- Most project management tools were built for teams with dedicated PMs, not for solo developers who are also the PM, the engineer, and the QA department. - GitHub Issues is free and already where your work lives, but it has no deployment visibility, no structured roadmap view, and no way to see whether the fix you shipped actually worked. - Linear is the best pure issue tracker available right now, but "pure issue tracker" is the problem: it doesn't know your build failed. - The real cost of a disconnected workflow isn't the tools themselves, it's the cognitive overhead of mentally stitching together five tabs every time you want to know where a project stands. - For solo developers and small teams on modern stacks, the right setup is fewer tools with deeper integration, not more tools with more logins. - If you want GitHub issues, deployment status, and a roadmap in one place, AdeptDev is built specifically for that workflow at $10/month.

## The Solo Developer PM Problem Nobody Talks About Most project management advice is written for teams with a dedicated Scrum Master. That's not you. You're the person who writes the code, opens the PR, deploys to Vercel, checks whether the deployment succeeded, and then goes back to the issue tracker to close the ticket. That's four context switches for one unit of work. The problem isn't that solo developers are bad at project management. The problem is that the tools assume someone else is doing the coordination. Jira assumes a PM is configuring workflows. Linear assumes someone is triaging issues. GitHub Projects assumes you're happy living inside GitHub for everything. None of them were designed for the person who needs to see "did my fix ship and did it break anything" in the same view. The real cost shows up around week three of a project. You've got issues in GitHub, a roadmap in Notion, deployments in Vercel, and a vague memory of what you were actually trying to build. That's not a discipline problem. That's a tooling problem.

## Why Developers Keep Going Back to GitHub Issues GitHub Issues is genuinely good. That's the honest starting point. It's free, it's already where your code lives, and every developer you'll ever collaborate with already has an account. For a solo developer building something small, opening a GitHub Issue and slapping a label on it is the lowest-friction way to track work that exists. The real limitations aren't obvious until you hit them. There's no deployment column. There's no way to see, at a glance, that the issue you closed yesterday corresponds to a Vercel build that failed at 2am. The connection between "I fixed this" and "this is fixed in production" lives entirely in your head, which is fine until it isn't. GitHub Projects, the newer Kanban layer on top of Issues, closes some of that gap. It's better than it was two years ago. But it's still a view over issues, not a workspace that understands your deployment pipeline.

## What Linear Gets Right (and Where It Stops) Linear is the best-designed issue tracker built for developers. That's not a marketing claim, it's just what you hear from every developer who switches to it from Jira. The keyboard shortcuts work. The issue states are sensible defaults. The cycle and project views are genuinely useful for planning a sprint when you're working alone. The obvious objection to Linear is that it doesn't know whether your Vercel build succeeded. It doesn't know whether the PR you linked to an issue actually got merged. You can set up automations, but you're configuring them yourself, and they're one-directional. Linear knows about your code when you tell it about your code. For a solo developer who ships fast and iterates faster, that gap matters. You close an issue in Linear, you push the fix, the build fails silently, and the issue stays closed. Nobody caught it because there's nobody to catch it.

## The Tab-Switching Tax Opening the Vercel dashboard to check a build status is a five-second task. Do it fifteen times a day and that's seventy-five seconds of context switching. Multiply by 250 working days and you've lost over six hours a year to tab management, and that's before you factor in the cognitive cost of re-orienting yourself every time you switch contexts. This isn't about time. It's about attention. Every time you leave your issue tracker to check a deployment, you break the mental model you were holding. You come back and have to rebuild it. For deep work, that cost is much higher than the seconds suggest. The developers who feel most productive aren't necessarily the ones using the most powerful tools. They're the ones who've minimized the number of places they have to look to understand where a project stands.

## Comparing the Main Options for Solo Developers | Tool | Strengths | Real Weaknesses | |---|---|---| | GitHub Issues + Projects | Free, already where code lives, good for small backlogs | No deployment visibility, limited roadmap views, no analytics | | Linear | Best-in-class UX, fast, developer-native | No deployment context, no analytics, another login | | Jira | Powerful, extensible, widely understood | Overkill for solo devs, admin burden is real, slow | | Notion | Flexible, good for docs + tasks together | Not built for code workflows, no GitHub/Vercel native integration | | Plane | Open-source Linear alternative, self-hostable | Smaller ecosystem, fewer integrations, rougher edges | | AdeptDev | GitHub + Vercel + analytics in one workspace | Newer product, smaller feature surface than Jira or Linear | The honest read on this table: if you only need issue tracking and you're happy with GitHub, stay with GitHub. If you want better UX and faster keyboard-driven workflows, Linear is worth the cost. If you want to see your GitHub issues, Vercel deployment status, and PostHog analytics in one workspace without building a custom integration, that's the specific gap AdeptDev is designed to fill.

