Cline
Leading#2 in Open sourcehigh confidence
The most widely installed open-source coding agent (~65k★, 5M+ installs): an autonomous plan/act agent in VS Code with human-in-the-loop control.Our read
Why it ranks #2
~65k GitHub stars and more than five million reported installs make Cline the most widely deployed open-source IDE coding agent in this list; it is a top pick in the cited OSS roundup.Here is the catch
model API costs can grow quickly during long tasks
approval-heavy flows can become tedious
autonomous loops can consume large context windows
Does this well
mature human-in-the-loop controls for autonomous changes
large install base and active extension ecosystem
works with many hosted and local model providers
Pricing
Checked by hand on 2026-07-23. Prices in this category change often — if this looks wrong, it probably is.
Key features
plan-and-act autonomous codingVS Code extension, CLI and SDKbrowser and terminal toolshuman approval for file and command actions
Sources we read
Quick facts
More in this area
The rest of the Open source column.- 1OpenCodeThe most-starred open-source coding agent (~189k★): terminal-native, editor-agnostic, 75+ model providers — the leading OSS alternative to Claude Code.
- 3gooseBlock's open-source on-machine agent (~52k★): a general-purpose local coding agent that runs tasks end-to-end via any LLM and MCP extensions.
- 4AiderThe most mature, battle-tested terminal pair-programmer (~47k★, 4M+ installs): deep Git integration with auto-commits.
- 5ContinuePopular open-source autopilot (~35k★) for VS Code and JetBrains, letting teams build and share custom AI code assistants and rules.
- 6google/agents-cliInstalls skills and a CLI so Claude Code, Codex or Antigravity can scaffold, evaluate and deploy ADK agents on Google Cloud.
- 70xranx/OpenContextA local context store with CLI, MCP server and desktop app, so Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and OpenCode share project knowledge across repos.