Kilo Code

Kilo Code — Open-source VS Code agent in the Cline/Roo lineage, with an orchestrator mode and a CLI. Kilo Code is an open-source VS Code extension descended from the Cline and Roo Code lineage, merging features from both and adding an orchestrator mode that decomposes work across specialised sub-modes. It ships its own credit-based provider alongside standard BYOK, and has since added a CLI. It moves fast and inherits a mature extension architecture, but its commercial side is less documented than its rivals'. 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 wins.

• Subagents — Yes, which only 5 of 14 tools here manage.
• Repo indexing — embeddings index, 3rd of 16.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• Background agents — No. Claude Code records Yes.
• GitHub stars — 9,000, the weakest of the 9 here. Gemini CLI records 75,000.
• 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. 22 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for Kilo Code, and 2 of those cite a document you can open. Nothing here carries a verification date yet, which is itself a reason to check before committing. 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. Kilo Code is ahead on MCP (Yes against No) and Subagents (Yes against No). Aider takes Headless / CI (Yes against Partial) and GitHub stars (37,000 against 9,000). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Kilo Code alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Licence

Apache-2.0 (open source)

Fields we track

22 of 26

A features-merged descendant of Cline and Roo Code that ships faster than either, with orchestrator mode as the genuine differentiator. The commercial side — credits, markup, roadmap — is the least documented of any open-source tool here, which is why this row carries nulls.

Subagents

●Yes1st of 14

Community-reported

Background agents

○No12th of 16

Inferred

GitHub stars

9,0009th of 9

Community-reported

Repo indexing

embeddings index3rd of 16

Community-reported

Opens PRs

○No10th of 16

Inferred

BYOK

●Yes1st of 16

Community-reported

MCP

●Yes1st of 15

Community-reported

Entry price

$0 /seat/mo1st of 16

Inferred

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

• VS Code teams who want mode-based orchestration without leaving the IDE.
• People who liked Roo Code and want a more actively developed descendant.
• Subagents is your binding constraint. Kilo Code records Yes, which only 5 of the 14 tools in the Coding agents roster do. We define that field as can the agent spawn child agents with their own context window and toolset, and collect their results? The main lever for keeping long tasks inside a context budget.
• Repo indexing is your binding constraint. Kilo Code records embeddings index, 3rd of 16 in the Coding agents roster. We define that field as how much structure the harness has about your code before the first token: nothing, live search, a parsed symbol map, a persistent vector index, or an index read alongside live search.

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

• Background agents. Kilo Code 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.
• GitHub stars. Kilo Code records 9,000, the weakest of the 9 tools in the Coding agents roster. Gemini CLI records 75,000 on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Opens PRs. Kilo Code 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. 4 of the 26 fields we track for Kilo Code are still blank: Default model, Hooks, 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.