Continue vs Cline

Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool

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🔴Developer

AI Coding

Open-source AI coding extension for VS Code and JetBrains — bring any model, configure custom rules, share assistants across your team.

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Starting Price

Custom

🔴Developer

AI Coding

Open-source autonomous coding agent for VS Code — plans, edits, runs commands and uses MCP tools with explicit human-in-the-loop approval.

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Starting Price

Custom

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Feature	Continue	Cline
Category	AI Coding	AI Coding
Pricing Plans	36 tiers	33 tiers
Starting Price
Key Features	• Multi-model AI support including OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and local models • Native IDE extensions for VS Code and JetBrains with smooth workflow integration • MCP server connectivity for development toolchain integration	• Open-source coding agent runtime for VS Code, CLI, and SDK embedding • Bring-your-own-key support for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other model providers • MCP Marketplace for connecting agent tools and context

✓Open-source under Apache 2.0 — no vendor lock-in or proprietary protocols
✓Genuinely supports JetBrains as a first-class citizen, not an afterthought
✓YAML config and Continue Hub make team-wide standardization trivial
✓Transparent pricing: $3/M tokens Starter, $20/seat/month Team — no hidden seat costs
✓Mix local and hosted models in one extension — cheap autocomplete, expensive chat
✓Strong on-prem story for regulated enterprises (BYOK, internal proxies, no telemetry)

✗Less polished UX than closed-source competitors like Cursor or GitHub Copilot
✗Agent mode is younger than Cline's and has fewer guardrails
✗Hub assistants quality varies — vetting community configs takes effort
✗$3/M tokens Starter is competitive but not the cheapest if you BYO API keys directly

✓Free, open source, and the most-installed AI agent on the VS Code marketplace
✓Plan/Act + per-step approvals make it safe to let an agent touch a production repo
✓BYO keys mean no platform markup — you pay model providers directly at cost
✓Built-in MCP marketplace makes tool integration almost zero-config
✓Works with frontier hosted models or fully local LLMs via Ollama for air-gapped use
✓Checkpoints provide an undo button independent of git for safe experimentation

✗Token usage can be high on long agent loops — easy to burn through Claude credits if you don't watch context
✗Plan/Act paradigm has a learning curve compared to Copilot-style autocomplete
✗Some advanced features (browser automation, MCP) need extra setup beyond install
✗VS Code-only (no JetBrains support yet)

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