Can You Share a Linear Roadmap Publicly for Customers to Vote On?
No. Linear doesn't have a customer-facing roadmap view, and it doesn't have a vote button either, not for customers, not for anyone. Linear's own documentation on member roles is specific about what a guest account can't see. It names "workspace-wide features such as workspace views, customer requests, or initiatives" directly. A roadmap in Linear is built out of exactly those three things, so a guest seat doesn't open a side door into one. Guests are also invited per team, not per workspace, and Linear's initiatives documentation confirms the same restriction from the other side: "Initiatives are visible to all members of your workspace except for guests."
The vote button itself doesn't exist to withhold in the first place. Unlike some trackers, Linear has no "+1" or vote count on an issue for anyone, teammate or customer. What it has instead is Customer Requests, which attaches a count of how many customers are linked to an issue, a triangle flag for requests marked important, and filters by tier, size, and revenue, so a team can sort a view by customer count and see what's asked for most. That's a real prioritization signal, but the same page draws a hard line on visibility. "Admins and Members will be able to see Customer Requests in Linear and in Slack," while "Guests see nothing relating to Customer Requests, including views that use Customer-related filters." It's an internal tool for the people running the workspace, not a public-facing count.
What a guest seat actually unlocks
Guest access on Linear is also gated behind the Business plan as "private teams and guests," so it isn't even the free option it sounds like. The table below breaks down what it actually buys.
| Who | Sees initiatives / roadmap rollups | Sees Customer Requests | Sees a given issue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Admin / Member | Yes, workspace-wide | Yes | Yes, any team they're on |
| Guest | No | No | Only issues on teams they're explicitly added to |
A guest can watch one issue they've been added to, comment on it, and get notified when it moves. They cannot open the initiative that issue rolls up into, cannot see how many other customers asked for the same thing, and cannot see a roadmap-level view of what's coming next quarter. Giving a customer a guest seat gets you a shared inbox for one ticket, not a public roadmap.
The bolt-on almost everyone reaches for instead
Linear's own integrations page lists GitHub, Slack, Figma, Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, and a long list of engineering and analytics tools. It doesn't list a single public-roadmap or feedback-voting product, because Linear doesn't build one and doesn't try to be one. The standard fix is a separate tool that does have a public voting board and syncs to Linear underneath it. Canny's Linear integration, for instance, will "send feedback to Linear, link it to existing issues, and sync statuses," so a customer votes on a public Canny post, and the status on that post updates when the linked Linear issue moves.
That covers the display and the sync. It doesn't solve where the votes came from in the first place, which is the part that trips teams up.
Where a public vote count stops matching who actually asked
The same feature request tends to arrive more than once, worded differently each time, from people who never see each other's message. A loyalty punch-card feature tied to checkout, say, so a barista can stamp a card instead of running a separate paper system, might show up like this in a single week:
Support email: Any chance you'll add a loyalty punch card at checkout, so we can stop running a separate paper card system?
Slack Connect message, four days later: A different account, the same feature, no idea the email above exists.
Sales call, a week after that: A prospect asks if loyalty is on the roadmap before deciding between you and a competitor.
Log all three as Customer Requests on the same Linear issue and the count reads 3, an honest number of who actually asked. Put a public voting board like Canny in front of customers instead, and only whoever finds that board and clicks through gets counted. The person who emailed support has no reason to go hunting for a voting page. The prospect on the sales call isn't opening a new tab mid-demo. A few weeks after a board like that ships, it's common to see a popular post sitting at a dozen or so votes, all from the handful of people who happened to know the board existed, while every request that arrived through a ticket or a call never shows up on it at all.
That's the general shape of the problem, not something specific to Canny. A public voting board counts whoever shows up to vote, and shows up is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It's an honest count of board visitors with an opinion, not a count of everyone who's asked. Below a small volume of requests, a customer or two remembering to click through is fine. Past that, the gap between votes on the board and people who actually asked grows every week those two stay disconnected.
The capture layer underneath the vote count
Start with what this doesn't replace. Modem has no public voting board, no page a customer visits to click a vote button, and it isn't trying to be Canny. If a feature's public page and status badge are the whole problem, a Canny-style board is still the right tool for that half.
What Modem does is sit one stage earlier, at capture, rather than at the board where votes get counted. Modem's Linear integration reads the support email, the Slack Connect message, and the sales call transcript the same way it reads a Linear issue, and treats "a loyalty punch card at checkout" as one request whether it showed up in a ticket, a channel, or a call nobody thought to write up. The count that reaches the Canny board, or the Customer Requests view inside Linear, ends up reflecting everyone who asked rather than everyone who happened to click a link. Modem is the company publishing this guide, which is reason enough to check that argument against your own numbers instead of taking it on faith; the wider field of public roadmap tools, including where a Canny-style board is worth setting up on its own, is covered in the six best public roadmap tools, and the mechanics of the Customer Requests feature itself are in the complete guide to Linear Customer Requests.
Where this leaves you
Linear has no public roadmap view and no vote button, and a guest seat, which is a paid-plan feature to begin with, is explicitly blocked from initiatives, workspace views, and Customer Requests, the three things a roadmap is made of. The working pattern is a separate public board synced to Linear by status, which fixes visibility but inherits whatever gap already exists in how requests get captured. Fix that gap first, in Linear or upstream of it, and the vote count on whatever board you run will actually mean what it looks like it means.
