Cline

Cline is an open-source coding agent for VS Code, JetBrains and the terminal that reads a repository, edits files, runs commands and drives a browser under human approval. It is aimed at engineering teams that want agentic coding without vendor lock-in — bringing their own model keys and running the agent inside their own VPC, on-premises or air-gapped network.

Cline is an open-source coding agent that runs inside VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, as a headless CLI and as an embeddable SDK, editing files, executing terminal commands and driving a browser under the developer's supervision rather than autocompleting single lines. Its defining design choice is Plan/Act mode: in Plan mode the agent explores the codebase, asks clarifying questions and lays out a strategy, and only once the developer agrees does it switch to Act mode and execute, with every change tracked by checkpoints that can be rolled back. Equally deliberate is what it refuses to do — Cline does not index or embed the codebase, arguing that on-demand file traversal beats vector retrieval for correctness. The May 2025 post defending that position drew 178 points and 124 comments on Hacker News, where practitioners split sharply: several argued Cursor's index is a real advantage on very large repositories and called the stance damage control, while others reported leaving Cline to work for ten to fifteen minutes and returning to a diff that was 'completely on the money'. The project is Apache-2.0 licensed with roughly 66,700 GitHub stars and works with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock, Azure and GCP Vertex, Cerebras, Groq, Ollama, LM Studio and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, consuming Model Context Protocol servers through a built-in marketplace. Founder Saoud Rizwan raised $32M in total, including a $27M Series A in July 2025 led by Emergence Capital at a $110M post-money valuation with Pace Capital, 1984 Ventures, Essence VC and Cox Exponential participating, on the back of installs that grew from one million in March 2025 to 2.7 million that July and roughly five million by January 2026. Commercially it is bottom-up: free and bring-your-own-key for individuals, Teams at $20 per user per month, and an Enterprise tier adding SSO, audit logs, centrally enforced model and MCP policy, and VPC, on-premises or air-gapped deployment. Samsung and SAP are publicly named users.

Category

Developer Tools

Pricing

Freemium, Usage-based, Subscription, Contact for pricing

Target Market

CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Platform Engineers, Enterprise Developers, Security-Constrained Engineering Teams

Deployment

Open-source, Self-hosted, Hybrid, Cloud-first

Customers

Roughly 5 million installs across the VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX as of January 2026; Samsung, SAP and other Fortune 100 engineering teams named publicly

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  Plan/Act mode

  The agent explores the codebase and proposes a strategy first, and only executes after the developer approves it, which keeps large refactors reviewable.

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  Checkpoints

  Every change the agent makes is snapshotted so a bad multi-file edit can be reversed in one action rather than untangled by hand.

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  No codebase indexing

  Cline reads files on demand instead of building a vector index, a deliberate correctness trade-off that also means no embedding of proprietary source into a third-party store.

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  Bring-your-own-inference

  Connect Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Bedrock, Vertex, Azure OpenAI, Groq, Cerebras, Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with tokens passed through at cost and no markup.

• ✓
  MCP marketplace

  Model Context Protocol servers extend the agent to internal systems, and Enterprise administrators can centrally control which servers and models a team may use.

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  Headless CLI and SDK

  The same agent runs unattended in CI/CD pipelines or embedded in another product, not just interactively inside an editor.

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  Self-hosted deployment

  Enterprise supports VPC, on-premises and air-gapped installation, so regulated organisations keep both the code and the audit trail internal.

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  Legacy modernisation

  Point the agent at an aging service, review the migration plan it produces, then let it execute file by file with checkpoints to roll back.

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  Vulnerability remediation

  Feed scanner findings to the agent so it patches each affected call site consistently across a repository instead of one ticket at a time.

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  Test generation for untested code

  The agent reads existing modules, writes tests, runs them in the terminal and iterates until the suite passes without a developer babysitting it.

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  Automated code review in CI

  The headless CLI runs against a pull request in the pipeline and posts findings, giving smaller teams a consistent first-pass reviewer.

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  Agentic coding under data-residency constraints

  A regulated enterprise runs the agent air-gapped against a self-hosted model so no source code leaves its own network boundary.

The agent itself is free and Apache-2.0 licensed; the real cost is model inference, which you pay either directly through your own provider keys or through Cline's provider at cost with no markup — an explicit contrast with coding tools that embed margin in token usage. That makes it cheaper than a flat subscription for light users and more expensive for heavy ones: independent 2026 comparisons put active sessions with frontier models at roughly $5-15 per hour and typical monthly API spend between $25 and $200. Teams is reported at $20 per user per month, and Enterprise pricing for SSO, audit logging and self-hosted deployment is not published.

This page was written from 7 sources, 4 on domains other than cline.bot.

1. 1.cline.bot — pricingvendor
2. 2.cline.bot — enterprisevendor
3. 3.cline.bot — cline raises 32m series a and seed funding building the openvendor
4. 4.github.com — cline
5. 5.sacra.com — cline
6. 6.news.ycombinator.com — item
7. 7.thehackernews.com — cline cli 230 supply chain attack