Product / UX / Orchestration & agents

Cline

Autonomous coding agent available as a VS Code extension, a CLI and an SDK. It creates and edits files, runs terminal commands, drives a browser and orchestrates multi-step development tasks with human approval at each step. The SDK exists so the agent can be embedded in other products.

Verified 2026-08-13 via the cline/cline repository and its VS Code Marketplace listing.

Openness

5 high confidence

5.0

license: Apache-2.0(OSI, (c)2026 Cline Bot Inc.)
source: public
core-gated: ungated

Verified Apache-2.0 OSI, full source public; free extension with no proprietary core gating.

https://github.com/cline/cline recorded 2026-08-13
Apache-2.0 license, full public source for the IDE extension and CLI, 66.1k stars, 7.1k forks; no enterprise directory and no paid tier

Adoption

4 high confidence

4.0

One of the most-installed agentic coding extensions: the VS Code Marketplace listing reports 4,974,003 installs, which lands at level 4. A Marketplace install count is cumulative rather than a trailing-30-day download figure, so it runs high against a monthly scale and stands in for a measurement the product does not publish. Cline ships through the Marketplace rather than PyPI or npm, so there is no monthly channel figure to prefer.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=saoudrizwan.claude-dev recorded 2026-08-13
4,974,003 VS Code Marketplace installs, 308 ratings, free

Capability

4 medium confidence

4.0

Second only to OpenHands (68.4%) among open coding agents, and above SWE-agent and Aider, at 59.8% SWE-bench Verified in autonomous mode on Claude Sonnet 4.6. The figure comes from an aggregator leaderboard (awesomeagents.ai) rather than a primary publication, which is why confidence stays medium.

https://awesomeagents.ai/leaderboards/swe-bench-coding-agent-leaderboard/ recorded 2026-08-13
row 5 - Cline (Autonomous Mode), Claude Sonnet 4.6, SWE-Bench Verified 59.8%, SWE-Bench Full 44.1%, Free (BYOK), VS Code extension

Verified 2026-08-13