Cline

Cline — Open-source VS Code and JetBrains agent built around an explicit plan/act split. Cline is the original open-source IDE agent — it predates most of this roster — and its signature is the Plan/Act split, where a read-only planning phase produces something you approve before any edit lands. It is fully BYOK across providers, has a large MCP server marketplace, and keeps per-message checkpoints of the working tree. There is no OS sandbox: the boundary is an auto-approve allowlist you configure. Founded 2024. Open source under Apache-2.0.

We track it in 1 comparison — Coding agents — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 16 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it gives ground.

• Subagents — No. Claude Code records Yes.
• Background agents — No. Claude Code records Yes.
• Hooks — No. Claude Code records Yes.
• Opens PRs — No. Claude Code records Yes.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 24 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for Cline, and 4 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-01-15. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is Aider. Cline is ahead on MCP (Yes against No) and Plan mode (Yes against Partial). Aider takes Headless / CI (Yes against Partial) and Repo indexing (AST / LSP repo map against agentic grep). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Cline alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Founded

2024

Licence

Apache-2.0 (open source)

Fields we track

24 of 26

Last verified

2026-01-15

The plan/act split remains the clearest interaction model in the category — you approve an approach, not a diff. It is the safest default for VS Code teams who want BYOK, but it stays inside the editor: no subagents, no hooks, no PR path.

Subagents

○No10th of 14

Community-reported

Background agents

○No12th of 16

Inferred

Hooks

○No7th of 10

Community-reported

Opens PRs

○No10th of 16

Inferred

BYOK

●Yes1st of 16

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

MCP

●Yes1st of 15

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

Entry price

$0 /seat/mo1st of 16

Inferredverified 2026-01-15

Model breadth

any provider / router1st of 16

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-01-15source

Cline is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• VS Code and JetBrains teams who want BYOK without leaving the IDE.
• Reviewers who want to approve the plan before any file changes.
• MCP-heavy setups that benefit from the server marketplace.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• Subagents. Cline records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Background agents. Cline records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Hooks. Cline records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Opens PRs. Cline records No on the Coding agents table. Claude Code records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 2 of the 26 fields we track for Cline are still blank: Terminal-Bench and Bench model. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.