Tool Introduction

Cline was built by Cline Bot Inc. and founded by Saoud Rizwan, who wrote the first version roughly ten days after Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024 and publicly launched it in October 2024. The project is Apache 2.0 licensed with more than 250 contributors. In July 2025 the company announced $32M in combined Series A and Seed funding led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital, with participation from 1984 Ventures, Essence VC, Cox Exponential, and angel investors including Jared Friedman, Logan Kilpatrick, and Addy Osmani.

Demo Available?

No formal book-a-demo or free trial is offered. The free Open Source plan runs indefinitely with no credit card, functioning as a self-serve trial.

Tool's Accuracy

Cline's own blog reports a first-party measurement of its agent harness: running the Cline CLI backed by Claude Opus 4.5 with 6,000-token extended thinking and a 2,400-second per-task timeout against all 89 real-world coding tasks in the Terminal-Bench 2.0 benchmark, executed in parallel via Modal. The baseline pass rate was 47%, and after a weekend of diagnosing failures and shipping fixes the score rose to 57%, which the post states put Cline ahead of Claude Code, OpenHands, and OpenCode on that benchmark at that time.

This is a self-reported result rather than an independent audit, and it reflects one model pairing, Opus 4.5, rather than Cline's performance averaged across the many providers it supports. No independent benchmark of the current shipping harness was found.

Aggregate Rating

4/5 stars (based on 300+ verified reviews across the internet)

Detailed Overview

What Cline Does

Cline turns a described task into working changes without the developer leaving their editor. Its signature Plan and Act workflow drafts a plan and aligns on it before touching anything, then carries it out step by step. Checkpoints let a developer preview each change and roll back with one click, and an opt-in Auto Approve mode speeds up trusted actions once the developer is confident.

Who Cline Is For

Cline suits individual developers and small engineering teams who want to add an agent to the editor they already work in rather than adopt a new application. It also serves large enterprises bound by strict security and compliance rules that require source code to remain within corporate boundaries. Named adopters include Samsung, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Top Differentiators

What sets Cline apart is a bring-your-own-key model that spans many providers, from Claude and DeepSeek to AWS Bedrock and local models, with cost scaling by token usage instead of a fixed seat fee. The project explicitly rejects treating inference as the business model, so there is no markup on model calls and no vendor lock-in.

Founding Year

2024

Target Industry

B2B, B2C, SMB, Enterprise, Finance, Healthcare, Defense, Technology, Retail

Available Integrations

MCP Marketplace: an in-app catalog of Model Context Protocol servers; installation is gated to happening through the Cline extension itself.
GitHub: an MCP server for repository, issue, and pull request operations, plus a GitHub Actions recipe where mentioning @cline in an issue comment triggers an autonomous investigation, triggering only on issue comments.
Slack: a CLI-only connector supporting webhook and socket mode, mapping each thread to its own agent session; socket mode is single-workspace only.
Discord: a CLI-only connector where mentioning or DMing the bot starts a session, with an --enable-tools flag that lets the agent edit code and prepare pull requests.
Telegram: a CLI-only connector that auto-approves every action unless the operator sets --allowed-user-id or --hook-command.
Supabase: an MCP server for Postgres schema exploration, SQL query validation, and database management without leaving the coding session.
Figma: an MCP server that pulls design-file data into context so generated code matches the design source.
AWS: a batch of 35 AWS-specific MCP servers released through an official Cline and AWS collaboration.
JetBrains: a plugin labeled Early Access, with JetBrains AI Assistant able to expose its own MCP server to Cline for IDE context.
Zed: Cline runs as a first-class Agent Client Protocol agent inside Zed with its full Skills, Hooks, and MCP capability set.
Enterprise observability: OpenTelemetry export to Datadog, Grafana, and Splunk, an enterprise-tier feature configured via the Remote Configuration dashboard.
SSO: WorkOS AuthKit supporting Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, or any SAML/OIDC provider, with just-in-time provisioning; an enterprise-tier feature.

Open Source (Free): free for individual developers with no subscription; you pay only for AI inference on a usage basis using your own API keys from providers like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Includes the VS Code extension, CLI, MCP Marketplace, multi-root workspaces, and community support, with no vendor lock-in.
ClinePass ($9.99/month): a flat monthly subscription with automatic renewal granting access to ten open-weight models across six providers, with quotas described as 2-5x standard API rate limits measured across 5-hour rolling, weekly, and monthly windows. A promotional $4.99 first-month rate is stated on the product page, and no free trial is offered.
Cline credits: a first-party pay-as-you-go system where users sign in once and draw down a unified balance across 100+ supported models with no per-provider API key management; some models are tagged FREE.
Enterprise (Custom Pricing): requires contacting sales and adds the JetBrains extension, SSO/OIDC, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, VPC, on-premise, and air-gapped deployment, an SLA, OpenTelemetry, centralized billing, role-based access control, a team management dashboard, and dedicated support.

Pricing last verified: 07/04/2026
Disclaimer: Pricing is subject to change. Please confirm current pricing on the vendor site.

