotion, amplified by Trending and reshares, not from the differentiation drawing people in by itself.
8. Copycats
- No direct copycat found (the few repos with the same description in search are GitHub forks; lalabase is a different product, and its description just got mixed into the Trendshift page).
- Followers with the same pitch have already appeared: kanzo (created 10-25, reached 10k stars in 1 days).
9. What others can borrow
- "Open-source X alternative" positioning, plus comparison landing pages, plus listing itself in various alternatives directories: SEO can bring traffic over the long run.
- Use the GitHub Trending rule that only repos at least 60 days old qualify: collect stars and content for the first 60 days, then push hard once past the threshold, which makes charting more likely.
- A Railway template with referral (you get a cut on each deploy) plus a per-instance Pro license is a monetization combo one person can run for an open-source self-hosted tool.
- Turn agents into project members who have permissions, can be assigned work, and show their cost, rather than a chat sidebar. The framing spreads well in 2026.
10. What's uncertain
- What drove the +223 on 10-17 (LinkedIn, r/BestGitHubRepos, or something else) is unverified. Reddit blocked our scraping, and the GitHub stargazer timestamp endpoint returned 404, so per-star timing isn't available.
- Contributor count doesn't match: the author says 36, Trendshift shows 3. Unverified.
- Whether the $869 on TrustMRR is Pro license revenue or includes other income (such as Railway payouts) is unknown.
- Whether the "Featured" slot on opensourcealternatives.to is paid is unknown.