Cline vs OpenHands

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.

OpenHands (MIT, formerly OpenDevin) is the option for people whose actual requirement is "this has to run on infrastructure I control." It is a self-hosted control centre for coding agents: a browser-based Agent Canvas plus a backend server you start locally or on your own VM, with agents working inside a sandboxed environment that has its own shell, filesystem and browser. Agents can edit code, run commands, call APIs and browse the web — real engineering tasks rather than completions. The project sells a managed OpenHands Cloud and licenses a self-hosted enterprise edition, but the core is MIT and self-hosting costs nothing beyond your own model usage. At 82.5k stars it is the most established self-hosted agent platform available.