Features & Specs

License and reach: Apache 2.0, 64.3k GitHub stars, 6.8k forks, more than 250 contributors, and over 8.0M installs across VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, Windsurf, and Open VSX.
Codebase: written 97.5% in TypeScript, with the latest CLI shown at release v3.0.37.
Model access: a unified OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions endpoint with streaming and tool calling, using provider/model-name IDs such as anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6 and google/gemini-2.5-pro, which documents a 1M-token context window.
Reasoning models: Claude, Gemini 2.5, and Grok 3 stream reasoning content through a delta.reasoning field.
Provider integrations: AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, GCP Vertex AI, Ollama for local models, OpenRouter, LiteLLM, and 30+ additional providers.
Enterprise observability: OpenTelemetry with direct connections to Datadog, Grafana, and Splunk, plus a Prompt Storage feature that backs up conversation history to S3 or Cloudflare R2.

Security & Compliance

Cline's security architecture is client-side by design: all processing happens locally in the developer's environment, and proprietary code, internal tooling, and prompts never leave the customer's infrastructure. The tool does not index or cache repositories, and code and prompts are not used to train models. Cline states it does not introduce a new compliance surface because code never touches its servers, and that compliance such as SOC 2 Type II is inherited from whichever AI provider the customer selects rather than certified by Cline.

SSO: single sign-on with OIDC so teams authenticate with corporate credentials instead of personal API keys.
Role-based access: a three-tier Member, Admin, and Owner model with organization-scoped permissions.
Configuration control: centralized remote configuration for models and tools, plus MCP server allowlisting.
Audit logging: selective logging of administrative operations, with advanced configuration management and fine-grained permissioning listed as coming soon.

Industry Use-Cases

Sports analytics startup scales engineering with Cline

Cleat Street, a sports-analytics startup, adopted Cline in early 2025 and built custom Model Context Protocol integrations connecting Linear, Notion, and AWS to modernize its codebase, converting JavaScript to TypeScript and refactoring Tailwind CSS. Per the company's published case study, Engineering Manager Chrys Propster described Cline as a 5x force multiplier, turning work that took two and a half days into half a day. API costs ran roughly $100 per two-week sprint, peaking at $500 during initial setup, for an estimated $12,000 a year that the team weighed against the cost of hiring a senior AWS architect.

Tool's Alternatives

Cursor is an AI-native code editor with deep, codebase-wide semantic indexing and a choice of frontier models inside one product. Its most autonomous features, including background agents and full Agent Mode, sit behind paid plans rather than being free. Unlike Cline, Cursor is a complete forked IDE a developer must adopt as their primary editor rather than a lightweight extension layered onto an existing one.

GitHub Copilot offers the widest official editor footprint of any competitor, spanning Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Vim, Eclipse, and GitHub.com. Its chat functionality is confined by GitHub's own docs to Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Visual Studio. Its differentiator is first-party integration into GitHub itself, with native pull request review, Issues, and Actions requiring no separate connector setup.

Devin Desktop, the product formerly branded Windsurf, provides an Agent Command Center that orchestrates fleets of local and cloud agents from one IDE surface. The prior Cascade agent was deprecated and replaced by Devin Local, forcing a workflow and UI migration. It differs from Cline by being a single-vendor stack unifying Cognition's own Devin agents rather than a model-agnostic, bring-your-own-key approach.

Aider is a terminal-based, git-native pair-programming tool whose repository codebase map gives the model structured context across large projects. Per its own documentation it works best with LLM APIs, implying reduced reliability in its web-chat-paste mode. Its differentiator is having no IDE or GUI at all, making it a pure CLI and git workflow tool rather than Cline's extension-first design.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Cline free to use?

Yes. The Open Source plan is free for individual developers with no subscription; you pay only for AI inference using your own API keys, and the extension is Apache 2.0 licensed.

What does the ClinePass subscription cost?

ClinePass is a flat $9.99 per month with automatic renewal, granting access to ten open-weight models across six providers with quotas at 2-5x standard API rate limits.

Which editors and IDEs does Cline support?

Cline runs in VS Code, the JetBrains suite, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, Zed, and Neovim via ACP mode, and also ships a CLI and a Node.js SDK.

Which AI models can Cline use?

Cline is model-agnostic, working with Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, and others through AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, GCP Vertex AI, Ollama, OpenRouter, LiteLLM, and 30+ additional providers.

Does Cline send my code to its servers?

No. All processing happens locally in the developer's environment; code, internal tooling, and prompts never leave the customer's infrastructure, and Cline does not index or cache repositories.

Who founded Cline and when?

Cline was founded by Saoud Rizwan under Cline Bot Inc., who built the first version in June 2024 and publicly launched it in October 2024.

What does the Enterprise plan add?

Enterprise uses custom pricing and adds the JetBrains extension, SSO with OIDC, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, VPC, on-premise and air-gapped deployment, an SLA, and role-based access control.

Does Cline offer a demo or trial?

No formal demo or time-limited trial is offered. The free Open Source plan runs indefinitely with no credit card, serving as a self-serve trial.

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