Claude Code vs Cline

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

	Claude Code Anthropic's official agentic CLI; plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, subagents.	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	commercial	hybrid
Pricing	subscription	freemium
Strengths	+ Mature primitives (skills, hooks, plugins, MCP, subagents) + Official Anthropic-supported harness + Strong ecosystem of community plugins/marketplaces	+ 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	− Terminal-first UX may not fit non-engineer users	− 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	4	0