Cline

Cline is the world's leading open-source AI coding agent, built by Cline Bot Inc. and founded in October 2024 by Saoud Rizwan in Sacramento, California. Starting as a solo hackathon project that became one of the most rapidly adopted developer tools in history, Cline reached 2.7M developers within its first year, 5M+ installations by early 2026, and 8M+ developers and 67,000+ GitHub stars by mid-2026 — making it the #1 open-source coding agent by both stars and active use. The company raised $32M total: an undisclosed seed round in November 2024 and a $27M Series A led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital in July 2025 at a $110M valuation, with additional backing from 1984 Ventures and Essence Venture Capital.

Cline's defining principle is radical transparency. While competitors like Cursor and Windsurf charge opaque subscriptions with hidden model routing, Cline shows every token consumed and every dollar spent per request, charges users directly at provider API rates with zero markup, and publishes its entire codebase under Apache 2.0. Cline works across VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, JetBrains (early access), Zed, and Neovim via ACP mode, and as a standalone CLI installable with `npm i -g cline`. It supports every major LLM provider — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS Bedrock, Azure, GCP Vertex, Ollama, DeepSeek, xAI, Mistral, Cerebras, OpenRouter, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — with no vendor lock-in.

The agent uses a Plan/Act workflow: in Plan mode the agent drafts an approach and shows every proposed file edit and terminal command for human approval before execution. In Act mode with auto-approve, it runs autonomously. Cline can read and write files, execute bash commands, browse the web, use MCP tools (from Cline's own MCP Marketplace), coordinate multi-agent teams, connect to Slack/Discord/Linear/GitHub Actions, and run on cron schedules. The SDK exposes the agent core for building custom products. In January 2026, several Cline engineers joined OpenAI's Codex team — Cline confirmed there was no acquisition and the company remains fully independent and operational.

Cline itself is free and open source — there are no seat fees or subscriptions for the core agent. You pay AI inference costs directly to your chosen LLM provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc.) with a full per-request cost breakdown shown in the UI. Cline shows every token used and every dollar spent transparently.

ClinePass ($9.99/month) is an optional managed billing subscription that provides 2–5x more usage on popular open coding models compared to standard API rates, with one-click sign-in and no need to manage API keys yourself. It is not required — BYOK (bring your own key) is always available at zero markup.

Enterprise pricing is custom and adds JetBrains extension, SSO/OIDC/SCIM, SLA, centralized billing, RBAC, team management dashboard, authentication logs, limit inference providers, dedicated support, VPC deployments, OpenTelemetry, and advanced config management. Contact sales at cline.bot/contact-sales.