Best Cline alternatives
8 tools developers use instead of Cline, ranked by popularity. 8 offer a free plan and 3 are open source. Updated October 2026.
-
Claude Code
Free planAnthropic's agentic coding tool, running in the terminal, IDE, desktop app, and browser, reading your codebase and editing files with explicit approval.
-
Cursor
Free planAI-first code editor forked from VS Code, with Tab autocomplete, multi-file Agent mode, Composer, and background agents running on Claude, GPT, or Gemini.
-
GitHub Copilot
Free planGitHub's AI pair programmer for code completion, chat, PR review, and an autonomous coding agent, built into VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, and more.
-
OpenAI Codex
Free planOpenAI's cloud-based autonomous coding agent, powered by the GPT-5 family, reading a codebase and opening pull requests from written instructions.
-
Windsurf
FreeCognition AI's agentic IDE (formerly Codeium), built on VS Code, with the Cascade agent handling codebase-wide reasoning and multi-file edits.
-
Open-source AI coding assistant for VS Code and JetBrains, routing between model providers through one config file, with custom context and Agent mode.
-
Open-source agentic coding platform with five agent modes, support for 500+ models at no markup, an MCP marketplace, and parallel subagents.
-
Google's open-source terminal coding agent built on Gemini models with a 1M-token context window. Shut down for free consumer accounts June 18, 2026.