Cline
Top pickThe open-source agent that lives in the editor you already have.
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.
What it does well
- +Keeps your existing IDE, extensions and keybindings — the smallest possible change from Cursor
- +Bring-your-own-key with no account required: 100+ providers, or fully local via Ollama / LM Studio
- +Plan/Act split and diffs you approve before anything is written, plus MCP tool support
- +The most-adopted open agent in the category: ~4.81M VS Code installs, 65.2k stars, commits daily
Where it falls short
- −No inline Tab-style autocomplete — Cline is an agent, not a completion engine, and this is its most-requested missing feature
- −You manage your own API billing; long agent runs on a frontier model can cost more than a $20 Cursor seat
- −Cline's own prepaid-credits path is the promoted onboarding — bring-your-own-key takes a couple of extra settings
- −Running a capable model locally is a real hardware ask (see the hardware note)
Hardware note
Cline itself runs on anything that runs VS Code — the hardware question is only about the model. Cline's own docs put local models at 16–32 GB RAM for small quantised models, 32–64 GB for mid-size coding models and 64 GB+ for larger ones with expanded context. As a concrete anchor, Ollama's default qwen3-coder tag (30B total, ~3.3B active) is a 19 GB download with a 256K context window, so roughly 24 GB of VRAM — or a 32 GB+ unified-memory machine — is a sensible floor for comfortable agentic work. Below that, a cloud API key is usually the better call, and a local model still won't match a frontier cloud model on hard multi-file tasks.
Cline as an alternative to
Where Cline shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Cline head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.