Linear Customer Requests vs. Canny: do you still need a voting board in 2026
Linear Customer Requests and Canny get compared because both track feature requests, but they face opposite directions: Customer Requests attaches demand to issues inside the tracker your engineers already work in, while Canny runs a public board your customers visit and vote on. The real question is not which is better — it is whether, once requests live in Linear with customer context attached, a separate voting board still pays for itself.
The short version
| Linear Customer Requests | Canny | |
|---|---|---|
| Lives in | Linear, next to the issues themselves | A separate board customers visit |
| Who sees it | Your team only | Customers (public) or invited users (private) |
| Capture | From Intercom, Zendesk, Front, email, Slack, and Linear Asks, attached to issues | Customers post and vote; Autopilot ingests from support and call tools |
| Prioritization | Requests tied to customer records with revenue, tier, and size | Votes plus optional MRR/ARR tags |
| Loop closing | Internal: the issue carries its requesters | Automatic: status changes notify voters |
| Cost | Included with Linear; support integrations need the Business plan | Free tier, then from $79/month by tracked users |
Linear Customer Requests
Customer Requests is Linear's answer to the copy-paste layer between support tools and the tracker. A request created from Intercom, Zendesk, Front, or Linear Asks automatically links back to the source conversation, and each request attaches to a customer record carrying attributes like revenue, tier, and company size synced from your support tool. The payoff is that prioritization happens where the work happens: an engineer or PM sorting the backlog sees which issues have how much customer demand behind them, without leaving Linear. The support tool integrations that feed it require Linear's Business plan, and Linear has added an agent for Intercom, Zendesk, and Gong that helps turn conversations into issues on those plans.
What Customer Requests deliberately does not do: face the customer. Linear is an internal tool — customers cannot browse your backlog, submit ideas directly, or see status. And attaching a request still takes a human noticing it in the conversation; two support agents logging the same ask against different issues is still two issues.
Canny
Canny is the customer-facing half. Requests are posts on a board, customers vote and comment, and when a post's status changes, every voter gets notified — the loop closes automatically, which remains the board model's best trick. Autopilot pulls feedback in from support and call tools and dedupes similar posts, and revenue tags let a big account's request outrank a popular one. Pricing runs from a free tier to tracked-user plans starting at $79/month, and Canny syncs posts to Linear for the handoff to engineering.
Canny's costs are the familiar board costs: someone grooms duplicates, and the board only reflects what got posted. If your customers do not visit the board, it becomes a stale page that undersells your roadmap.
So do you still need the board?
For a growing set of teams, honestly, no. If your feedback arrives through support conversations and sales calls rather than a community that votes, Customer Requests covers capture, customer context, and prioritization inside the tool where work gets done — and the board was only ever a staging area on the way there.
The board still pays for itself in two cases. First, when your customers genuinely participate: developer tools and prosumer products with active communities get real signal from public voting, and Canny's automatic voter notifications close the loop in a way Linear does not. Second, when you want a public promise surface — a roadmap page that shows customers you are listening — independent of your internal tracker.
Which one
- B2B team, feedback comes through support and sales: Customer Requests alone, if you are on Linear's Business plan. Skip the board.
- Product with an engaged voting community: Canny, synced to Linear. The board is doing real capture and loop-closing work.
- Both conditions: run both — Canny as the public surface, Customer Requests as the internal ledger — and accept some double bookkeeping.
Where Modem fits in
We build Modem, so read this section knowing that. Modem is not a third option in this comparison; it sits upstream of Linear rather than beside it. Customer Requests records the asks a human notices and attaches; Canny records the asks a customer posts. Modem reads the conversations themselves (Slack, Discord, support tickets, email, sales calls), dedupes the same ask across sources, and can file it into Linear when asked, with the customer quotes in the issue, then remembers the requesters, so when a linked PR merges your team knows who to follow up with and the loop closes without a board. Knowing who asked is a lookup against Modem's context graph, where requesters stay linked to topics, rather than someone reconstructing who asked from memory. If you are all-in on Linear and the missing piece is capture that does not depend on a human noticing, that is the gap Modem fills. If what you want is a public page customers vote on, Modem is not that; use Canny.