Cline vs Aider

Cline (Apache-2.0, by Cline Bot Inc.) is an autonomous coding agent that installs as a VS Code extension, a JetBrains plugin or a CLI — so you keep your editor, your extensions and your keybindings and simply add the agent. It is model-agnostic: bring your own key for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Bedrock and 100+ others, or point it at Ollama or LM Studio and run the whole loop on your own machine. Cline sells optional prepaid credits and an enterprise tier, but nothing about the extension requires an account, and with your own key there is no Cline backend in the request path. At roughly 4.81 million VS Code installs and 65.2k GitHub stars it is the most widely adopted open-source coding agent, and because it is published on Open VSX you can also install it inside Cursor itself.

Aider (Apache-2.0) is the minimalist of this group: a Python CLI that edits files in your repository and commits each change with a sensible message, so your review tool is `git diff` and your undo is `git revert`. It connects to almost any LLM including local ones — `aider --model ollama_chat/<model>` with `OLLAMA_API_BASE` set — and it has no account, no backend and no vendor anywhere in the path. The honest caveat is cadence: the most recent PyPI release (0.86.2) landed on 12 February 2026 and the latest commit on GitHub is 22 May 2026. It still works, and 47.8k people star it, but in a field where models change monthly that is a noticeably slower pulse than the others here — which is why it scores well on sovereignty and lower on maintenance.