Cline vs OpenHands

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

	Cline Open-source coding agent that runs as an IDE extension and CLI with bring-your-own-key model access.	OpenHands Open-source, model-agnostic platform for running autonomous software engineering agents, formerly known as OpenDevin.
Category	harness	harness
Vendor type	hybrid	hybrid
Pricing	freemium	freemium
Strengths	+ 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	+ MIT-licensed core with 75+ LLM provider support + Multiple interfaces: SDK, CLI, GUI, cloud, and Kubernetes-based enterprise + Sandboxed (Docker) execution for autonomous multi-step tasks + Strong research lineage and large contributor community (~77k stars)
Tradeoffs	− Token costs fall directly on the user and can run high with frontier models − Per-step approval workflow is slower than fully autonomous harnesses	− Heavier setup (Docker/sandbox runtime) than editor-extension agents − Autonomous runs can consume significant tokens without close supervision
Used in stacks	0	0