Cline

Cline answers a question the paid tools mostly dodge: what if the agent showed you everything before it did it? Every file edit, every terminal command, every API call is proposed and waits for approval. That sounds tedious and is, for the first hour. Then it becomes the reason you trust it with real work — you never discover after the fact that it rewrote something you cared about, because nothing happens without a click.

The economics are the other draw. There is no subscription. You bring an API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google or a local model, and you pay for tokens. For light use that lands well under a $20 subscription; for heavy agentic days it lands well above one, and the plan/act split exists partly to keep that in check — planning on a cheap model and executing on an expensive one is a genuinely effective habit. Cline shows a running cost per task, which no subscription product has any incentive to do.

The gaps are real. There is no inline autocomplete at all, so this is a companion to your existing setup rather than a replacement for it — most people we spoke to run Cline alongside Copilot or Cursor's tab completion. Cost visibility does not mean cost control: without a spending cap on your provider account, a badly scoped task can burn through several dollars before you notice. And because it is open source and moving quickly, the experience varies more between releases than a commercial product's would.

Our guidance: the best way to try an agent without committing to anything, and the right permanent choice for developers who want to see and approve every step, or who need to use a model their employer already has a contract for.