## The Workflow That Actually Works for Solo Developers The best workflow for a solo developer isn't the most sophisticated one. It's the one that survives contact with a real project, which means it has to work when you're tired, when you're behind, and when you haven't touched the project in two weeks. Start with two boards, not ten. A roadmap board for features and a bug tracker for issues. Four columns: Todo, In Progress, In Review, Completed. That's it. The moment you add more columns, you add more decisions about where a task lives, and that friction compounds. Wire your GitHub webhooks so tasks move automatically when you push code or close an issue. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do for a solo workflow. When the tool updates itself, you stop having to remember to update the tool. That's the whole game.

## What to Do With Deployment Visibility Most developers check their Vercel dashboard reactively, after something breaks. That's backwards. Deployment status should be visible in the same place where you're tracking what you shipped, so you can see the connection between "I closed this issue" and "this change is live and healthy" without opening a second tab. If you're using Vercel and GitHub together, the minimum viable setup is to have build status surfaced somewhere in your project workspace. This can be as simple as a Slack notification to a channel you actually check, or as integrated as a dashboard that shows build logs next to the issue that triggered the deploy. The specific tool matters less than the principle: deployment outcomes should be visible without a dedicated context switch. The developers who catch production regressions fastest aren't the ones with the most monitoring. They're the ones who see deployment status as part of their normal workflow, not as a separate audit they run when something feels wrong.

## Wrap Up The solo developer PM problem is real, and it's not solved by adding more tools. It's solved by reducing the number of places you have to look. GitHub Issues is a fine starting point. Linear is a genuine upgrade for issue tracking. But neither of them closes the loop between "I shipped the fix" and "the fix is live and working," and that loop is where most solo developers lose time and attention. Pick the setup that matches your actual stack. If you're on GitHub and Vercel and you want that loop closed without building it yourself, try AdeptDev. Two Kanban boards, GitHub webhook integration, Vercel deployment tracking, and analytics in one workspace. Try it free for 7 days at adeptdev.io.

## What's the best project management tool for solo developers? The honest answer depends on what you need beyond issue tracking. GitHub Issues is the lowest-friction starting point and it's free. Linear is the best pure issue tracker if you want better UX and keyboard-driven workflows. If you're on Vercel and GitHub and want deployment status visible alongside your tasks without building a custom integration, AdeptDev is designed specifically for that workflow at $10/month after a 7-day trial. ## Is GitHub Issues good enough for a solo developer? For a small project with a simple backlog, yes. GitHub Issues is free, it's already where your code lives, and the friction is low. The limitations show up when you want deployment visibility, a structured roadmap view, or a way to connect "I closed this issue" with "this fix is live in production." If you don't need those things, GitHub Issues plus a few labels is genuinely sufficient. ## Why do developers leave Jira? The admin burden. Jira is a powerful tool built for teams with a dedicated person to configure and maintain it. For a solo developer or a two-person team, the setup overhead is real, the interface is slow, and you spend more time managing the tool than using it. Most developers who leave Jira go to Linear first, because the UX difference is dramatic. The ones who stay on Jira are usually on larger teams where the integrations and reporting justify the complexity. ## How do I connect GitHub Issues to my project workflow? The most useful thing you can do is set up GitHub webhooks so your issue tracker updates automatically when you push code, open a PR, or close an issue. This removes the manual step of updating task status after every code change. GitHub Projects has some of this built in. Linear has a GitHub integration that syncs issue states. AdeptDev uses GitHub webhooks to move Kanban cards automatically when you push or merge, so the board reflects what actually happened in the repo. ## What's the difference between a roadmap board and a bug tracker? A roadmap board is for planned work: features, improvements, and intentional changes to the product. A bug tracker is for reactive work: things that are broken, reported issues, and regressions. Keeping them separate matters because the prioritization logic is different. A critical bug should jump the queue regardless of where it sits in the roadmap. Mixing them in one board makes that triage harder. AdeptDev gives each workspace two separate Kanban boards for exactly this reason. ## How do I track Vercel deployments alongside my tasks? The simplest option is Vercel's built-in Slack integration, which posts build status to a channel. The more integrated option is to use a workspace tool that pulls Vercel deployment data directly, so you can see build status, logs, and environment info in the same place as your tasks. AdeptDev does this natively for teams on Vercel, which means you can see whether the PR you just merged produced a successful build without opening the Vercel dashboard separately. ## Is Linear worth it for a solo developer? Yes, if issue tracking is your main pain point. Linear's UX is genuinely better than most alternatives, the keyboard shortcuts are fast, and the project and cycle views are useful even for solo work. The cost is low relative to the time it saves. The gap is deployment context: Linear doesn't know whether your build succeeded or whether the fix you shipped is actually live. If that visibility matters to your workflow, you'll need to supplement Linear with something else or switch to a tool that integrates both.