Cline

Cline is an open-source (Apache-2.0 licensed) autonomous coding agent, installable as a VS Code/JetBrains extension, a standalone CLI, or an SDK. The GitHub repo (cline/cline) has 67,800 stars and 7,324 forks as of today, and the VS Code Marketplace listing shows 5,282,977 installs with a 4.1/5 rating from 312 reviews. The repo is actively maintained — the latest push was today, and desktop releases ship roughly weekly. It started as a VS Code extension (published under the marketplace ID saoudrizwan.claude-dev) and has since expanded into a CLI and a 'Kanban' web UI for running multiple agents in parallel, each in its own git worktree.

Cline's core pitch is model and provider neutrality: it works with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex, OpenRouter, Groq, Cerebras, DeepSeek and others, and you can bring your own API key with no markup. It ships a 'Plan/Act' two-stage workflow (plan before executing) and a permission-gated approval flow for file writes and shell commands — both aimed at users who want an agent that asks before it acts, rather than running autonomously by default. The Kanban feature lets you queue multiple agent tasks and run them concurrently in isolated git worktrees, which is a distinctive approach among coding agents for parallelizing agent work without one task clobbering another's files.

The VS Code/CLI extension is free for individual developers with no seat fee; you pay only for AI inference, either via your own provider API keys (no markup) or via Cline's own pay-as-you-go 'Cline credits.' A separate subscription, ClinePass, costs $9.99/month and bundles quota-based access to open-weight models (GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4, MiniMax M3, Qwen3.7/3.8, and others) at what Cline says is 2–5x the usage of standard API rate limits for those models — that multiplier is a vendor claim we did not independently verify. Enterprise pricing (SSO, RBAC, centralized billing, audit logs, SLA) is custom/quote-only.

In May 2026, a security researcher disclosed a critical (CVSS 9.6) vulnerability in Cline's Kanban server: it opened WebSocket endpoints on localhost:3484 with no Origin header validation, so any website a developer had open in a browser could silently connect, read the developer's workspace paths, task content and git branch data in real time, inject commands directly into a running agent's terminal (leading to remote code execution), and kill active agent tasks. The affected component was the separate kanban npm package (not the core cline CLI package) — it was fixed by commit-level origin/host validation merged April 27, 2026 and shipped in kanban v0.1.66 (released April 28, 2026); versions ≤ v0.1.65 remain vulnerable per the GitHub advisory. Separately, in February 2026 a compromised npm publish token was used to push [email protected] with an unauthorized (non-malicious but unwanted) postinstall script; Cline caught and fixed it within about 8 hours, publishing 2.4.0 and moving npm releases to GitHub Actions OIDC provenance.

The product is run by Cline Bot Inc., based in San Francisco per its careers page, which lists two open engineering roles as of this review. We could not establish Cline's funding history or headcount from a primary source — no funding announcement, filing, or press release was found in this session, and general web search was unavailable throughout (a known, ongoing environment limitation, not evidence about the company). The open-source core reduces lock-in risk regardless: the code, and a self-hosted or BYOK path, remain usable even if the company changes course.