Aider vs Cline

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Aider OSS AI pair programmer for the terminal; multi-model, git-native.	Cline Open-source coding agent that runs as an IDE extension and CLI with bring-your-own-key model access.
Category	harness	harness
Vendor type	open source	hybrid
Pricing	free	freemium
Strengths	+ Fully open source + Multi-model (Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, local) + Git-native commit-per-change workflow	+ Open source (Apache 2.0) with full BYOK model flexibility + Plan/Act split gives explicit human approval before execution + MCP support and .clinerules for repo-specific configuration + Runs in VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, and as a CLI
Tradeoffs	− Less polished than IDE-based harnesses − No managed plugin ecosystem	− Token costs fall directly on the user and can run high with frontier models − Per-step approval workflow is slower than fully autonomous harnesses
Used in stacks	1	0