I've run remote engineering teams on four different PM tools across the last five years — Jira, Linear, ClickUp, and GitHub Projects. This is the opinionated take I'd give a CTO friend asking "which one in 2026?" The WordPress version of this piece covers all 10 tools for general SMB; this is the dev-team subset and the API math that actually matters when you're going to script around it. The dev-team criteria that override "feature count" Keyboard speed. Devs leave PM tools that take 3 seconds to load a board. Linear, GitHub, and Plane fit. ClickUp, Notion, Jira don't, even after their 2024-2025 speed improvements. API quality. If you can't script standups, auto-create issues from CI failures, and sync tickets to a Slack bot, the tool will be abandoned in 6 months. GitHub/GitLab integration. Real bidirectional — branch names linked to issues, PR status visible on the issue card, merge → close the ticket. Not "we have a Zapier zap." Markdown everywhere. Tickets, comments, descriptions.…